WASHINGTON: A judge on Thurs­day suspended a scheme masterminded by billionaire Elon Musk to slash the size of the US government by encouraging federal workers to quit through a mass buyout.

The federal judge in Massachusetts ordered a temporary injunction on the plan’s deadline — midnight Thursday — given by Musk for the country’s more than two million government employees. The offer was to quit with eight months’ pay or risk being fired in future culls.

The deadline has now been extended to Monday, when district judge George O’Toole will hold a hearing on the merits of the case brought by labour unions.

Musk, the world’s richest person and President Donald Trump’s biggest donor, is in charge of a free-ranging entity called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that aims to gut the government.

According to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, more than 40,000 staff have so far accepted the buyout deal, a relatively small number.

Unions representing some 800,000 civil servants and Democratic members of Congress are resisting the scheme and have challenged the legality of threats to fire civil servants.

But the broader budget cutting campaign — fanned by anti-government-worker invective from Trump and his aides — has already severely disrupted the huge departments and agencies that for decades have run everything from education to national intelligence.

The USAID, the government’s humanitarian aid agency, has been crippled, with foreign-based staff ordered home and the organisation’s programmes lambasted daily — and often inaccurately — as wasteful by the White House and right-wing media.

A union official confirmed reports that the agency’s global workforce would be slashed from over 10,000 to just under 300.

“Eventually we will have to stop food distribution, because we won’t have bodies in the field to make sure the food is actually being distributed,” Randy Chester, vice president of the American Foreign Service Association, told reporters.

Robin Thurston, of Democracy Forward, which has sued the Trump administration over the mass layoffs at USAID, slammed the “unlawful seizure of this agency by the Trump-Vance administration, in a plain violation of basic constitutional principles about separation of power”.

Trump has also repeatedly said he wants to shut down the Department of Education. The inducements to resign have further been extended to the CIA.

An official with the agency that manages government property said the real estate portfolio, barring Department of Defense buildings, should be cut by “at least 50 per cent”.

Leavitt told reporters that federal workers should “accept the very generous offer” of a deferred resignation.

She said “competent” replacements would be found for those who “want to rip the American people off.”

Among the controversies swirling around the Musk plan is how much access the South African-born tycoon is getting to secret government data, including the Treasury’s entire payment system.

Published in Dawn, February 8th, 2025