The termination notice came just before Valentine’s Day, and Elena Moseyko’s heart was shattered as she broke down crying in front of her two young children.
She has bills to pay – a mortgage, preschool tuition, a car payment – and a scared family.
“I feel so angry now at the administration because I traumatized my kids,” she said. “I wish I would’ve never joined the federal government.”
Moseyko joined the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs last year as a data scientist. She’d been “happily employed” in the private sector for a consulting firm but thought a government job seemed more stable
Instead, her life was turned upside down last week after President Donald Trump’s administration began instituting mass layoffs as part of an aggressive effort to trim the federal workforce.
Harrison Fields, a special assistant to the president, said in a statement to USA TODAY that Trump “returned to Washington with a mandate from the American people to bring about unprecedented change in our federal government to uproot waste, fraud, and abuse.”
“This isn’t easy to do in a broken system entrenched in bureaucracy and bloat, but it’s a task long overdue,” he said.
USA TODAY spoke to federal workers fired from the departments of Education, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture and Transportation who said they were shocked, angry and emotionally distraught by the terminations. They were scrambling over the weekend to figure out how to file for unemployment benefits and reviewing their budgets to adjust to a new financial reality.
They worried about everything from making rent to paying student loans. Many talked about going into government work because they value public service and feeling like those values are being trampled.
“I’m much more angry than devastated,” said Chelsea Milburn, a 34-year-old Navy reservist, who lost her job as a public affairs specialist for the Department of Education. “It took away my hope that I would continue to be respected and valued for my service. And especially in the way the termination happened.”
Firings target probationary employees
The ex-employees USA TODAY spoke to said they never received bad performance reviews at work, but their walking papers all included similar language:
“The agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the agency would be in the public interest,” multiple federal workers told USA TODAY their termination letter read.
Which agencies are being impacted?Education Department, USAID, NIH and more
“It read like a copy-and-paste letter that did not provide any specifics,” Milburn said. “It was just very cold and cruel.”
She said her teleworking job was a near-perfect situation after her life dramatically changed two years ago, first with a bout with COVID-19 and then being diagnosed with POTS, a disability that makes it hard for her to sit at a desk full-time.
Milburn was one of the nearly 70 employees in the Education Department still within their probationary periods who were let go Wednesday night. Federal employees in probationary status have typically been hired within the past year.
