A statue at the Gettysburg National Military Park along the Union lines where Pickett’s Charge was turned away on July 3, 1863. (Tim Lambert)
While he was preparing for work at the National Energy Technology Laboratory on Feb. 14, Kyle Buchheit opened an email he’d received around midnight.
“Per OPM instructions, DOE [the Department of Energy] finds that your further employment would not be in the public interest. For this reason, you are being removed from your position.”
It was a total surprise. The Pittsburgh-area research engineer knew President Donald Trump campaigned on cutting the federal workforce, but saw his work, conducting research that helps inform how grants are awarded in promising areas of fossil fuel development, as aligned with the administration’s energy goals. And he didn’t recognize himself or his colleagues in Trump’s description of wasteful bureaucrats.
“I’m one of the quote unquote ‘good federal employees.’ I went to work every day in the office,” Buchheit said. “I’m not a bureaucrat. I don’t handle money. Our lab doesn’t pass any kind of rules, regulations, none of that. We do research. We try to [help the development of] energy technology so electricity is cheap and affordable.”
Buchheit was one of hundreds of federal workers in Pennsylvania, and tens of thousands across the country, who have lost their jobs as a result of cost-cutting measures implemented by Trump and overseen by billionaire mega-donor Elon Musk. Mostly, they were probationary workers — meaning they were in their first year or so of employment, and didn’t have the job protections of their more senior colleagues.
Before the layoffs, the commonwealth was home to around 75,000 federal workers, not including post office workers or military members, according to data provided by the state Department of Labor and Industry.
An analysis by the Capital-Star shows they come from all over.
But the landscape is changing rapidly.
In the last week, two federal judges have ruled many of the firings were illegal, and ordered probationary employees to be allowed to return to work. But those rulings left room for future job cuts, and the Trump administration has signaled their intention for even larger action.
Since Valentine’s Day, the administration has told federal agencies to prepare for even more staff cuts, and a deadline has come and gone for agencies to submit plans for “large-scale reductions in force,” though none have been made public yet. That puts thousands of federal workers living across the state at risk of losing their jobs, and those plans have not been made public.
For many of those federal employees, like Buchheit, the blow could be massive.
“I’m one of the quote unquote ‘good federal employees.’ I went to work every day in the office. I’m not a bureaucrat. I don’t handle money. Our lab doesn’t pass any kind of rules, regulations, none of that. We do research.
– Kyle Buchheit
For nine years, his life revolved around the NETL lab, the only one of its kind fully owned and operated by the U.S. government. After graduating in 2015, he took a postdoctoral fellowship at the branch in West Virginia. Four years later, he moved to Pennsylvania to work as a private contractor at the Pittsburgh-area location, where he bought a house and started his family. When he got a full-time federal job last year, it was exactly where he wanted to be.
“There’s a running joke that everyone could make more money if they worked in the private sector,” Buccheit said. “But if I worked in the private sector, my benefit goes to the company. If I work in the government, my benefit goes to the people.”
Buchheit comes from a long line of public servants. His grandfather on his mother’s side served in the Pacific in World War II. And his paternal grandfather was the postmaster and mayor of a small Missouri town.
In his own way, he felt he was continuing that service to his country.
It’s a sentiment shared by other federal workers, who are stung by questions and accusations by Musk and Republican lawmakers over their work ethic.
“A lot of people have bought into the concept of the D.C. bureaucrat, and I think that’s a real problem,” said Philip Glover, the vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees third district. It covers Pennsylvania and Delaware. He estimates his union, the largest for federal employees in the commonwealth, represents about 30,000 Pennsylvanians.
Philip Glover, national vice president of AFGE District 3, addresses protesters outside of Rep. Scott Perry’s office in Harrisburg on Feb. 20 (Capital-Star photo by Ian Karbal)
Glover said people should realize that federal workers do not conform to a stereotype. They work white collar and blue collar jobs, and have a variety of political views. Nationwide, roughly 85% of the federal workforce lives outside of the nation’s capital. And about one third are veterans.
“They’d come out and recruit us for these jobs,” said Glover, an Army veteran. “They came to Fort Bragg to recruit me into the Federal Bureau of Prisons. I was an MP. Now, [they say] ‘You’re not really worth anything.’”
Both Republican and Democratic areas hit hard
On Feb. 20, Glover joined dozens of people in a field outside Rep. Scott Perry’s office in Harrisburg, despite the sub-freezing temperature. They were protesting the termination of federal workers and proposed cuts by Congressional Republicans to federal funding and social safety nets like Medicaid.
“It’s crazy what’s going on here,” Glover said in a speech. “This is not running (the) government, and [Perry] is not saying a word about any of it.”
Perry’s 10th District in southcentral Pennsylvania has the highest proportion of federal workers of any congressional district in the state. Around 3.22% of the workforce is employed by federal agencies — or roughly 13,000 people, according to data compiled by the Congressional Research Office last year, not including post office employees and active duty military members,
The lawmaker, who was involved in efforts to keep Trump in office following his loss in the 2020 election, wasn’t at his office during the protest, and did not respond to questions from the Capital-Star. But he has praised Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.
Glover was joined by Mark Cochran, the president of the local AFGE union that represents National Park Service workers at the Gettysburg National Military Park and Eisenhower National Historic Site. He is also president of AFGE Council 270, which represents National Park Service employees in the northeast part of the country.
The staff at the two sites has been hit hard by Musk’s team and an executive order freezing new hires. First, they learned seasonal workers, who make up about 75 percent of the Gettysburg workforce during the busy tourist months, couldn’t be hired back in the spring, according to Cochran. Five probationary workers were also cut.
That means some parts of the Civil War battlefield, one of the most popular tourist sites in the state, and Eisenhower farm will be left to go to nature, which can create hazards for visitors and, ultimately, will take much more time and money to restore than if they’d kept up with the work at their previous pace.
“We’re working these typically lower-paying jobs, because we’re passionate about the work that we’re doing,” Cochran said. “Working here at Gettysburg, we’re preserving one of the turning points of our country’s history for future generations. You can’t ask for a better job than that, and these folks, they just want to work.”
Republicans like Perry represent the three Pennsylvania congressional districts with the highest proportion of federal workers. That’s according to data collected by the Congressional Research Office.
They include Reps. Rob Bresnahan (R-8th District) and John Joyce (R-13th District). Federal workers make up 2.9% and 2.8% of the total workforce in their districts, respectively.
Neither congressman responded to questions from the Capital-Star about their views on the workforce cuts.
According to data provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, many of the parts of the state most dependent on federal labor supported Trump in the 2024 election.
Federal workers made up 6.8% of the workforce in Union County as of last September, more than any other in the commonwealth. Sixty one percent of voters there cast ballots for Trump in 2024.
In Lebanon County, where 64% of voters supported Trump in November, 6.2% of the workforce is employed by the federal government. The federal workforce there is largely employed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which runs the Lebanon VA Medical Center, where an undisclosed number of probationary federal workers have already been laid off.
Douglas Etter, a spokesperson for the VA Medical Center said the cuts “will have no negative effect on veteran health care, benefits or other services and will allow VA to focus more effectively on its core mission of serving veterans, families, caregivers and survivors.”
Monroe County, which had the third highest rate of federal employment at 4.7% of the workforce, went for Trump by less than a single percent in November. The Dept. of Defense is the largest civilian federal employer, and Secretary Pete Hegseth has said he’d like to cut the Pentagon’s budget for nonlethal programs by 8% over each of the next five years, while reprioritizing spending on border security, drones, missile defense and more.
“A lot of my co-workers, they voted for Trump, and very proudly voted for Trump,” Cochran said. “Now they’re seeing their people they’ve worked side by side with for years — suddenly they’re not here. And they’re like, ‘What’s going on?’”
While many of the areas in the state with the highest proportion of federal employees in their workforce are more rural and suburban, cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have tens of thousands of federal workers between them,
Roughly one-third of federal workers in the commonwealth, or over 25,000, lived in Philadelphia County as of September 2024. That’s 3.6% of the county’s workforce.
Alex Berman, vice president of a Philadelphia branch of the National Treasury Employees Union, represents thousands of workers on the Philadelphia campus for the Internal Revenue Service. He says that roughly 400 IRS employees in the city have been laid off since Trump took office.
“They’re in shock. They’re hurting,” Berman said. “They’re understandably feeling betrayed. It’s hard to sit here and be part of the union and say, ‘We’re working on it.’”
Berman is also an IRS employee, and said the layoffs could result in more people paying more fees and taxes than they should. He estimates 90% of the workers that were cut were responsible for helping people who feel they were taxed more than they owed, or need to set up a payment plan, or other issues after they receive their tax bills.
And, according to Berman, those agents are often recruited as volunteers by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to take calls from people impacted by natural disasters.
“What happens if there is a terrible hurricane coming this season, or another round of wildfires in another area of California or Texas, and those people need to get their claims heard, filed or claimed quickly? There’s not gonna be many of us,” Berman said.
‘It was brilliantly executed, if the goal was to cause people a lot of stress’
For Kyle Buchheit, the Department of Energy researcher, there’s hope though. While it hasn’t happened yet, he’s been told to expect a formal letter reinstating him.
This past Thursday, a federal judge ruled the termination of probationary federal employees, including his, were illegal. Still, the ruling left room for future workforce cuts, and there’s the “massive” reduction plans that Trump has ordered but not yet announced.
“I’m gonna get my job back, but it’s not guaranteed I’m gonna stay there” Buccheit said. “RIFs [reductions in force] are next and I’m going to keep preparing.”
While he’s excited to return to work, he plans to keep sending out resumes. It’s a big mindset shift from mere weeks ago, when he had hoped to retire from the lab.
“A lot of people have bought into the concept of the D.C. bureaucrat, and I think that’s a real problem.
– Philip Glover, the vice president of the American Federation of Government Employee’s third district.
And his wife plans to keep the third job she got at their child’s daycare so they can save as much as they can – just in case.
Going back to work will also mean returning to a changed workplace.
Federal workers still on the job in Pennsylvania have struggled with felt the impact of the layoffs too. Beyond having to make up for a reduced staff, some feel their workplace has become hostile and unpredictable.
“Every day I go to work, I feel like I could be fired,” said a Department of Energy employee who works at the same lab Buchheit did. She was granted anonymity because of fears of retaliation.
Buchheit’s colleague was also a probationary employee, and can’t see any reason why he was laid off and she wasn’t. Both had excellent performance reviews.
“Everybody was coming up with these theories,” she said. “It was brilliantly executed, if the goal was to cause people a lot of stress.”
She said the communications her colleagues have received from Musk’s team — from the early “fork in the road” buyout offer that called them less productive than private sector workers, to requests they justify their positions by describing what they did that week — are demoralizing and antagonistic.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.
And there’s the sword of Damocles. So far, her supervisors haven’t told her anything about what the reduction in force plans might mean for the lab. It’s been particularly unnerving because they’ve otherwise been quick to respond to new developments as they appear in the news or in their inboxes. It’s unclear to her if that’s because her bosses don’t know or don’t want to say.
“I took a pay cut to get this job,” she said. “At a fossil energy lab, you have a lot of people who you might imagine could be making a lot more money working in the oil and gas industry … They actively made a choice not to go cash in because they believed in the mission.”