Thursday is the deadline for federal employees to respond to the Trump administration’s so-called “fork in the road” email that offered them the choice to immediately resign in exchange for eight months of pay.
Tens of thousands of those employees live and work in metro Atlanta, says Tatishka Thomas, who oversees the southeast as a national VP of the American Federation of Government Employees.
The union represents the roughly 80,000 federal civilian employees in Georgia, she said, but they don’t know how many of their members received the email because the email was sent outside of each agency’s HR department, by the Office of Personnel Management.
AFGE and legal experts have argued the offer is illegal and by accepting it, employees risk not receiving a payout. The union has already joined a lawsuit with others, including the AFL-CIO, to challenge it in court.
Joyce Kitchens, a Georgia-based lawyer with more than four decades of federal and municipal government labor and employment law experience, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution she believes the offers are “unprecedented.”
“Nothing I have seen has led me to believe that it would be enforceable” in the courts, she said. “It’s a risk because you don’t know if you’re going to get the money.”
“Government officials are limited to their authority granted by law and regulation,” she said. “If they exceed that, then whatever agreement they have signed or given you cannot be enforced.”
The administration published a memorandum Tuesday defending the offer as enforceable, legally binding and not needing Congressional approval: the “Legality of Deferred Resignation Program.”
More than 62,000 of Georgia’s federal civilian workforce are in the six congressional districts that make up the core of the metro Atlanta area, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report.
That makes the government the largest employer in the metro by a long shot. (The closest is Delta Air Lines with nearly 40,000 full-time employees at the end of 2023, per the Metro Atlanta Chamber.)
The biggest affected agencies in Atlanta include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration, Thomas said.
She said sentiments among members have been a “mixture of a lot of confusion, a lot of unanswered questions … chaotic, nervous, high anxiety” since the email last week.
Still, some members have indeed accepted the offer, she said, even though the union is advising them not to.
“Some have asked the question, ‘Can I change my mind?’ We have others that are staying steadfast, that it’s too many unknown factors to accept it.”
If employees do accept it, she said, the union is advising them not to actually stop working. Because if they do, then the agency might have grounds to fire someone for not showing up, she said, and not pay out the offer.
A spokesperson for the CDC confirmed that the agency has more than 10,000 Atlanta employees, but referred questions about the buyout offers to the Office of Personnel Management.
Kitchens said at a high level she feels “nauseated” for the federal employees seeing this “barrage of executive orders and casual cruelty; the lives that he’s destroying, careers he’s destroying.”
Atlanta is the southeastern regional center of a number of important agencies, she said. They are “your neighbors, your friends, your brothers and sisters … they’re everywhere.”
“We’re not just people who work in Washington, D.C.,” Thomas agreed. “We’re actually your next-door neighbor in Georgia. We’re the people making sure your food is inspected properly. We’re the people making sure you receive your Social Security checks.”
“These are federal employees. Not what Trump has made them out to be.”
Only 20,000 workers nationally, less than 1% of the federal workforce, have taken the deal so far, Axios reported Tuesday.
Staff writer Zachary Hansen contributed reporting.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include the CDC’s Atlanta headcount total.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
