When Today Is the Day You Could Be Fired

The following is adapted from “American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government,” published this month by OR Books.

In the opening months of 2025, a year as consequential to American politics and society as any since the early days of the New Deal, the federal government’s social contract with its workers to provide good, stable conditions of employment, and with the population to provide core social services, broke down.

Amid all of the rolling chaos and political upheaval of 2025, the Donald Trump-Elon Musk attack on federal employees and on the structures of the civil service system, enacted via the machinations of Musk’s shadowy so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) stands out for its cruelty and also for its destruction of basic government functions.

Within days of DOGE’s engineers, many of them barely out of their teens and with little to no knowledge of how complex government bureaucracies and programs operated, having been set loose on the American government, a cascade of cuts flowed through Washington, D.C., and on to points beyond. The Constitution be damned, Musk’s team was on a mission to simply “delete” congressionally mandated programs they deemed wasteful and institutions they felt were antithetical to the values of the MAGA movement. In this frenetic assault on government function, tens of thousands of ordinary workers became collateral damage.

For some, that meant losing jobs they had moved across the country to take on; for others, further into their federal careers, it meant an implosion of retirement dreams — a fired federal worker with less than 20 years of service, and a lower civil service rank, gets a far more basic pension than they would have had they been allowed to work a few more years.

One of the women whose story is detailed in this book was an Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) communications specialist who was subjected first to being fired as a probationary worker, then — after she had been rehired under court order — to being fired again as part of a broader reduction-in-force mandate. In meetings she attended during those brief weeks she had been rehired, her colleagues kept breaking down in tears. “By the time I was fired on Feb. 14, I was already exhausted by what the administration was putting government employees through, and it hadn’t even been a month,” she recalled. As the year progressed and her anxiety about her family’s financial situation intensified, she had to have hard conversations with her husband about whether they could afford to continue to keep their son in day care and whether they should postpone the decision to have a second child. A scientist who had been booted out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and, in the process, cut off from her health insurance, was having to ration her last remaining doses of the medication she needed to keep her Crohn’s disease in check. A 29-year Navy vet who had lost his job with the U.S. Forest Service was having conversations with his partner about calling it a day in the U.S. and moving overseas. Another longtime employee of NOAA concluded that the federal government could no longer be trusted as an employer. “I have no intention of ever returning to federal service,” he declared, “and will forever look back to this chapter as a shitshow of the highest order.”

One after another, federal workers told me they were struggling to sleep, were wracked with anxiety, and found themselves fighting more often with their partners. Some had begun taking antidepressants or medications used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder to counter the dread they felt surrounding their work; others couldn’t handle the emotional roller coaster of not knowing from one day to the next whether they were still employed and, despite believing their jobs provided important services to the American public, opted instead for Musk’s “Fork in the Road,” taking deferred resignation offers or signing up for early retirement.

None of this cruelty was incidental; rather, it was the main point. The federal government, the largest employer in the country, had decided that its workers were the enemy within. Indeed, Russell Vought, architect of Project 2025 and Trump’s choice to head up the Office of Management and Budget, was on record as saying he wanted federal employees to be “traumatically affected.” A month before the election, ProPublica released a video recording of Vought saying of the workers, “when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down .… We want to put them in trauma.” Now, the administration was setting out to do just that.

“It’s going to leave a black mark on my federal record of employment. Every time something happens to a federal employee, there’s a form called a Notification of Personnel Action, an SF 50. When you apply for a federal job, you have to give in your most recent SF 50. And mine says ‘terminated,’” said Kelsey Hendrix, a blind woman who was fired from her job as a procurement and contracts specialist with NOAA. “That’s the first thing a human resources manager will see when I apply for a new job.” She worried that even in the private sector the termination notice would hinder her ability to find new work; that, in their hurry to find excuses to fire people, the DOGE enforcers had conjured up a fictitious “poor performance” rationale that would haunt her for the rest of her career. It was, she said, an “unimaginably cruel” thing to do.

On a near-daily basis, Musk — whose personal fortune was so gargantuan that he could have paid the entire federal workforce of 2.3 million people for a year and covered all of their work-related benefits as well, and still been left with more than $100 billion in assets — amped up the pressure. He tweeted out to his more than 200 million followers pronouncements about which agencies would bite the dust next. He declared that the U.S. Agency for International Development was a “criminal organization,” and that it was “time for it to die.” Then, when his engineers began dismantling it, firing its staff and refusing to pay its overseas contractors, he gloated that he had spent the weekend feeding the agency into a wood chipper. The world’s richest man promised to “delete” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and, once the mass firings at the organization started, mocked it by tweeting out, “CFPB RIP.”

At Musk’s behest, agencies imposed onerous new restrictions on employees, as well as make-work tasks seemingly designed for the sole purpose of tormenting workers and hounding them out of their positions. All federal employees were ordered to send a weekly email detailing five things they had done the previous week that would justify their continued employment. Their work credit cards were either canceled or limited to being able to spend a mere one dollar a day. Most work-related travel was eliminated. Office buildings were sold off. Remote workers were ordered to return to in-person work, only to find buildings with nonfunctional toilets, offices with no furniture, heating and air-conditioning systems that had been turned off, and so on.

For those who didn’t get the hint, letters soon went out telling thousands upon thousands of workers that their services were no longer needed by the government. They were ordered to clear their desks and hand in their cellphones and computers and workplace IDs. In many instances, they were frog-marched out of the buildings they had worked in and unceremoniously deposited on the streets outside. All that was missing was a kick in the rear to complete the picture.

In the past, that hatred of government hadn’t been the case. In Gwinnett County, Georgia, just outside Atlanta, it didn’t matter whether you were a Republican, Democrat or independent, you knew people who worked for the CDC; and, likely as not, until the recent hyper-politicization of views on the public sector, you felt an abiding sense of pride in knowing that the world’s preeminent public health organization was an anchor to the surrounding community.

That was certainly the case for Aryn Backus when she was growing up, the third of four siblings and half-siblings, in the late 1990s and 2000s in the fast-growing suburb of Snellville. The parents of several of her friends were CDC employees, and everything about the organization seemed cool to her; its staff were working to prevent disease outbreaks and to understand how illnesses spread, and all of them radiated a powerful sense of public service.

Backus’ family was solidly middle class, and her upbringing reflected that. For years, she did ballet. She played clarinet in her middle-school marching band and was in the color guard dance line for the marching band in her high school. She was a cross-country runner and an avid reader.

In her sophomore year of high school, she became friends with a boy on the drum line. Three years later, they started dating.

They both attended the University of Georgia’s Athens campus, where she studied for a degree in communications — and down the road, after she had completed a master’s degree in public health at Emory University, they ended up marrying.

All the while, Backus was thinking about how to get a communications job at the CDC. When she was at Emory, one of the country’s top schools for public health, she was taught by professors who either had worked for, or still had gigs with, the organization. For her work study, she did a internship with the CDC’s Office of Safety, Security and Asset Management at its Chamblee campus, learning the ropes for how to do internal communications in the event of an emergency. The internship straddled the end of the Barack Obama presidency and the start of Trump’s first presidency — and, because of that, ended up being truncated when the new president announced a federal hiring freeze, meaning that she couldn’t be reappointed to finish her work study. It didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for the CDC.

Backus graduated from her master’s program in 2018. She was $75,000 in debt — a stunning amount that, at 6% interest, meant that without any relief she would be paying upward of $1,000 a month for the next 10 years. But she hoped that if she could get a job in the public sector, she would ultimately qualify for a loan-forgiveness program. If she didn’t, she wasn’t sure exactly how she would cope; after all, in the Atlanta region she would likely start out at the CDC with a salary in the mid-$50,000s. Factor in the cost of housing, utilities and all the other expenses that made up daily life, and that $1,000 seemed like a mountain to climb each month.

Seemingly on cue, an Emory alumna who was working at the CDC reached out to her as she was getting ready to graduate and asked if she was interested in becoming a fellow with the ORISE program, aimed at bringing young public health workers who had recently received their master’s or doctorate into the CDC. Backus could hardly hide her delight; it was a perfect opportunity and she could start a month after graduating; if it panned out, it would set her on a path for student debt relief.

And that was how it began. She did two years with ORISE. Then, during the COVID crisis she was tapped to work on communicating with the public about the pandemic. And after that, in early 2022, she took a contracting job at the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health. In November 2024, just after the election, she was offered a job doing basically the same work but as a full-time employee. After 6½ years with the CDC, bouncing from one office to the next, it appeared as if she was now in a secure position. Her pay had increased, she was getting benefits, and she was doing important work educating the public on the dangers of smoking and on ways to make it easier to quit the habit.

It didn’t take long after Trump was inaugurated, on Jan. 20, for Backus to realize she might have to dramatically recalibrate her expectations. Emails started hitting her inbox, seemingly from random people outside the government email system, urging her to leave her “low-productivity” job and seek work in the private sector. Other emails circulated that told her and her colleagues that anyone caught trying to do work related to diversity, equity and inclusion under the radar would immediately be terminated. Still other missives insisted the CDC communications teams delete all reference to transgender and nonbinary people in their press releases and other files. She found out that her supervisor had been asked to provide a list to the Office of Personnel Management of all probationary employees, and to then indicate whether or not they were mission-critical workers.

In early February, mass firings started hitting different government departments and agencies. As the month progressed, the firings intensified. DOGE squads were basically targeting one department after the next, gaining access to their employee and pay data, to their contracts with contractors and grantees, and then orchestrating a mass culling of newer hires.

All of which made for a nerve-wracking Valentine’s Day. All that day, as Backus desperately tried to focus on the upcoming launch of a “tips from former smokers” campaign, the rumors intensified: DOGE had arrived at the CDC with its metaphorical chainsaws; the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control was being hit; the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion was being decimated.

When she made it to 5 p.m. without having been fired, Backus breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps, after all, she would be safe. She went home, too worn out to celebrate Valentine’s Day. When, hours later, the CDC director sent out an email to staff informing them that terminations had taken place, Backus again thought she had dodged a bullet — after all, she still hadn’t received any word that she was being fired. The next evening, a Saturday, she relaxed enough to drop off her 1-year-old son with her mother, and go on a belated Valentine’s date with her husband. They drove into the swanky uptown Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead, ate dinner, accompanied by a bottle of white wine, at an Italian restaurant — they shared a charcuterie dish, and, for her main, she ordered a lobster risotto — and then headed over to a dessert place for cheesecake and a flourless torte. By the time they had swung by her parents to pick up their child and then driven home it was 11 o’clock.

The next morning, Backus got up early to feed her son. As she was doing this, her phone buzzed, alerting her to a text from a friend at the CDC. Had she checked her work email recently? No, she texted back. You need to do so, her friend replied, and then told her that she, the friend, had just been terminated. “I said, in my brain, ‘Well, shit!’” Backus recalled. She finished feeding her baby, logged on to her work email, and, sure enough, there was an email, from 7:35 p.m. the previous evening. It wasn’t from a person, but from a new email address, [email protected], that had, in recent weeks, been sending out mass emails, usually about unpleasant topics seemingly designed to make employees’ lives miserable; she and her colleagues assumed it had been set up by the DOGE crew. The subject line was a combination of ominous and phishing-like. “Read this immediately,” It was the sort of tagline that smelled of a scam. The text within the email itself was hardly more reassuring. “Good afternoon. Please read the two attachments to this email immediately. Thank you for your service to the American public.” If she didn’t know it was a real email, with real consequences for her, she might well have deleted it and not openedthe attachments. After all, the most basic cybersecurity training tells you to be suspicious of an email like that. Instead, with trepidation, she downloaded the documents. The first informed her that she was “not fit for continued employment, because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit Agency needs; and your performance has not been adequate to justify your further employment at the Agency.” The second informed her that she could appeal the first.

Backus was stunned. She knew that she was a stellar worker — that was why the CDC had hired her months earlier instead of leaving her as a contractor. She also knew that being fired for poor performance would both make it harder to qualify for unemployment benefits and make it next-to-impossible to ever get a federal job again. And she also knew that whoever had authored the letter, or whichever AI program had spewed it out, wasn’t even making the slightest effort to be accurate. She would find out, within days, that all 800 of the probationary employees who had been fired at the CDC had received the exact same letter; in the rush to ditch them, all had been arbitrarily given a black mark against their name that could easily hobble them for the rest of their careers.