DOGE Ended on July 4, but the Workers Whose Lives Musk Upended Are Still Reeling [View all]

“It’s hard to explain. Like, this is not a normal job loss.”

2 hours ago by Anna Rogers
Ben Bagdikian Fellow

When Lucy found out she was pregnant in the summer of 2025, she might have been delighted. Instead, the news added to the uncertainty she’d been facing since that February, when she was among the first crop of federal workers fired by the Trump administration.

Her old bosses at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to rehire her, but human resources offered nothing in writing, and given how the administration had treated her already, she just couldn’t trust the proposal. (She would eventually return as a contractor, hence her request that I use a pseudonym—one former colleague, after all, had been fired for putting up a protest sign.)

President Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly that the career workers his minions drove out—roughly 317,000 were fired, quit, or took a buyout since he returned to the White House—are “getting private sector jobs” and making “twice as much money, three times as much money.” Even the judge who ruled those early firings illegal was under that impression. The workers “have moved on with their lives and found new jobs,” he stated last fall. “Many would no longer be willing or able to return to their posts.”

That wasn’t Lucy’s experience. She’d applied for at least 80 positions, resulting in just two dead-end interviews, though her PhD and ample work experience had made her well-qualified. By the time she knew she was expecting, she’d accepted a retail gig without health insurance. Similar stories abounded among her former colleagues.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/trump-doge-elon-musk-fired-federal-workers-civil-servants-recovery-struggling-mental-health/