We all knew there would be a lot of changes when Donald Trump took office and got rid of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to reorganize the American government. People who don’t like the new president warned that the changes would not be good. As people are fired and hired, this becomes more and more clear.
Many workers have been fired or told they were no longer needed, only to be later found to be essential and randomly replaced by private sector workers or other government workers. This coming and going hasn’t stopped, and it probably won’t for a while. Most of the people who were fired were “probationary employees” who had been hired less than two years ago. When they were hired again, they were put on administrative suspension right away and told to wait for further instructions.
What the Trump Administration’s choice will really mean
Raphael Garcia is one of the cases. He is an analyst at the Department of Veterans Affairs and a wounded former soldier. He was put back on the job after two federal judges ordered it, but he wasn’t able to do his job because he was put on administrative leave. He was told that he would get paid back for the time he spent on leave, but he’s not holding his breath. Garcia told NBC News this week, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” He also said that he won’t know if his pay has started up again until the end of the pay period in late March.
There are 24,000 other government workers on probation who are going through the same thing as him. A person who worked for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was fired, then hired back, and put on leave said, “To be honest, I don’t fully trust this administration and its appointees about whether or not I’ll get to go back to work.” I haven’t had a job in a month. He was told that the human resources staff of his company would get in touch with him to talk about benefits and paperwork for getting him back on the job, but they haven’t.
Because of the stress and lack of security at work, this FEMA worker has started looking for another job. “I’d rather continue my work for FEMA and the American people,” they said. However, “if I turn down another chance and then get fired again in two weeks, it could make things even worse.” They have already earned my lack of trust. We don’t know what to do next. “It’s so crazy and hard to understand.”
Sarah Boim was on probation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) until she was fired in February. She has not been directly reached since then, even though she is still in the same job. She thinks her “rehiring email” may have been sent to a CDC email account she could not get into after being fired, and she wants the problem to be dealt with in a clear way.
This is because not everyone has been told about the rehiring process in the same way. Some have gotten emails, while others have gotten calls from managers or bosses. This has made people less likely to make decisions, which has made the problem worse.
A worker at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has gone even further and said they think the Trump administration will only “honor this reinstatement” as long as federal judges stop its plans to fire a lot of people, and that it was all done in bad faith.
Even when the reinstatement orders were being appealed, federal officials said that bringing back “removed employees to full duty status would impose substantial burdens” on different agencies and “cause significant confusion and cause turmoil for the terminated employees.” This is something that the head of human capital operations at the Environmental Protection Agency, who said in one of the filings:
“In particular, all employees who were offered reinstatement would have to be onboarded again. This would include going through any necessary training, filling out HR paperwork, getting new security badges, re-enrolling in benefits programs and payroll, resuming actions related to their security clearance, receiving government-provided equipment, and other administrative tasks that needed to be done.”