One was fired by email at 12:47 a.m. Another wept with colleagues as security escorted her from the office. A third frantically tried to fill a prescription after she got a 24-hour notice that her health care was ending.
Then there is Jacqueline Devine, a contractor in the office of H.I.V.-AIDS at the United States Agency for International Development. Ms. Devine, a behavioral scientist who worked largely in sub-Saharan Africa on H.I.V. treatment, was among those affected by an abrupt mass firing in her Washington office on Jan. 28. She received no severance pay.
“I’ve been going through the stages of grief, and it’s not a linear process, I’m finding out,” Ms. Devine said in an interview last week. “You kind of go back and move forward and go through anger and sadness.” Nights are difficult. “I either am not sleeping, or I’m sleeping to escape,” she said. “Or it’s waking up at 1 or 2 a.m. and not being able to fall asleep again.”
One thing lost in the Trump administration’s war on the federal bureaucracy is the collective voice of the workers. Many of those fired or in limbo say they feel silenced by Elon Musk, whose gleeful, vengeful posts describing U.S.A.I.D. as a “criminal organization” that he fed “into the wood chipper” make them fear retribution. Others don’t want to speak publicly because of pending lawsuits or orders from their agencies.
But a few from U.S.A.I.D., the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department spoke in interviews last week. Some gave their full names, and others asked that only their first names be used. U.S.A.I.D. workers worried about colleagues overseas abruptly ordered home, and said that gutting a $40 billion foreign assistance agency, though a judge has paused some of those plans for now, would mean lives lost to famine, disease and war.
Experts and the workers themselves acknowledge that reforms are needed in the federal work force, which counts around 2.4 million people, excluding the uniformed military and the Postal Service. The numbers have not grown significantly in the past decade, though the total of federal contractors had ballooned to an estimated five million by 2020, according to a Brookings Institution scholar. But experts said that Mr. Musk’s tactics, including offering blanket deferred resignations to two million workers, amounted to an immolation of government without thought or strategy.
“What if the people who resign are the people who process the Social Security payments?” said Terry Clower, an expert on the region’s economy at George Mason University.
The pain is particularly acute in Washington, where an estimated 40 percent of the region’s economy — including federal workers, contractors, nonprofits and businesses — is tied to the federal government. And yet more than 80 percent of federal workers live in other parts of the country.
“I heard from a forest worker in Idaho who feared for his job,” said Max Stier, a longtime expert on the federal work force who said that Americans were largely unaware of the work of civil servants across the nation. “The human story,” he said, “is getting ignored.”
The Purged Prosecutor
Jake Struebing, a federal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, was fired by email on Jan. 31 in a purge of more than a dozen people. The email, Mr. Struebing said, “said explicitly that we were being fired for working on the Jan. 6 cases.”
Mr. Struebing, 33, is one of the few fired prosecutors who have gone public and in recent days has made the rounds on CNN and MSNBC. Formerly in private practice in the Washington office of the powerhouse law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Mr. Struebing got his dream job in September 2023 at the Justice Department: He was hired to help handle the Jan. 6 cases, the largest prosecution in the department’s history.
“It was everything that I imagined,” Mr. Struebing said in an interview. “I loved every second.” At his law firm job, he said, he “used to sit in front of the computer all the time,” but at the Justice Department he was in court multiple times a week and ultimately handled four trials. He was especially proud, he said, of getting a Jan. 6 defendant convicted on all counts for an assault on a police officer. That defendant, like all the others, has now been pardoned by Mr. Trump.
Asked whether he still had faith in the criminal justice system, Mr. Struebing paused for a long time — and did not answer.
But he did say this: “I signed up to do these prosecutions because I thought it was about defending the peaceful transfer of power and defending democracy. But after doing these cases for a while, it really became about defending the officers who stood in the breach for us that day.”
The Aid Workers in Limbo
A federal judge on Friday granted a temporary reprieve against President Trump’s plans to get rid of U.S.A.I.D. — “CLOSE IT DOWN!” the president had posted on social media — but that did not help three agency contractors who remain out of work.
Mieka, who worked on gender-based violence, got a stop-work order at around 6 p.m. on Jan. 27. Four days later, she was furloughed without pay, and shortly after received a notice that her health insurance would be cut off 24 hours later.
She had only two weeks left in medication she needs daily, so she raced to fill it at her Virginia pharmacy. When it didn’t arrive the next day, her first hope was that she could get on Medicaid before the two weeks were up. She also began applying for unemployment insurance.
“I have four kids; I have a kid in college; I have twins graduating from high school, and my husband is retired,” she said. “The human cost to me personally is hard to wrap my head around.” Still, she was trying to be positive. “We work in places where there is no Medicaid and unemployment insurance,” said. “So I’m grateful for those systems and I hope I don’t lean on them too hard.”
Mieka, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of retribution online, said she had saved enough, so she was not in immediate financial crisis. But she saw prospects of another job in aid work as grim. The end of U.S.A.I.D., which funded nonprofits in Washington and development efforts around the world, has already led to large layoffs downstream.
“Even during the pandemic I didn’t have the experience where every single person I knew didn’t have a job,” she said. “It’s just very bizarre when your entire sector gets tanked overnight.”
One bright spot is that her prescription finally arrived last week.
Sarah, a contractor who worked in the agency’s bureau of humanitarian assistance, got a stop-work order, like about a hundred others in her office, at 11:40 a.m. on Jan. 28. She was told to turn in her laptop and badge and leave with the others immediately, escorted by security. “We cried,” she said.
By 12:30 p.m. everyone was on the sidewalk outside a U.S.A.I.D. annex building in downtown Washington, stunned. No one wanted to be alone, so a group headed to a nearby restaurant, the Smith, packed with other workers under the stop-work order. Sarah, who said she did not want her last name used for fear of threats against her family, got an email later that night saying she was furloughed without pay, with her health insurance ending in three days.
She has tried to stay upbeat. “This is an extremely resilient group of people who work in disaster settings,” she said. “I think the coping skills for high-stress environments do carry over.” But this time, she said, “the stress we are feeling is for ourselves.”
Kristina, a contractor in maternal and child health, nervously checked her email every five minutes on Jan. 28 as word spread about Mr. Trump’s planned cuts. She gave up at midnight and went to bed, only to learn first thing in the morning that the email firing her had landed at 12:47 a.m. She asked that her last name not be used out of fear of retribution against her husband, who works at another federal agency.
“One of the saddest things about this is that it’s taken decades to earn the trust of our global peers,” Kristina said. “It totally undermines the gains that we’ve made.”
The Alarmed Union Lawyer
“I’m just horrified,” said Nicole Cantello, a former lawyer for the Environmental Protection Agency who represents its union in Chicago. Ms. Cantello was reacting to emails that landed on Thursday putting 168 employees in the agency’s office of environmental justice on administrative leave, including a number in Chicago.
The office, which is aimed at helping poor and minority groups that often face disproportionate amounts of pollution, was created in 2022 under the Biden administration. The emails were a big first step in Mr. Trump’s expected plan to shut down the office.
“These people came into an agency hoping to help Biden, and that turned out to be toxic,” Ms. Cantello said.
She is not sure of her own future. Project 2025, the blueprint for a new Trump administration that has turned out to align with many of the president’s early actions, suggested eliminating unions of government workers entirely.
In the meantime, Ms. Devine, the fired contractor from the U.S.A.I.D. office of H.I.V.-AIDS, said she was overwhelmed by all the chaos. When she’s not job-hunting, she said, she wonders where she can most make a difference. “Is it posting, writing, marching?” she said. “It’s, ‘Where do I put my energy?’”
When she was asked why she was speaking out, her answer was swift.
“I have nothing to lose,” she said.
The post For Stunned Federal Workers, Sleeplessness, Anger and Tears appeared first on New York Times.
