Long before he was confirmed to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the White House office that oversees federal spending and agencies, Russell Vought detailed his intention to roll back what he called the “Marxist takeover” of this country. In his design, a key target of the counterrevolution would be career civil servants.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Mr. Vought said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
During its first 100 days, the Trump administration unleashed a sweeping campaign to cull and weaken the civil service, firing or laying off tens of thousands of federal workers and pressuring many more to resign. Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with some of those caught up in the upheaval. Some were probationary employees, meaning they had been in their roles for less than a year or two and had fewer protections. Others resigned on principle.
The Trump White House and its allies frequently justify these actions by invoking the logic of the private sector. Anyone who has lost a job knows how it can slip you from your moorings. But the way these federal workers lost their jobs goes beyond that; in our conversations, they described not just an absence of compassion but also an apprehension of malice — the sense that this ordeal had been designed to maximize hardship, that the pain of the firing was the point. After all, you do not lay off villains. You vanquish them.
Of the people I spoke to, only about half were willing to tell their stories on the record. We edited and condensed five of them below. Taken together, they suggest a federal work force not overrun with Mr. Vought’s Marxist obstructionists but rather filled with citizens driven by an ethic of public service. True, my sample size was small. But it included the kinds of people who can say they understand knot theory, who leave lucrative jobs at global law firms, who write policy dissertations on state sea-level rise policy, who drop out of Ph.D. programs in rhetoric to enroll in law school to become do-gooder attorneys, who move from Iowa to Montana to Wisconsin and back to Iowa again — all united by the choice to dedicate some measurable portion of their finite lives to the common good.
‘My favorite part of the job is putting on the uniform.’
— Brian Gibbs, 41
Mr. Gibbs, a park ranger in Iowa, was fired in February and reinstated in March.
I live in a tiny little town in rural northeastern Iowa called Elkader, in a county without a stoplight. I knew from a very young age that the outdoors was going to be where I wanted to spend my life, personally and professionally. I was fortunate to have a father who took me in his truck for a three-hour road trip from the flatlands of central Iowa up to the bluff country, where Effigy Mounds National Monument is. I was 12, and he took me up in the area to go trout fishing. That was a profound, life-changing experience for me, to be surrounded by these old limestone bluffs with pine trees and clear-water springs, camping and listening to whippoorwills and woodcocks and all sorts of other critters in this beautiful landscape I now call home.
I started a job as an education technician at Effigy Mounds last June. My duties were to manage field trips, lead outreach to schools and universities and come up with creative ways to get people outdoors. Once, I had over 100 people show up for this guided hike 350 feet up the bluff to watch the full moon rise over the mounds and the Mississippi River. I also put up and take down our country’s flag and greet you at the visitor center, answering any questions about the park.
Wearing that uniform instilled a great sense of pride in me. I took an oath of office and carried that with me every day. I cherished introducing teachers and families and students to Effigy Mounds, so that they could create these core memories — just like my dad created for me when he took me to national parks — in hopes that they would be, now and forever more, protectors of our public lands.
I’m just one of about 1,000 people whose positions got eliminated in a set of Park Service cuts on Valentine’s Day. I got the “fork in the road” email a couple of weeks before, but I just put it out of my mind. I didn’t want to take the bait. Protecting natural and cultural resources — that’s so much bigger than jumping on a buyout.
Fortunately, I got reinstated in March because of a court order and am back at the park leading field trips and taking things day by day, committed to serving the public as long as I am authorized to.
‘I solved puzzles, and at the end of the day, there was somebody’s name and money going back to them.’
— Matthew McBride, 26
Mr. McBride worked as a data analyst for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He was fired in February, reinstated in March and fired again in April and is now in limbo while he waits for a court hearing.
I got into government through a fellowship that allows you to rotate through different offices at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But I loved my first office so much that I stayed.
I was working for a program to audit machine learning models in the personal lending space. Banks use A.I. all the time now to decide whether you can get a personal loan. Some have started using what’s called black box models, which can’t explain the results they spit out. A company might discriminate without wanting to; think about chatbots that turn racist real quickly. We wanted to make sure that people had access to credit and weren’t denied for opaque reasons like living in the wrong place or buying the wrong things or shopping at the wrong store. And we definitely found that some of these models were biased.
There’s a real need for technical people to be involved in this work. In college I focused entirely on higher abstract algebra, specifically algebraic topology. People on my team had Ph.D.s in random technical subjects: a cryptographer, an industrial engineer and two astrophysicists. The skills the DOGE kids say they want in the federal government — that’s what I do for a living, right?
I got an offer to continue this work at the Federal Housing Finance Administration in June, after my fellowship was slated to end, but in January it was revoked when Trump issued a hiring freeze. Then I got fired in February. The explanation basically amounted to: An executive order told us to fire people. I was reinstated to my fellowship by injunction on March 29. Then came the mass layoff on April 17, which was halted the next day by an emergency order, which is pending a hearing. So that’s Matt 0, Trump 3, almost inevitably 4.
Every single person on my team could have found incredibly high-paying work elsewhere, but none of us are motivated that way. I wanted to spend my time solving issues, not focusing on abstract nonsense (and I love abstract nonsense). I wasn’t interested in making money, frankly. I wasn’t interested in the biggest, newest start-up. I wanted to do work that was helping people. The amount of trust that was put into the bureau to do that kind of work — it was an incredible privilege.
‘I keep thinking of the tragedy of the commons, of “The Lorax,” destroying resources we can’t get back.’
— Nicole Rucker, 48
Ms. Rucker is a marine scientist who worked as a program coordinator and policy analyst for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She was fired in February, reinstated in March and fired again in April.
You know when you’re in kindergarten and you write those little statements about what you want to be when you grow up? Mine said, “I want to work with the ocean.” (And study sharks, until I realized I got seasick.) I studied biology and environmental science and got a Ph.D. focused on sea level rise along the East Coast. It brought me to NOAA, coordinating a new climate resilience program, created through the Inflation Reduction Act, to train American workers for good jobs with living wages — jobs like water treatment technicians in American Samoa and construction workers who can shore up Louisiana against floods.
In February, I received a canned termination email, saying I was “not fit” for continued employment. I received a high score on my annual review, so when I was told that I didn’t have the “ability, knowledge and/or skills” to fit the needs of the agency, I was surprised and wondered, “What exactly was I lacking?” I asked several people. Nobody could tell me.
Eventually I was reinstated but placed on administrative leave — paid but forbidden to work. DOGE accuses federal workers of just sitting on their butts and doing nothing all day, and it’s like, you just created that situation. Although there are ongoing court cases regarding the firing of probationary staff, it’s very unlikely I’ll be able to return to my job. All we wanted was to do our jobs. The people fired from NOAA are experts who keep people safe. They have irreplaceable knowledge, manage fisheries and respond to hurricanes and wildfires. I’m worried about the impacts the firings will have on the public health and safety.
‘I wanted to do what was right.’
— Michael Missal, 68
Mr. Missal investigated criminal activity and mismanagement at the Department of Veterans Affairs. He was fired in January and is suing for his job back.
As inspector general for the V.A., I oversaw a staff of about 1,200 investigators, auditors and lawyers charged with finding waste, fraud and abuse. Every day, my team would get flooded with complaints. Our hotline received about 35,000 a year.
At any given time, we had about 1,000 ongoing criminal investigations, 150 health care inspections and 100 performance audits. We investigated a nursing assistant who, the V.A. discovered, had killed eight veterans at a V.A. medical center in Clarksburg, W.Va. We found a chief pathologist at a Fayetteville, Ark., medical center, who’d been drunk on the job for years, committing diagnostic errors in more than 3,000 cases, some of which ended in serious harm or death to veterans.
We issued a scathing report on the Biden administration’s leadership breakdowns at the V.A. and under President Trump stopped a fraudulent attempt to obtain a contract for more than $750 million worth of masks, gowns and other protective gear. All told, we saved taxpayers $45 billion while I was I.G.
That ended the night of Jan. 24, when I received an email informing me that I was fired, effective immediately. The message cited only “changing priorities.” The law requires the president to give Congress 30 days’ notice and detailed, case-specific reasons before firing an inspector general, but in this case, he didn’t. If Congress remains silent as the independence of inspectors general burns, I fear government programs and taxpayers will suffer irreparable harm.
‘It makes me want to fight harder.’
— Mary Giovagnoli, 63
Ms. Giovagnoli led a Department of Health and Human Services watchdog office for migrant children in government custody. She was fired in February, reinstated in March and immediately put on administrative leave.
I grew up in a Catholic family of 10 kids, and we were raised to use whatever skills you have to serve other people. When I was very little, my dad stepped out of his everyday life as an inventor — he made baseball pitching machines — to run for office. And I tried living out my own commitment to public service, first by teaching and then by doing advocacy work, particularly around immigration issues.
In 1990 I was in El Salvador in the mountains near Arcatao, where I saw a bombing attack by helicopters — most likely piloted by Salvadorans — that I was told bore U.S. insignia. That really helped crystallize my sense that I should become an attorney, because I could do more making arguments on behalf of others.
I’ve been in and out of government since 1996, but I returned last year to build a new office protecting unaccompanied immigrant children in custody. I was working crazy hours, but I loved it because my team was creating something really important.
You can have all kinds of arguments about immigration, but the bottom line is that you have to do what’s right for the kids. My office was created to investigate conditions in detention centers and provide a way for children — as well as shelter workers, legal services providers and government employees — to raise concerns before they become crises. What’s so disturbing is that the unaccompanied children’s program appears to be becoming just an extension of other enforcement efforts, making it harder for parents to take custody of their children and potentially ensnaring undocumented parents who try. The children are effectively being held hostage. It’s really just another form of family separation.
In February I was fired in an email citing either unsuitable skills or poor performance, which was ridiculous, since I was hired for those exact skills and hadn’t even had a performance review. I’ve never thought that this was just a matter of incompetence. There’s a level of cruelty built into this, to make people suffer. I turned 63 in January, and I thought this would be the capstone to my career, that I could retire from the government having built something lasting. Now I’ve got to figure out how to do that from the outside. I want to keep fighting for my job, but I want to fight for better immigration policy, too, and it looks like the administration is determined to make it impossible for people like me to return.
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Spencer Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor in the Opinion section. @bokatlindell
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