A federal judge in Massachusetts will hear arguments on Monday in a lawsuit brought by public sector unions challenging President Trump’s buyout offer to thousands of federal employees. The jurist also extended the midnight deadline to apply for the buyout, but did not rule on the merits of the case. 

Judge George O’Tool of the federal district court of Massachusetts told attorneys on Thursday that he needs to hear further arguments from both the public sector unions and the government employees defending the buyout program before issuing his final ruling. 

“I make no assessment at this stage of the merits of the claims,” Judge O’Toole told the courtroom, according to NBC News. 

Mr. Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal workforce, said on January 28 that they would be offering buyouts to those employees who refused to return to office full-time.

The office said in what has come to be known as the “Fork in the Road” directive that employees could only accept the offer until Thursday at midnight, at which point the offer would expire. If they accepted the buyout, according to the directive, they would be paid through the end of September without having to work. 

To accept the buyout, employees simply had to reply to the email from OPM and write the word “resign” in the body before sending it back to the office. The office warned that those employees who refused to take the buyout would not be guaranteed job security in the coming weeks and months.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have already started slashing the workforces and budgets of several executive agencies. The U.S. Agency for International Development has laid off most of its full-time staff, and on Thursday, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration was ordered to cut its workforce in half and slash its budget by 30 percent. 

The unions representing these public employees sued Mr. Trump shortly after the buyout offer was made, saying that the president may not even have the authority to enforce such a payment scheme, and that union members may be left out in the cold with no paycheck should Mr. Trump just decide to stop paying them. The unions said in their lawsuit that Mr. Trump offered an “an arbitrary, unlawful, short-fused ultimatum which workers may not be able to enforce.”

In total, more than 60,000 federal employees — about three percent of the total workforce — have already accepted the buyout offer, according to Trump administration officials. Judge O’Toole said agencies must inform those who accepted buyouts that the program is now on hold until he issues a final ruling. 

The legal group representing the unions in court, Democracy Forward, praised Judge O’Toole’s ruling in a statement on Thursday. 

“We are pleased that the court has paused action on the so-called ‘fork in the road’ offer and ordered the government to notify all civil service employees. We look forward to the court hearing more fulsome argument on Monday,” said the group’s president, Skye Perryman. 

The directive is one of several executive actions by the new administration being challenged in court. After a flurry of orders in his first two weeks that sought to cut government waste, halt funding to congressionally approved programs, and lay off tens of thousands of members of the federal workforce, judges across the country are still trying to make their way through the legal reasonings behind the president’s spending and hiring freezes. 

In response, Democrats in Congress are promising total obstruction until the GOP and Mr. Trump restore the funding previously authorized by Congress. As of Thursday, Senate Democrats were filibustering the final confirmation vote for Mr. Trump’s director for the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, who has embraced the idea that the executive branch has the power to impound federal funds if he believes that the money does not serve the interests of the American people. 

Democrats in the House have also laid out a plan saying that they will not lift a finger to help Republicans keep the government open or raise the debt ceiling limit by the March 14 deadline until Mr. Musk backtracks his overhaul of federal agencies.