Air Force veteran and military spouse Iceley Andaya was fired from her job at the Veteran Benefits Administration as part of the Trump administration’s purge of probationary employees. (Max Nesterak/Minnesota Reformer)
Veterans need assistance accessing their benefits. Who can they call? A fellow veteran was making sure their financial claims were processed.
The public often struggles to find the information they need to access disability benefits and other services across the federal government’s thousands of websites. Could one central search engine answer all questions? A web developer was working on it.
Cities and counties want to build new infrastructure like bridges and train stations with federal assistance. Can they do it without damaging a Native American burial site or the environment? A historian was helping them.
The Trump administration’s purge of tens of thousands of federal workers across agencies and across the country has upended the government’s work providing human services, ensuring safety and building infrastructure that the public expects.
A pair of federal judges ordered the reinstatement of probationary employees across many agencies, though the Trump administration plans to appeal. In the meantime, workers the Reformer spoke to say they haven’t heard how the ruling affects them.
The Trump administration has not released exact figures of how many employees have been fired and from which agencies — there are more than 18,000 federal civilian employees in Minnesota.
Out placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas tallied up more than 60,000 from 17 different government agencies, while the New York Times estimate is around half that. The layoffs threaten to send shock waves through the greater economy as laid off federal workers cut down on spending and struggle to make mortgage and rent payments.
Eliminating the workers hasn’t eliminated the work. The result: lengthy delays or the government turning to pricey private contractors to carry out its business, foiling the Trump administration’s goal to offset tax cuts by cutting personnel.
Three fired federal workers in Minnesota shared their stories:
Veterans make up nearly a third of the federal workforce
Iceley Andaya started a job in the Veterans Benefits Administration in December shortly after earning her bachelors degree. She’s a veteran who served four years in the Air Force.
“I love helping veterans,” Andaya said. “I think veterans are one of the cornerstones of the country because we are the people who are serving to protect everyone, not just ourselves, not just our families, everyone in the country, regardless of any differences.”
Andaya was program support assistant, helping process financial hardship waivers for veterans who were mistakenly overpaid benefits but couldn’t afford to repay the funds. But soon after she was trained in, she received a boilerplate letter sent to tens of thousands of probationary employees — usually those in their first year or two of service — saying she was being terminated for poor performance.
“I know it’s not personal, but it just feels personal,” Andaya said.
Andaya can’t collect unemployment benefits since she was in school completing her degree last year, so she must rely on her wife’s income while she searches for another job.
Andaya’s wife is currently serving in the military in Minnesota. Part of the reason Andaya left the Air Force was because it can be challenging for military spouses to find joint assignments in the same locations while both advancing in their careers.
But she felt confident leaving the armed forces because her status as a veteran and a military spouse promised to give her an advantage in seeking civilian federal employment. She could still advance in her career while following her spouse to different assignments. The purge of the federal workforce now has her doubting the government’s commitment to her and other veterans.
“There is no job stability anymore, which is unfortunate,” Andaya said.
Many workers chose purpose over paychecks
Nina Sawyer took a pay cut and a less prestigious title to join the General Services Administration in 2023.
She had a successful career in the private sector working in web and game development, but she desperately wanted a job that she felt had a greater purpose. She comes from a military family and grew up wanting to serve her country, but couldn’t join the armed forces herself because of an epilepsy diagnosis.
“I wanted to give back,” Sawyer said. “I can make more money (in the private sector), but that’s not the point. That’s not what I wanted to be doing.”
The GSA helps other federal agencies but also state and local governments with procurement services and real estate — like the federal government’s office manager.
Sawyer was using her skills to make government websites more user-friendly and efficient. She was working on rebuilding the federal government’s search engine so the public would be able to easily pull information from multiple agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration when accessing disability benefits.
Sawyer, who was working remotely, liked working for the federal government, and had stellar reviews. About three months ago, she was hired for a higher-paying supervisory role with the Technology Transformation Services. Which made her a probationary employee.
After DOGE fired up its chainsaw to hack down the size of the federal workforce, Sawyer learned her job was likely on the chopping block. She worried about not having affordable health insurance if she were laid off; her daughter also has epilepsy.
So when the Office of Personnel Management — the federal government’s human resources department — offered federal employees buyouts in its “Fork in the Road” email, she felt she had to take that “sketchy, shakedown offer,” as she called it. The deal promised workers pay through September if they voluntarily resigned. Sawyer says she was fired anyways.
“Trust, it wasn’t eroded. It was atomized,” Sawyer said.
She’s worried that after this indiscriminate purge, the federal government won’t be able to recruit talented workers. One of the key selling points for the federal government was stability, and that’s gone.
Sawyer said the indiscriminate purge of federal workers doesn’t seem aimed at improving the enterprise.
“They’re talking about building smarter, better software and government (but) my skill set wasn’t even taken in consideration when it was time to fire people,” she said. “They’re just going in with a hammer and breaking things.”
Work won’t disappear even if the workers do
Historian Katie Haun Schuring joined the Federal Railroad Administration last fall after about seven years at the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
It might seem strange for a historian to end up at government agencies overseeing highways and railroads rather than at a museum or university, but her expertise is needed to make sure infrastructure projects comply with various environmental and historic preservation requirements.
When a local community receives federal money for a new train station or a bridge over a rail line, she would make sure there wasn’t an archaeological site or historic building in the way. If there were, she would help planners work around those assets and minimize the impact of construction.
While the Trump administration eliminated Haun Schuring’s job, it can’t eliminate those regulations.
“(Projects are) going to still have to go through the environmental process unless the law is repealed …With fewer people doing that work, it just means there’s going to be further delays,” Haun Schuring said. (She emphasized that she doesn’t speak for the agency.)
Cities and towns may still hire a private company to do the work, which seems to be the goal. Musk said the government should privatize everything that can be — even the postal service — although it may not increase efficiency or cut costs.
Haun Schuring worked at a private-sector consulting firm before entering government doing similar work.
“The grant money that is made available to a city or a county is not going to go as far because now they’re going to have to hire me as a private consultant who can charge more for the work compared to someone who is a federal employee,” Haun Schuring said.