WASHINGTON — A federal judge said Monday that the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program would remain paused until he ruled on its legality, hours before a deadline for roughly 2 million federal workers to accept incentives to quit.

Federal officials had set a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Eastern time Monday for employees to join the resignation program, known as “Fork in the Road,” part of an Elon Musk-led initiative to drastically slash the size of the federal government. Federal workers who take the offer would receive pay through September, according to the Trump administration.

George A. O’Toole Jr., a U.S. District Court judge in the District of Massachusetts, last week stopped the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency, from moving ahead with the program until Monday’s hearing, forcing the government to adjust its deadline for employees to accept the offer.

It was not immediately clear when O’Toole would rule.

“The program is NOT being blocked or canceled,” the agency said in a social media post last week. “The government will honor the deferred resignation offer.”

McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management, said in a statement Monday that federal agencies could still process resignations, and had begun receiving lists of employees who chose to quit. More than 65,000 people had taken the offer, she said, adding that “the number continues to grow.”

The roughly 65,000 federal workers who accepted the deferred resignation offer represent less than 3% of all 2.3 million federal workers, excluding the military and the Postal Service. Musk, who is spearheading the Trump administration’s efforts to whittle down the federal government, had circulated an estimate that the offer could lure 5% to 10% of the federal workforce to leave.

Around 150,000 federal workers, or 7%, voluntarily leave the government every year.

The liberal nonprofit Democracy Forward and government unions representing hundreds of thousands of federal workers — the American Federation of Government Employees; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; and the National Association of Government Employees — had sued to stop the resignation program. They argued that it was unlawful in part because Congress had not yet appropriated funds to compensate workers the Trump administration was promising to pay.

Congress faces a mid-March deadline for a new spending deal, which could hold up any potential funds used to pay federal workers who resign.

O’Toole last week instructed lawyers representing the Trump administration to contact employees who had received the offer and inform them that the program was paused. The original deadline of 11:59 p.m. last Thursday was pushed back.

Elena Goldstein, a lawyer for Democracy Forward, told O’Toole on Monday that the Trump administration’s resignation program was arbitrary and devised to pressure federal workers without collective bargaining rights. The program, she argued, was a pretense for Musk to fire people and fill the ranks of government agencies with his associates.

“It was issued in blanket fashion without analysis of which positions were no longer needed or vital to government,” she said, adding that the federal government could continue to change the terms of its offer until the last minute. Personnel officials, she said, appeared to be “making this up as they go along.”

Eric Hamilton, a Trump administration lawyer, defended the program, saying that President Donald Trump’s vows to reshape the federal government may come as a “disappointment” to agency employees, but that the resignation offer was a “humane off-ramp” that temporarily preserved salary and benefits. The federal personnel office, Hamilton said, needed to move ahead with a broader reorganization once the deferred resignation program ended, and needed to know conclusively who wanted to participate.

“Holding it open would only inject more uncertainty,” he said.

Trump administration officials have argued that concerns about the legality of the plan were “misplaced,” and that separation agreements would be legally binding.

“Union leaders and politicians telling federal workers to reject this offer are doing them a serious disservice,” Pinover said in a statement last week. “This is a rare, generous opportunity.”