DOGE Ended on July 4, but the Workers Whose Lives Musk Upended Are Still Reeling – Mother Jones

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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.)

The survey of fired federal workers "came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was."

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.

I, too, left a job at the NIH last year—voluntarily, having seen the writing on the wall. My old workmates and I keep in touch via a group Signal chat, which, in addition to hand-drawn protest signs and pictures of pets, has been populated with tips for job seekers, mutual aid info, and countless employment postings.

Lucy, whom I hadn’t met prior to reporting this story, figured she wasn’t an outlier in terms of her difficulties finding suitable work. As the anniversary of the so-called Valentine’s Day Massacre approached, the members of one of her Signal chats began talking about designing a survey to assess how ejected workers were really faring.

Among the laid-off workers were plenty of people skilled in collecting and analyzing data—including Lucy, an epidemiologist, who raised her hand to help. “It came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was,” she says.

“I’ve done a lot of different analysis projects, worked with a lot of data. I’ve never done something that was personal like this,” says Christa Reynolds, another fired NIH employee who helped crunch the numbers. “In one way, it was validating. In another way, it just was terrible.”

The data they collected—300 responses across 14 federal agencies and nearly every state—suggested that the fired workers had not, by and large, settled into high-paying private sector jobs. Many struggled to find work, with about 40 percent searching for at least six months. A year after Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut them loose, almost 17 percent remained unemployed.

“Probationary sounds like they’re just out of college," said a former IRS chief, but "a lot" of the fired workers had "very sophisticated backgrounds."

And not for lack of trying. Brier Ryver, who also helped design the survey, said they applied to at least 110 jobs after getting fired as a park ranger for a federal wildlife refuge in Florida. Wildlife conservation “is an extremely competitive field,” Ryver told me. Most of their applications were for local government positions, in dozens of states.

“Every single county government and every single state government and every single university has a different website to apply through, so I had to create accounts for every single one,” Ryver says. “I’d stay up till 3 a.m. applying and overthinking and making my materials look as good as I can.”

Seasonal work was a nonstarter—at first. “I need benefits in some way, shape, or form,” Ryver explains. But as rejections piled up, their expectations grew more flexible: “I’m going to take little money over no money.”

In the survey, more than two-thirds of the workers who had found jobs reported taking a pay cut. One interpretation might be that federal salaries were “bloated,” as House Republicans misleadingly put it in a 2024 proposal to slash benefits for civil servants. But a fairer interpretation is that they took what they could get in...