It had been six days since Joy Marver was locked out of her office at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, five days since she checked herself into a hospital for emergency psychiatric care, and two days since she sent a letter to her supervisors: “Please, I’m so confused. Can you help me understand?”
Now, she followed her wife into the storage room of their house outside Minneapolis, searching for answers no one would give her. A half-dozen bins held the remnants of 22 years spent in service to the U.S. government — first as a sergeant first class in Iraq, then as a disabled veteran and finally as a V.A. support specialist in logistics. She had devoted her career to a system that had always made sense to her, but now nobody seemed to know whether she had officially been laid off, or for how long, or why.
“Are you sure you never got an email?” asked her wife, Miki Jo Carlson, 49.
“How would I know?” asked Marver, 45. “They deleted my account.”
“Maybe it’s because you were still probationary?”
“My boss said I was exempt,” Marver said. “I was supposed to be essential.”
In the last few months, more than 30,000 people across the country were fired by President Trump’s new initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency, a historic reduction of the federal work force that has been all the more disruptive because of its chaotic execution. Entire agency divisions have been cut without explanation or mistakenly fired and then rehired, resulting in several lawsuits and mass confusion among civil workers. After a court ruled last week that many of the firings were illegal, the government began reinstating workers, even as the Trump administration appealed the decision and promised more layoffs.
The V.A. alone said it planned to cut about 80,000 more jobs this year — including tens of thousands of veterans — and for Marver the shock of losing her job was eclipsed by the disorientation of being repeatedly dismissed and belittled by the government she served. She had watched on TV as Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk took the stage at a political conference wielding a chain saw to the beat of rock music, slicing apart the air with what he called the “chain saw for bureaucracy.” She had listened to Trump’s aides and allies deride federal employees for being “lazy,” “parasitic,” “unaccountable” and “essentially wasting” taxpayer money in their “fake jobs.”
In Marver’s case, that job had meant helping to retrain soldiers for the civilian work force and coordinating veteran burials while earning a salary of $53,000 a year.
“Here’s the note I got a little while after I was hired,” Marver told Carlson, pulling a form letter from the government. “You represent the best of who we are as Americans,” it read. “You could have chosen to do anything with your talents, but you chose public service.”
“Kind of boilerplate, but it’s nice,” Carlson said.
“I would be OK right now with boring and predictable,” Marver said, as she tucked the letter back into a file.
She dug through the bins, pulling out military awards for “exceptional achievement” and “tactical proficiency,” and pushing aside a large steel hunk of a rocket. It had exploded on her base in Iraq during an attack in 2020, leaving her with a concussion, damaged eyesight and a traumatic brain injury. She’d come home flattened, depressed and ill-equipped to hold a corporate job, but working alongside other veterans at the V.A. had done more to restore her sense of purpose than any of the five medications she was prescribed for post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks and anxiety.
She reached into another bin and pulled out an employee of the month certificate and then her last performance evaluation, from October. She read the reviews out loud to Carlson, looking for clues that might hint at a reason for her dismissal. “Joy puts the mission first — team player, responsible, continually displays professionalism. She is a great employee.”
She scanned down to her performance rating and saw that her boss had not circled “satisfactory,” or “fully successful,” or even “excellent,” but had instead chosen “outstanding!” — the best possible result.
“I did everything they wanted me to do,” Marver said. She flipped over the sheet and read it again, searching for some hidden flaw.
“You’re not going to find anything that makes it add up,” Carlson said. “This was never about you.”
But Marver kept digging through the paperwork, already knowing what came next: a “Fork in the Road” email from Musk offering mass buyouts, a sample letter of resignation provided to all federal employees, and another email demanding that Marver and her colleagues send a list of five things they had accomplished that week. Some of her co-workers had refused to answer in protest, but Marver believed in following orders. She wrote that the Minneapolis V.A. was requiring its remote employees to return to the office, and that she was responsible for preparing the building. She was reviewing floor plans, moving hundreds of chairs and assembling desks in the hallway. Then, on Feb. 14, the first wave of her co-workers had been fired, and she was in charge of collecting their badges. Her managers had reassured her that her job was safe. She was vital to the mission, they said.
She kept digging in the box until she found a few family photographs that she had taken off her desk that last morning, after she couldn’t log into her computer. A confused supervisor had suggested she grab her personal items before leaving the building, just in case. Marver had gone back to her truck and texted Carlson, already plagued by the question that had consumed her ever since.
“What just happened?” Marver asked. “It’s like being erased out of thin air.”
She kept American flags all over the house — raised above the front porch, framed on her bedroom wall, draped over the gun safe and tattooed on her right bicep underneath the word “Loyalty.” She had just turned 21 when she enlisted in the National Guard a few months after Sept. 11, 2001, and she had served under Republicans and Democrats for two decades without paying much attention to politics. Her job was to follow orders wherever they led — driving a Humvee that exploded when it hit a roadside bomb in Iraq, scrambling underneath her bed during rocket attacks, defending herself and others with a riot shield in downtown Minneapolis during the violent protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Her military career spanned three active-duty tours and more than 800 days in war zones, and each year she was graded by her superiors based on a list of Army tenets she understood to be reciprocal: Loyalty. Duty. Respect. Honor. Integrity.
Her final tour had been the most damaging, when she was stationed at Camp Taji outside Baghdad in March 2020 during a series of incoming rocket attacks that killed several soldiers. One day, she heard more than 30 explosions on the base and started running through clouds of black smoke and into a bunker just as a rocket landed nearby. She felt the shock waves rip through her, clouding her vision and rattling her rib cage. She checked her arms, her shoulders, her legs. Her body remained intact. She stumbled into the middle of the bunker and told her soldiers she was fine, but then she started vomiting, blacking out and slurring her words. A few hours later, she was diagnosed with a concussion and a traumatic brain injury, and doctors had been taking measure of her wounds ever since. She was rated 10 percent disabled for eyesight, 10 percent for hearing loss, 20 percent for back pain, 30 percent for persistent migraines and 70 percent for depression, PTSD, insomnia, anxiety and memory loss.
“I think I’m going to have another panic attack,” she said one day, about a week after her firing from the V.A. It was almost 2 p.m., and she was still in her pajamas.
“Have you taken your medicine yet?” Carlson asked.
“I’ve been trying not to,” Marver said.
“Take it,” Carlson said. “Kick up the dose. Rockets.”
It was the word they used as shorthand for all the accommodations Marver’s new life required after she returned from Iraq. Her chronic fatigue and recurring nightmares? Rockets. Her sudden avoidance of crowds? Rockets. They had moved out of a noisy apartment building in downtown Minneapolis and into a suburb south of the city. They bought a house with soundproof walls, a canoe and a view of a lake, but Marver still jolted awake and paced the bedroom at night.
Carlson felt as if she were married to a new person, so she had started keeping a handwritten list of all the ways in which Marver was diminished by her last tour. “Memory before Iraq: Great, meticulous.” After: “Forgets appointments, leaves lights on, misses entire strips when mowing the grass.”
“Personality before Iraq: Does funny dances and makes up silly songs — great social skills.” After: “Sense of humor gone and very introverted. Avoids big crowds or new places. She lost her spark. The difference is night and day.”
“Relationship before Iraq: Happy/normal.” After: “No intimacy. I am now more of a caretaker than a wife.”
Only in the last week had Carlson begun to wonder whether all that caretaking was sustainable on her own. She worked six days a week as a bartender, while Marver found both confidence and community in her job at the V.A. Marver worked alongside other veterans who understood her wounds and forgave her occasional memory lapses. Now she was home alone for much of the day. She mostly stayed in bed, ate microwaved meals and watched the news on TV to see what Trump and Musk were planning next.
Marver wasn’t opposed to thoughtful government cuts. During her time in the military, she had complained about the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on new weapons and aircraft that never panned out. She had managed her own tight supply budget of $21 million on her base in Iraq and won praise in her annual reviews for fiscal responsibility and loss prevention.
“There are smart ways to go about this,” she told Carlson. “There’s plenty to cut. They don’t have to go in with a firing squad.”
“This isn’t helping you,” Carlson said. She grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. “You need to eat. Go outside. Get some air. Go for a walk.”
“I can’t keep piecing myself back together,” Marver said.
“Rockets,” Carlson said. “We need to ask for some help.”
The next afternoon, they drove out of the suburbs and back into Minneapolis to see Marver’s psychiatrist at the V.A. The hospital was across the street from the administrative building where Marver used to work, and she pulled up to her old entry gate and tried to look inside. “It’s a black box,” she said. She was still waiting for an email from human resources with an official reason for her firing. She had tried to ask her co-workers, but some said they were afraid to talk to her over the phone. They worried that their calls were being monitored or that they could be disciplined for sharing information or offering their support.
“I’m getting the same panicky feeling I had that morning,” Marver said.
“Relax,” Carlson said. “Breathe.”
“I couldn’t control any of my thoughts,” Marver said. She pulled back onto the road, but now her mind was stuck inside the confusion of that last morning at work, when she was locked out of her computer as her colleagues began arriving for work. Her manager said that there had been a mistake, and that he would sort it out. She waited at her desk until another manager came back and said he was sorry, but her name no longer existed in the system. He asked for her badge and walked her outside. She sat in the cab of her truck in the parking lot, staring at the wheel. She didn’t want to go home. She was tired of disappointing Carlson with bad news — tired of being the problem. She started the engine and drove out of the parking lot. She stopped at a traffic light that led onto a bridge.
She knew a half-dozen veterans who had died by suicide, including two of her closest friends in Iraq, and she sat at the red light and considered it for the first time. If she proceeded onto the bridge, if she swung the wheel to the right, if she pressed down on the accelerator and drove over the guardrail. The light turned green. Her hands were shaking. She didn’t move. Someone honked from behind, and for a moment it jarred her back. She drove straight over the bridge, parked at the V.A. hospital and followed signs to the psychiatry department.
Now she was arriving there again, for a follow-up appointment. She held Carlson’s hand in the waiting room until a psychiatrist came to greet them.
“You might have saved my life that day,” Marver told her psychiatrist. “I felt this voice telling me: ‘Do it. Just get it over with.’ It came on so fast. It scared the shit out of me.”
“I’m so glad you had the courage to get help,” she told Marver. “How are you doing now?”
“I’m stable, but it’s dark,” Marver said. “I can’t turn off the news. Nothing that’s happening makes sense. They keep getting rid of things without even knowing what they’re cutting.”
She said she was worried about layoffs affecting the doctors she relied on at the V.A.: the specialist who treated her T.B.I., the neurologist who managed her migraines, the therapist with whom she relived the rocket attacks, and the psychiatrist who rushed out of a meeting to see Marver as soon as she crossed the bridge, consoling and hugging her until she finally stopped shaking.
The V.A. had been scrambling to hire psychiatrists for years to make up for what it called a “severe staffing shortage” as veteran suicide rates rose to epidemic levels, but now a few new ones had been fired by DOGE because they were still probationary employees. Each V.A. psychiatrist was already responsible for 500 patients, and lately those patients had begun reporting increased rates of anxiety and stress because many of them were also employed by the federal government.
“Nobody wants to serve this country more than veterans,” Marver said. “It’s personal for us.”
“That’s why I love working here,” her doctor said.
“I need a purpose,” Marver said. “I still want some way to serve.”
“Then keep looking.”
She changed back into her pajamas. She took medication for a migraine. She went back to bed and slept through the afternoon, until Carlson came home from work. “Rockets,” Carlson said. “You can’t stay like this forever. Get up. Get mad. Get back in the fight.”
A former colleague had invited Marver to speak at a town hall in southern Minnesota alongside a few other fired federal workers, and at the last minute, Marver agreed to go. She waited in line for her five-minute slot and then stared out at the crowd of about 100 people, trying to find the right words. “Sorry,” she said into the microphone. “This is hard for me.” She hadn’t spoken in public since she left the military. She scanned the audience for Carlson, who raised her fist in support. “OK,” Marver said. “Let’s try this.” She told the story of her firing, the ensuing confusion and her crisis at the hospital. “Is this how we treat our veterans?” she asked.
The audience clapped as Marver handed the microphone to the next speaker, but on the ride home she could still feel the adrenaline and anger rising into her chest. She stopped on the front porch and reached up for the flag. She smoothed out the fabric and rehung it upside down.
“You’re sure about that?” Carlson asked.
“Until this country starts making sense again,” Marver said.
She kept watching the news and checking her email for a reasonable explanation, but every update only left her more confused. More than a week after she was fired, Marver received a “Termination Letter” from human resources: “Your performance has not met the burden to demonstrate further employment,” it read.
She received another message a week later: “The V.A. is rescinding the termination,” it read. “You will be on administrative leave. You are not to return to duty at this time.”
And then, 24 days after she was fired, she got another email with a subject line marked urgent: “Return to Duty Instructions.” The message told her to report back to work Monday morning.
“Are you kidding me?” Marver said. She searched for more information online and saw that a federal judge had ordered the government to rehire some probationary employees, ruling that their mass firing was based on “sham” reasoning. The Trump administration had agreed to comply with the order even as it filed an appeal and asked for emergency relief from the Supreme Court.
“Who knows what they’ll tell me tomorrow,” Marver said, when she showed the email to Carlson.
“Why even go back there again?” Carlson asked.
“Because I can keep helping veterans,” Marver said.
She lay awake for most of the night and then got into her car Monday morning. She drove back over the bridge and parked in front of her building. One of her supervisors met her outside and said she would need to spend most of the day “reorienting.” The government had to give her back pay for the last 24 days, a new ID badge, new passwords and a new computer monitor.
“All in the name of government efficiency,” Marver said.
“Does it feel like déjà vu?” one of her co-workers asked, as he handed her a new ID.
Marver looked at her picture and thought for a moment about the roller coaster of the last month. She had always prided herself on following orders — on adhering to the rules of a system. But now the system was being dismantled, and the orders no longer made sense.
“Actually, no,” she said. “This time feels different.”
Erin Schaff contributed reporting.
Eli Saslow writes in-depth stories about the impact of major national issues on people’s lives. More about Eli Saslow
Erin Schaff is a photojournalist for The Times, covering stories across the country. More about Erin Schaff
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