(WASHINGTON) — For many, a federal government job was a marker of stability or a way to serve the country, in some cases a “dream” job.
But a week after the Trump administration started to hack away at government agencies, many employees who were cut are left fearing for their future and in the dark about their next steps.
Days after they’d been let go, employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s hadn’t received the paperwork they needed to file for unemployment, said Elizabeth Aniskevich, who was a litigation counsel for the agency before she was told her job was eliminated.
“It’s really been a total roller coaster of emotions,” she said. “I will say the solidarity among those of us who have been terminated has been amazing, but we can barely get information.”
Aniskevich was fired with 70 other employees who were still in their probationary period. Many of them are keeping in touch through a group chat.
“We have not received forms that are requested to file for unemployment,” she said. “We have no real understanding of when our health insurance terminates,” she said. “We just have no information. We were just basically tossed out on the streets, and so that has been angering and heartbreaking, and our pay stopped the day we got the termination letter, so we’re all without a paycheck as of Tuesday.”
“I think the main question is, ‘What are we going to do?’” she said.
“I’m a single person in my house. I’m responsible for my insurance and for my mortgage, and I worked really hard to buy this house on my own after putting myself through law school, and I don’t know how I’m going to continue to make mortgage payments very far into the future,” she said.
Aniskevich said she chose to work for the CFPB because she was raised in a military family that believed in service.
“My dad was in the military for 27 years, and he really instilled in me a commitment to this country and to public service,” she said.
Katie Butler, a Department of Education lawyer, knew her days with the agency were numbered.
“Ever since the start of the Trump administration, we knew there would be a cut in federal employees,” she said.
She and her colleagues also knew that the first people to go would be probationary employees with less protection.
And while she expected to be terminated, certainty came with the “Fork in the Road” notice, an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that introduced a new program called “deferred resignation, that allowed them to continue to work until Sept. 30. Around 75,000 federal employees took the buyout, according to the White House.
Butler is also an adjunct professor at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, where she earned her law degree.
She says she was teaching a class when she got the Fork in the Road notice and didn’t see it immediately. The next day, she got a termination letter.
Her supervisors asked, “Did you get a termination notice, because we don’t know who got one.”
Butler doesn’t hold her abrupt termination against them.
“I don’t think this is coming from them, they are doing their best, but this is not the way you run the federal government system.”
Butler and her colleagues were told they could appeal through the Merit Systems Protection Board but she says she knows the decision would be hard to appeal.
The loss of her job has also hit her financially — she had just bought a house in June that she’s been remodeling and also has student debt of around $140,000.
Butler began working for the federal government “right out of college.”
She worked for the National Park Service and at the Bureau of Labor Statistics before getting into law school. In September 2024, she joined the Department of Education, where she had to complete a new probationary period despite having previously established career status.
She says the job she lost was “one of the exact jobs I went to law school for.”
“Career-wise, this is a big detour from what I expected,” she said. “I went to law school because I planned to work long-term as a public servant.”
Given what she calls “the somewhat disrespectful and unthoughtful way this is being handled,” Butler says she will take a detour away from the federal government.
“It’s honestly just really disappointing, from like a personal standpoint.”
Her plan is to go into general litigation at a mid-size to large law firm or a solicitor’s office. She has also considered local government work, given her experience.
She may go to work for a city. Even now, she is “still dedicated to doing good as a civil servant but not under the present circumstances.”
Victoria DeLano, who was an equal opportunity specialist in the education department’s Office for Civil Rights based in Birmingham, Alabama, said she was outraged when she received notice that she had lost her job last week.
“I think that the work that the Office for Civil Rights does is absolutely instrumental to children in my state,” she said.
“When you take out of the equation a fully staffed Office for Civil Rights, you’re taking away an avenue to resolution and an avenue to law enforcement, a really important avenue to law enforcement.”
“These students have no one else,” she said. They can still file complaints with OCR. Please understand OCR is understaffed at best, and OCR right now does not have external communication with you all. So I don’t know where they turn,” she added.
DeLano also called her position a “dream job.”
“It’s something that I’m extraordinarily passionate about because I believe with my history working with students with disabilities,” she said. “So I jumped at the chance to take this job, and absolutely loved it.”
She is concerned that the Trump administration has no clear plan to shrink the federal government, nor is it considering students with disabilities.
“This dismantling of our government right now is just being done with a sledgehammer without thought of what are the implications be to the individuals who are serviced by these agencies,” she said.
That sentiment is echoed by Butler.
“It takes a while to build a government system, but when [you] tear it down this quickly, it can cause a lot of damage,” she said. “The progress feels slow. This could take 100 years for us to rebuild.”
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