Getting fired once was painful. Getting rehired and then fired a second time was excruciating. But federal workers are learning that waiting for the government to make it official may be worst of all.
When President Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency began slashing jobs in February, the mass layoffs were supposed to cut through America’s hulking bureaucracy and streamline government functions. For workers caught up in those firings, and the legal wrangling that ensued, the process has been anything but efficient.
In interviews, workers described reaching a stage where they were ready to move on, only to be frustrated by administrative morass. They are finding that the only thing harder than getting fired is staying that way, and navigating a Kafkaesque web of bureaucratic snafus that has left some of them in a surreal employment limbo.
Obtaining the termination paperwork necessary to apply for employment benefits in some states has taken months, some said. Calls and emails to former bosses and human resources officials went unanswered, or were redirected in what seemed like an endless loop. Lapses in health care coverage were a major source of stress.
Sometimes, the people whose job it was to deal with terminated employees had been fired, too.
“Honestly, I need this to be over,” said Erin Czajkowski, who was fired from her job at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in February, rehired in March and then fired again in May. “Every time I get an email, my anxiety spikes and I get mad.”
Ms. Czajkowski, from Carmel, Ind., said she spent weeks seeking answers from former supervisors about her employment status and how to interpret various court orders stemming from legal challenges to the firings. The government would not send her formal separation documents until June 30.
At one point, Ms. Czajkowski, 43, said her former supervisor called her to ask the status of her employment. The supervisor told Ms. Czajkowski that her name was not on any list.
She had to tell HUD that the agency fired her.
The whole experience, she said, has been an “emotional roller coaster.”
Legal Challenges Play a Role
The Trump administration’s haphazard, DOGE-driven approach to downsizing left workers and often their supervisors in the dark. Lawsuits intended to help employees get their jobs back have offered temporary relief.
It is not clear just how many people are still struggling to get what they feel are basic answers, in part because the legal challenges over the administration’s efforts cover a range of firings across different agencies.
Former employees regularly turn to Reddit threads and group chats to try to learn what cases apply to them, while court orders stop and restart the administration’s plans to keep cutting more jobs. At one point, agencies were told to reinstate thousands of fired workers all at once, something the government has never tried to do before, adding significantly to the chaos.
Just last week, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration permission to move forward with mass firings while a lower court considers whether the moves are legal. But if additional lawsuits are filed, workers could potentially be affected again.
Agencies have not been consistent in communicating these abrupt changes. And some fired workers learned they had been reinstated only when they saw paychecks deposited into their bank accounts.
The week after Martin Basch was fired in February from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, he started applying for unemployment benefits in Ohio, where he lives.
The government did not offer much information when it fired him, but it did say his separation would be official on March 14. So he was surprised to see paychecks deposited into his bank account beyond that date. He reached out to his former supervisor, who directed him to someone who worked in human resources. After about five emails, he got an answer: A court case had led to his reinstatement, and he had been placed on paid leave.
“They never told me any of this,” Mr. Basch, 54, said. He had to stop his application for unemployment benefits and cancel his interim health coverage.
When he was fired again in May, he applied for unemployment benefits again. But because he had started the process earlier and then stopped it when he learned he was not unemployed after all, he was stuck in the state’s maze of forms, facing new delays.
“I was in limbo for three months, not knowing whether I was employed, whether I was going to get a paycheck the next cycle, whether I could start looking for jobs or not,” he said. “It was very unsettling, and now I’m not happy about being fired, definitely not happy, but at least I am now moving forward, I guess, or moving on.”
Emailing Into a Void
To be sure, human resources officials on the other end of these calls and emails are also dealing with the difficulties caused by Mr. Trump’s downsizing efforts and the legal challenges.
And an unknown number of benefits and human resources officials across the government have been caught up in the firings or decided to leave or retire early, too.
The people left behind are trying to handle private-sector-paced firings through a complex process that often involves multiple agencies for a single employee. For example, separation forms for employees at the Department of Homeland Security have to go through a hub housed at the Agriculture Department, a human resources manager explained in a court filing.
Mika Cross, a workplace transformation strategist who has advised the government in the past, said that during times of high stress, even officials who administer benefits can be thrown out of sync.
“Institutional knowledge can disappear overnight,” Ms. Cross said. “That creates delays, duplicated efforts and often leaves both the employee and the H.R. specialist frustrated and disempowered.”
Federal agencies, including the Treasury Department and HUD, did not respond to requests for comment about the challenges fired employees have faced in dealing with their former employers. The Department of Health and Human Services referred questions to the Office of Personnel Management. A spokeswoman for that agency said human resources and benefits vacancies were agency-specific problems and not addressed by the personnel office, the government’s human resources arm.
For Sarah Garman, a fired probationary employee in Fort Wayne, Ind., who worked for the Internal Revenue Service, “frustrated” would be an understatement. Like Ms. Czajkowski and thousands of others, she was fired in February and reinstated in March because of a court order. But when she was back on the government’s payroll, there were lapses in her health coverage, even as she saw the premiums deducted from her paychecks.
Ms. Garman, 52, said she spent 35 hours on the phone with government officials and insurance company representatives.
“This is life-threatening and all I need is a simple form sent to the carrier via fax so they can reinstate my insurance today,” Ms. Garman wrote to an agency human resources official. She said she desperately needed to clear up her health coverage so her spouse could get a critical scan to establish whether a tumor on her pancreas had grown.
“Would you be willing to talk to my insurance carrier?” Ms. Garman wrote.
The human resources official responded, “I am unable to make outside calls as when we were returned to work we were not provided with desk phones.”
Earlier this year, the Trump administration ordered federal employees to return to in-office work, even in situations where the government was short on space and equipment.
Ms. Garman likened the experience to slamming her head into a brick wall multiple times.
“There is no other way to describe it,” she said.
Christa Reynolds, 39, of Arvada, Colo., was fired in February from her job as a program analyst at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health. She was rehired in March, only to be fired again.
When she reached out to the benefits division at her former agency, she received an automatic response notifying her that the whole office had been laid off.
“Unfortunately, the entire Retirement & Employee Benefits Branch (REBB) has been RIF’d,” read the automatic response. “RIF” stands for reduction in force.
She said she spent more than a month trying to get ahold of her termination documents. The lack of responses made her wonder if anyone had even seen them. It was so bad, she said, that she was genuinely excited to see that she was blind-copied on a message that forwarded one of her emails to someone else, with the note, “Jasmine, please assist.”
“I had no idea who Jasmine was,” Ms. Reynolds said, but it was at least proof that someone had seen her question. She never did get a response to that note.
Ms. Reynolds finally received the documents she needed, 42 days later.
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
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