WASHINGTON — About a year ago, Emma Schultz decided it was time to take the leap and pursue her dream job as a forestry technician with the U.S. Forest Service – a dream that turned into a nightmare as she got caught in the Trump administration’s campaign to slash the federal bureaucracy.
The move meant uprooting her family of four from their home in north Minneapolis and moving to Durango, Colorado, a small, wealthy mountain town.
“It was a very fulfilling position. I just loved every day that I got to go to work. I was happy,” said Schultz, who last week became one of many federal workers caught up in the flurry of terminations.
Elon Musk and his crew at the Department of Government Efficiency, which is not an official government agency, have methodically fired workers at a number of government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Interior Department, the Department of State and many others that employ Minnesotans who provide key services to the public.
“The impacts in state and local economies is what we’re seeing now,” said Jennie Mattingley, vice president of governmental affairs for the Partnership for Public Service. Those impacts, she said, will escalate as agencies lose their staff and some are dismantled, like the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose demise has left American farmers with canceled contracts.
Schultz and most of the federal workers laid off in Musk’s sweep, but not all, were “provisional employees” — federal workers who have not completed their trial periods, which typically last one or two years but could be longer at some agencies.
Schultz went through a gambit of emotions as she was caught up in this saga — fear for her job as the new administration made drastic cuts in federal employment and sadness when she indeed received notice of her termination a week ago.
But Schultz, whose job was to interact with loggers to ensure compliance with timber sale contracts and prevent environmental degradation, was lucky.
She is one of the federal workers laid off in haste who were quickly rehired, like the USDA officials who were called back to work on bird flu and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rehired to keep the nation safe. Like these other workers, Schulz was determined “mission critical.”
Although Musk said layoffs were based on job performances, Schultz and many others who had been fired said they had received positive job performances.
Workers receiving termination notices under the guise of poor performance was an issue Jacob Malcom, now former deputy assistant secretary for Policy and Environmental Management and director of the Office of Policy Analysis for the Department of the Interior, outlined in a LinkedIn post last week.
Malcom said he quit after he “had to contribute to terminations of federal employees who happened to be in their probationary periods.”
“This was directed under the guise of ‘poor performance’ or ‘skills not aligned with the Department’s needs’ for these individuals,” the post reads. “That’s a lie. It wasn’t supported by facts or evidence, and in some cases I know darn well that the opposite was true: these were people whose skills are exactly what is needed and had been performing excellently! All I could do was to note in the record the lack of evidence to support this decision, which I hope is enough for these actions to be overturned.”
Despite having had her job reinstated, Schultz is concerned about the future of the agency she works for.
“It seems like such a large percentage of Forest Service employees are already gone. It makes me super concerned for the future of our public lands,” Schultz said.
Mattingley said some federal workers were reinstated after someone at an agency “raised their hand” and said “this person is really critical.”
A pushback in the courts
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management says there are about 2 million civilian federal employees, with about 15% living in Washington, D.C., and the city’s Maryland and Virginia suburbs. The rest, about 85%, live across the nation.
According to a December report by the Congressional Research Service, 18,031 of these employees live in Minnesota.
But that number has most likely dropped in the last couple of weeks.
Layoffs are expected to continue. After firing top military brass, including Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DOGE announced on Monday it would cut 5,400 probationary employees in the Pentagon.
Michael, 46, who lives in the Twin Cities and requested anonymity because he feared he would be “blacklisted,” said he was hired by the National Highway Safety Administration last May and recently was advised that he had been laid off.
Michael said he was advised he was terminated from NHTSA, a U.S. Department of Transportation agency, in an email that was sent at 8 p.m. on a Friday night.
Since he’d seen news reports of the layoff of probationary employees, Michael said he had prepared himself for the possibility that he would lose his job, even as his manager had told him in a series of emails he knew nothing of those plans.
At NHTSA, Michael was employed in ferreting out safety defects in emergency vehicles and motorcycles by monitoring complaints, news articles and other sources of information that might indicate problems.
“It’s important work,” he said. Michael also said he applied for a civil service job with the federal government “because at the time I thought it would be a more stable place to work.”
He said he liked his division chief and his co-workers and received a mid-year review in January that “was 100% positive.” He also said he’s even willing to go back to a job that he enjoyed.
“I’m wishing this could be rectified, but I don’t have high hopes it will be,” he said.
Michael is an Army veteran who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. The federal government is the largest employer of military veterans; about 30% of the federal workforce has served in the military.
“I certainly served my country, and it turned its back on me,” he said.
There may be hope for Michael. On Monday, Government Executive reported that the Office of Special Counsel, the agency responsible for investigating illegal actions taken against federal employees, deemed some of the mass firing of probationary employees unlawful.
The unions that represent federal workers are also suing over the dismissals, as have some individuals who have been fired.
Mattingley said many probational workers assumed they had no rights because they are in their trial period, “but it’s much more complicated than that.”
Like the top brass fired at the Pentagon, it’s not just probationary employees who have been dismissed from their civil servant jobs.
Musk orders ignored?
On Monday, Musk ordered all federal employees to detail five things they have accomplished last week, or face termination. That order received a pushback from some agency and department heads who told their workers to ignore it.
Musk said he’s firing federal workers to save money and fight fraud and the dissemination of diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
But Musk’s characterization of a bloated federal bureaucracy is off the mark. Federal employment has actually shrunk as a percentage of the nation’s population over the past 50 years.
According to the Partnership for Public Service, federal workers accounted for 1.1% of the American population in 1967. They now account for about .06%.
“There’s clearly a need to streamline and modernize the government and make it work better, but this is not the way to get there,” Mattingley said.
Winter Keefer
Winter Keefer is MinnPost’s Metro reporter. Follow her on Twitter or email her at wkeefer@minnpost.com.
Ana Radelat
Ana Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. You can reach her at aradelat@minnpost.com or follow her on Twitter at @radelat.
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