Government employees fired by Musk speak: ‘I feel betrayed by my country’

The email arrived at 7:06pm on a Saturday, but had been dated the day before. With it, K. Waye, an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), became one of the thousands of federal employees that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fired on February 14, part of what has become known in Washington as the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

Citing that the reasons for the dismissal were based on the fact that her “skill,” “knowledge” and “aptitude” were apparently not sufficient, it also defined her “performance” as “inadequate.” Waye had been placed into the category of “probationary employees” because, even though she had worked for the government for a decade, she changed jobs and agencies last August, which technically reset her seniority to zero. In theory, her new position had been a reward, a promotion that came with a raise. A public health expert who has experience with the World Health Organization, she had always wanted to work at the CDC. But in practice, that step up the ladder led to her downfall. In DOGE’s crusade “against bureaucracy,” Musk started with the most vulnerable: the employees who, on paper, had been in their posts for less than two years and who do not have the same rights as permanent staff.

Waye has an eight-year-old daughter and is divorced. She had just bought a house in a quiet Maryland neighborhood located an hour away from Washington D.C., not far from where she’d grown up as the offspring of a Senegalese diplomat. It was there, in a room full of moving boxes that had yet to be opened, she told her story. Now she’s not sure how she will pay for the new house. The worst part is that she suffers from a chronic autoimmune disease that, “if not correctly controlled, is dangerous. A common cold can be a matter of life and death,” she says. She frequently visits the doctor. Unemployed and without health insurance, she’s not sure how she will afford that expense, either. “I never thought something like this could happen to me,” she says.

Donald Trump successfully campaigned to become president on the promise of “dismantling the Deep State,” taking back control over independent federal agencies and putting them in the service of his conservative revolution. To do this, he recruited the richest man in the world, asking him to make cuts equal to one trillion dollars. Musk and his employees, a handful of young men with iconoclastic streaks, have already managed to freeze billions of dollars in federal grants and programs and are carrying out their assault on public employees agency by agency.

First, they offered an incentive package for voluntary resignations to more than 75,000 government workers, according to the Office of Personnel Management. Then, they proceeded to fire employees on probationary status. Numbers have not been released as to the total number of workers who have been let go, but in March 2024, 220,000 federal employees had been in their positions for less than a year. On Saturday, DOGE took things a step further, sending public service workers who still had their jobs an email in which they were asked to describe what they’d done at work last week. If they did not comply within 48 hours, they would be subject to termination.

All told, there are more than three million public employees in the United States and, though you’d never know it from the Republican Party’s fiery anti-Washington rhetoric, more than 80% of them are based in other locations around the country, from Huntsville, Alabama, home of the NASA headquarters, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the Department of Veteran Affairs operates a hospital. The latter is where, prior to February 13, Andrew Lennox worked.

Thirty-five-year-old Lennox served in the Marines for a decade, stationed, among other sites, in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. When he came home, he held a string of jobs until he got the one he just lost, where he felt “like a family” and “again, happy to serve” his country. He was also fired by email. The letter said that “based on your performance,” it was not “in the public interest” that he continue at in his position. “I never heard that when I was in Afghanistan, defending the American values of truth and justice. I feel betrayed,” Lennox said in a phone interview.

His dismissal, like Waye’s, is proof that DOGE’s decisions aren’t made on an individualized basis, according to Alden Group, a Washington D.C.-based law firm specializing in public employment. Then there are the inconsistencies in its language regarding unsatisfactory performance. Lennox, who had only been in his position for two months, had yet to undergo an official review. During her EL PAÍS interview, Waye shared her job evaluation, dated January 17, on which her superiors shared that during the review period she had “obtained better results than expected.” “I got an A,” she said, pointing at her score of 4.33 out of 5, “as I’ve received every time since I began to work for the government.”

Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to an email in which EL PAÍS asked about the apparent contradiction in citing “poor performance” as a reason for firing employees who are held in high regard by their superiors. Nor did they respond to questions about whether the dismissals are decided on a case-by-case basis, or what criteria was used in drawing up the lists of dismissals.

Throughout the implementation of Musk’s arbitrary and opaque plan, there’s been a feeling that anyone could be next, as agencies continue to fall like dominos. Months of Trump’s constant attacks on civil servants are taking their toll on federal employees.

Fear of reprisals

Over the last few weeks, EL PAÍS has spoken with 15 of those who still have their jobs, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid possible reprisals. Many see some logic in the idea of streamlining government, but are opposed to its “inhumane measures,” the “chaos” and “lack of judgment,” as well as the distorted public image that has been attached to those who “sacrifice” in their service to their country. They say that they are “demoralized” and are “fearful” and “anxious” that a dreaded email could arrive in their inbox at any moment. One official said that they had “lost several pounds from nerves.” Some have been looking for jobs in the private sector for weeks, and one individual who was successful in that search described the feeling of starting a new professional chapter as being “like getting on the last plane out of Vietnam.” Another, who retired just in time, said they felt “survivor’s guilt.”

They also shared their concern that “hasty cuts” could affect the United States’ global leadership in science, prevention of the next pandemic, the management of national parks — which have lost more than a thousand staff members just before the start of their peak season — and even national security. The dismissal of 300 employees who guarded nuclear weapons set off alarms, and they were quickly given their jobs back. The only problem was that, since they’d been locked out of their email addresses, contacting them regarding this reinstatement proved to be a problem.

Doug Wilson is a state worker who was suspended by DOGE as a first step towards the likely elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB), which was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. He warned during a recent demonstration in front of the Washington D.C. headquarters of Space X, one of Musk’s companies, that for the last three weeks “nobody has been doing” the job for which he had been hired: “Monitoring abuses committed by banks and other financial institutions,” in order to prevent another economic crash from taking place.

In some areas, like that of humanitarian aid, the damage is already done. As part of one of DOGE’s first actions, the 2,200 employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) were ordered to stop what they were doing and cancel all programs, a move of incalculable global impact that affects both vital programs in conflict areas and the financing of subsidy-dependent Latin America media. All agents working in the field were also ordered to return home immediately.

Among other the consequences of this move, some 400 workers at the Bureau for Global Health who were not on staff wound up in the street, with no right to severance. One of them, María A. Carrasco, says in a telephone interview that when it came to USAID — an agency that Musk has called “a ball of worms” full of “radical liberals” — “there was no waste,” lamenting that the current administration is making decisions that are “serious, without consulting experts.” As an example, she mentions the $10 million cut from a voluntary circumcision program in Mozambique, one of the initiatives that DOGE cited as proof of alleged corruption in the use of “U.S. taxpayer money.” “What they don’t say, because they don’t know or because they don’t want to know, is that science has demonstrated since the beginning of the 2000s that circumcision reduces the risk of [female-to-male] HIV transmission by 60%,” Carrasco says.

As does a newly created website of somewhat sinister design, the DOGE account on X, the social network owned by Musk, offers context-free examples to demonstrate the advances it’s made in its mission to cut spending by a powerful network of independent federal entities, many of which were created during Roosevelt’s New Deal. It commonly refers to them as the “alphabet soup agencies” due to their hodgepodge of acronyms. In a joint interview with Trump on Fox News, Musk — who enjoys unprecedented access to confidential information from the government with which his private companies do lucrative business — warned on Tuesday that, “if the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people and preventing the president from implementing what the people want,” then the United States is “a bureaucracy and not a democracy.”

In another joint appearance at the Oval Office made the week before, Musk warned that there could be “errors” during this cost-cutting process, as demonstrated when a reporter asked about an alleged $100 million item approved during Joe Biden’s administration that Trump’s team marked for elimination, saying it was for buying “condoms for Gaza.” The Tesla owner acknowledged this had been incorrect, although Trump repeated the anecdote on several occasions.

In addition to the mistakes and lies (like the one about retirement benefits being paid out to millions of dead people) that are rife in DOGE statements, there are the agency’s exaggerations. Musk and his people say they’ve saved the federal government $65 billion by cutting staff and canceling contracts, but a review carried out by various U.S. publications found the figure was based on incorrect assumptions and obsolete and erroneous data. One of the most embarrassing examples was the cancellation of a contract worth, according to DOGE, $8 billion — its actual value was $8 million.

Despite these gaffes, Musk still has his fans (in the United States and abroad) among people who are suspicious of those in public office by default. In the world of MAGA, the entrepreneur is idolized. He received a rock star’s reception when he took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where Argentinian President Javier Milei presented him with a chainsaw (“the chainsaw of bureaucracy”), shortly before the nationalist-populist ideologue Steve Bannon delivered what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Attendees of the Trumpist convention spoke of Musk being an “extremely intelligent” guy who is sacrificing himself for his country instead of living the cushy life of the world’s richest man. In his speech, the billionaire said his goal is “to get good things done, but also have a good time doing it.” Inequality expert Chuck Collins, an outspoken voice against the South Africa-born tycoon, compares this particular iteration of Musk’s shock doctrine to the magnate’s strategy upon purchasing Twitter in 2022, when Musk fired 75% of the workforce as “an act of purification.”

For the moment, doubts as to whether these Silicon Valley-type experiments are useful when it comes to running the United States appear to be taking their toll on Trump’s popularity. He achieved an unequivocal victory at the ballot box after a campaign he spent promising to take on an “out-of-control” federal government, and began his second administration breaking his own record with an approval rating of just over 50%. But one month later, according to an Ipsos poll, that number has fallen to 45%. That poll also asked its respondents about Musk. Only 34% were satisfied with the role he is playing in the administration, the same percentage that fears he is cutting essential government programs.

Musk has replaced Trump as the preferred target of criticism by a largely absent Democratic Party still crushed by November’s defeat, as well as that of civil rights organizations, which have organized dozens of protests around the country. The largest took place on Presidents’ Day, in front of the U.S. Capitol, calling to “stop the coup” led by a person for whom no one voted, as well as Trump’s monarchical inclinations, demanding Congress do something to stop the takeover.

DOGE, a “useful experiment”

Holman Jenkins, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, writes that the “hysteria” being displayed by “reactionary media” is proof that what Musk is doing is “a useful experiment.” Another columnist for the conservative paper, William McGurn, celebrates the attack on federal agencies that were, he says, created to undermine presidential power. Underlying McGurn’s argument is a shadowy legal concept, the “unitary executive theory,” born in the Reagan era and now being resurrected, that proposes a broad reading of presidential powers.

Trump has signed an executive order that places independent agencies under the supervision of the White House. Publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic warned of a budding “constitutional crisis” that endangers the separation of powers and foreshadows the prospect of the president failing to abide by judicial decisions in the dozens of lawsuits that have been filed throughout the country to halt his agenda.

“We will be at least as persistent as they are. As civil servants, it is our nature to be resilient,” says Alissa Tafti, local president of the American Federation of Government Employees. Hers is the largest union of public employees in the country, and it appears as a plaintiff in several of the suits that have been filed against DOGE actions, including its dismissal of all employees on probationary status and efforts to reinstate Schedule F, which removes job protections for civil servants. The result of this hyperactive resistance in the courts has been an avalanche of hard-to-follow cases and legal decisions that often contradict each other. One day, public employees are celebrating the courts’ ban on Musk from accessing Treasury Department files. The next, a Washington judge is refusing to prevent DOGE from utilizing data from all federal agencies in its purge.

Former CDC worker Waye has written to two law firms, asking to join any class action suits that may arise. She doesn’t have much hope of getting her job back, but says she’s got nothing to lose by trying. The public health worker is clinging to one of the two grounds available to her for appeal (the other, based on “marital status,” doesn’t seem applicable to the situation). “They say you can appeal if you were fired for political reasons. It seems obvious to me that there is a political motive behind this plan. Trump campaigned at the expense of civil servants.”

Waye has already started looking for a new job, but her search won’t be easy: the Washington area is full of highly qualified, newly unemployed candidates. “Also, I have to adapt my experience in government to the private sector,” she says, “and I’m afraid that corporate America speaks a very different language.”

It seems that the same can be said for the country of which her president dreams. Trump made that clear when he once again expressed his praise (in capital letters) for Musk’s “GREAT JOB” in a post on his Truth Social network, in which the president said he’d like the tycoon to be “MORE AGGRESSIVE.” It’s the only way, concluded the Republican, that America will be — you probably know how this sentence ends — “GREAT AGAIN.”

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