'The Fork in the Road Is Closed'

A judge lifted his block on President Trump's buyouts of federal workers—but any employees who had belatedly decided to take the offer were out of luck. Soon after the ruling, the Office of Personnel Management, which informed workers of the buyout offer late last month in an email titled "A Fork in the Road," sent an email saying, "The Fork in the Road is Closed," Politico reports. The email said resignations received after 7:20pm Eastern would not be accepted under the offer. Officials said around 75,000 workers had accepted the offer to be paid through September if they resigned ahead of the deadline.

• Next step: layoffs. The Washington Post reports that Elon Musk's DOGE has "initiated sweeping layoffs of federal employees," overwhelming staff at the OPM. Musk's team has started by dismissing workers still in their probationary periods, which account for around 7% of the federal workforce, the Post reports.

• Others could be harder to fire. The AP reports that legal protections for civil servants built up over more than a century could make it harder to fire other members of the 2.4-million strong federal workforce, apart from around 4,000 classed as political appointees. "The president definitely has his work cut out for him," says Donald Kettl, former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.
• "This is deregulation by firing." Firings, as well as stop-work orders and halts to litigation, have "hobbled" the work of many regulatory agencies, the New York Times reports. "Under the Trump administration, federal consumer protections are being rapidly stripped away in a lawless process," says Georgetown Law professor Adam Levitin. "This is deregulation by firings."
• A tough job hunt. Federal workers who have taken the buyout offer or been pushed out in other ways could find it harder than they expected to find a new job, the Wall Street Journal reports. Tristan Layfield, a career coach in Detroit who has heard from dozens of federal employees in the last couple of weeks, says federal workers often don't have the kind of experience companies are seeking, including hitting sales targets. Government jobs "aren't always tied to tangible results," he says.

(More federal employees stories.)