A judge lifted his order against DOGE. Musk immediately sprang into action.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On Thursday, only hours after Massachusetts District Judge George O’Toole dissolved the temporary injunction that he’d entered the week before, temporarily blocking the deferred resignation program, they received another email saying that the offer was “closed.” The lawsuit, brought by three federal worker unions, argued that Musk’s offer violated the Administrative Procedure Act and that the Office of Personnel Management had exceeded its authority in proposing to write checks that Congress had not yet accounted for, in violation of the Constitution’s appropriations clause. To state the obvious, the court would have created a daunting task for itself if it had ruled for the unions, inasmuch as so many horses—approximately 75,000 of them, at last and possibly final count—are already halfway out of the barn, merely by virtue of having clicked Resign in response to Musk’s “Fork in the Road” email. And I wasn’t the only one—two colleagues in my small department were in the same boat, waiting to see what the judge would do.” Musk’s “Fork is Closed” email also makes no mention of the memo that acting OPM Director Charles Ezell sent to agency heads on Tuesday, instructing them to “provide supplemental notice of additional, agency-specific disclosures required by the,” which would require the government to give workers over the age of 40 at least 45 days to consider the deferred resignation program. Ezell’s memo even concedes the legitimate basis for adhering to the law: “This is so an employee has enough information regarding the program to allow the employee to make an informed choice whether to sign a waiver.” It’s still unclear, though: Is Ezell’s memo acknowledging the rights of over-40 workers to have additional time to accept the offer still valid, or has the OWBPA joined the growing group of laws Musk has decided are of no matter in his ostensibly relentless pursuit of efficiency?