ATLANTA — On Thursday afternoon a judge pushed the deadline for federal employees to accept buyouts to Monday.
Employees originally had until midnight to accept the Trump administration’s offer.
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Yolanda Jacobs says it’s been practically nonstop: the phone calls, the texts, the emails. They come from federal employees nervous and confused about whether they should resign and receive severance pay for the next eight months.
“I have never seen employees in such an uproar and fearful about what’s gonna happen from one day to the next,” Jacobs told Channel 2′s Bryan Mims.
Jacobs is the president of the local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees and works at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.
She’s among the roughly 2.3 million federal employees across the country who received an email on Jan. 28 that offered financial incentives to resign. Originally, employees had until 11:59 p.m. on Feb. 6 to resign, but a federal judge in Boston extended the deadline. U.S. District Judge George O’Toole scheduled a hearing for Monday at 2 p.m. to address the program. He did not issue an opinion on the program’s legality.
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Last week’s email from the Office of Personnel Management said employees could decide to resign by Feb. 6 and receive full pay and benefits until Sept. 30. Jacobs said some employees were likely feeling pressured on Thursday to resign.
“It’ll be out of fear more than anything,” she said. “I can’t say that it would be a decision that they made with all the working parts there.”
A big uncertainty among employees, she said, is whether their jobs would still be cut if they stayed on the job. Employees have also expressed concern about whether they would receive the eight months of pay.
“The panic is there,” she said. “The panic is really there and if that was the purpose of the email, it worked.”
Several employees outside the Peachtree Summit Federal Building declined to discuss the offer, saying they were not allowed to speak to the media. One woman, who works for the Internal Revenue Service, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. She said last week’s email blindsided her and her colleagues.
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“It’s insulting because it doesn’t come from inside, it came from outside,” she said. “Leadership is very quiet. We’re not getting direction from anyone.”
She’s also concerned that the program will push people out “who can least afford to leave.”
“Those of us who stay, the workload is gonna be crazy,” she said.
Across the country, more than 40,000 employees had taken the resignation offer by Thursday. It’s unclear how many are from Georgia, which has more than 71,700 federal employees.
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