Washington, United States:
A judge suspended on Thursday a master scheme for billionaire Elon Musk to reduce the size of the United States government by encouraging federal workers to resign through a massive purchase.
The federal judge in Massachusetts ordered a temporary court order on the deadline of the Plan, midnight on Thursday, given by Musk for the more than two million employees of the country’s government. The offer was to quit smoking eight months of payment or risk being fired in future sacrifices.
The deadline now extends to Monday, when the United States District Judge, George O’Toole, will hold a hearing on the merits of the case presented by the unions, the US media reported.
Musk, the richest person in the world and the largest donor of Donald Trump, is in charge of a high -reach entity called the Government Efficiency Department (Doge) that aims to gut the Government.
According to the White House Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, more than 40,000 employees have so far accepted the purchase agreement, a relatively small number.
The unions representing about 800,000 officials and Democratic members of Congress resist the scheme and have challenged the legality of threats to civil partners.
But the broader budget cut campaign, fueled by the antigubernamental-Travakers of Trump and its assistants, has already severely interrupted the huge departments and agencies that have directed everything for decades, from education to national intelligence.
The USAID, the government’s humanitarian aid agency, has been paralyzed, with the personnel abroad ordered at home and the organization’s programs criticized daily, often inaccurately, as a waste from the White House and the means of Right communication.
A union official confirmed reports that the agency’s global workforce would be cut from more than 10,000 to just under 300.
“Eventually we will have to stop the distribution of food, because we will not have bodies in the field to ensure that food is really distributed,” Randy Chester, vice president of the American Foreign Service Association, told journalists.
Robin Thurson, of Democracy Forward, who has sued the Trump administration for the mass layoffs in Usaid, criticized the “illegal seizure of this agency by the Trump-Vance administration, in a clear violation of the basic constitutional principles on the separation of power “.
Trump has also repeatedly said that he wants to close the Department of Education. Incentives to resign have extended even more to the CIA.
An agency official who manages the property of the government said that the real estate portfolio, except for the buildings of the Department of Defense, must be reduced by “at least 50 percent.”
Leavitt told journalists that federal workers should “accept the very generous offer” of a deferred resignation.
She said they would find “competent” replacements for those who “want to scam the American people.”
Among the controversies that revolve around the musk plan is how much access the magnate born in South Africa is reaching the secret government data, including the entire treasure payment system.
The Treasury Secretary, Scott Besent, told Bloomberg TV on Thursday that there was “a lot of wrong information” and that access to such data was only given to two treasure employees who work with Musk.
Besent said those employees had “reading only” access, which means they could not change the data.
One of those two resigned, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, after it arose that he had advocated racism and eugenics on social networks.
‘Chill’ or Big ‘with’?
The questions abound about the purchase, even about whether Trump has the legal right to make the offer and if the conditions will be honored.
The plan was announced for the first time in an email sent through the majority of the vast federal government and entitled “Forda on the road”, the same phrase that the note that Musk sent to employees on Twitter when he bought the network platform Social in 2022 and renamed it unknown.
Musk says that payments are an opportunity to “take the holidays you always wanted, or simply watch movies and relax, while receiving your salary and benefits from the full government.”
The unions warn that without the Congress firm the use of money budgeted at the federal level, the agreements may not have value.
“Federal employees should not be deceived by the elegant conversations of not chosen billionaires and their lackeys,” said Everett Kelley, president of the Great American Federation of Government Employees (ANGE).
An employee of the United States personnel management office, where Musk has put his own staff in key positions, said the plan was to encourage resignations through “panic.”
“We are trying to instill a panic so that people simply go out the door and leave the government in a crippled state, which is partly their goal,” the employee told AFP, speaking under condition of anonymity.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a union feed).
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