A U.S. Forest Service employee in Henderson County has taken his age-bias fight to federal court, accusing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and USDA Secretary Rollins of rigging a 2025 retirement buyout so older workers were effectively shut out.
The complaint, filed pro se last Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Asheville, targets the agency’s rollout of a widely publicized “deferred resignation” program and the way some field positions were quietly marked off-limits.
Joel Smith, an Etowah resident who worked as a vocational development specialist at the Pisgah Forest Job Corps site, says he was effectively barred from even applying and that the agency’s actions amount to “intentional age discrimination,” according to the Mooresville Tribune. The suit says the Department of Agriculture rolled the program out in February 2025 and briefly reopened it in April, offering employees pay and benefits through Sept. 30, 2025.
What the complaint says happened
At the heart of the filing is an April 1 email from National Job Corps Director Jerry Ingersoll, which, according to the complaint, told Forest Service Job Corps center-based employees they were ineligible for the buyout because they were “mission critical.”
Smith points to a Department of Labor change after the April application window as proof the agency knew some of those “mission critical” duties were actually being pared back. In his telling, that undercuts the rationale for blocking Job Corps staff from even considering the package.
The complaint further alleges the Forest Service later eliminated Smith’s position and, on July 15, involuntarily reassigned him to a program-specialist role outside his union unit, stripping him of collective-bargaining protections in the process.
The Agriculture Department declined to comment on pending litigation, according to reporting by the Asheville Citizen Times.
The law and what workers must be told
Smith’s case leans heavily on the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act, arguing the agency failed to give older employees the kind of detailed written disclosures that law requires when an employer offers exit incentives.
As outlined by the EEOC, those disclosures are supposed to spell out which class or unit is covered, who is eligible, what the eligibility factors are, and the job titles and ages of people who are and are not eligible.
The Office of Personnel Management’s early-2025 instructions, described in guidance from OPM, laid out how agencies were expected to administer the deferred-resignation option across the federal workforce.
Why this case reaches beyond one job
Smith is just one employee, but his lawsuit taps into a much bigger federal story. The deferred-resignation offer prompted thousands of departures across agencies and a wave of legal second-guessing over whether managers followed the rules and clearly explained the fine print.
At the time, federal reporting documented widespread confusion over deadlines, contract language and what exactly workers were signing away. That national backdrop helps explain why one case in Henderson County could end up being cited far beyond Western North Carolina.
For more background on how OPM and individual agencies handled the program, see coverage from Fedweek.
What happens next in court
According to the complaint, Smith first tried the administrative route: he contacted an equal-opportunity counselor, filed a formal complaint and then appealed to the EEOC’s Office of Federal Operations before finally heading to federal court.
He told reporters the lawsuit was “a last resort” and declined further comment while it moves forward. Local reporting notes the case was filed pro se on Feb. 18.
The suit will be litigated in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, and any ruling could shape how the deferred-resignation program and similar personnel policies are applied in Forest Service field offices and other workplaces across the region.
