Some of the federal employees who were fired in recent days were just shy of completing their probationary periods and securing more job protections.
WTOP heard from several former federal employees as the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, continues to reshape the federal workforce.
‘I am not going to go quietly’: Woman loses HHS position
Rachel, who only wanted to use her first name, has had a long career as a healthcare IT professional.
She transitioned into the federal government less than a year ago to work for the Department of Health and Human Services supporting Medicare and Medicaid services.
Rachel got a notice Sunday morning that she was being placed on administrative leave with full termination in a month.
She would have reached her first anniversary on the job on March 24, completing her probationary period.
“My husband is 100% disabled, an Army combat veteran,” she told WTOP. “I have two special needs children. I am the predominate breadwinner.”
“One of the things that the RIF (Reduction in Force) letter that I received via email states for instance is performance,” she said.
“It’s boilerplate. Everybody that I know received the same notice with the exact same language.”
Rachel said she has had positive employment reviews in her time at HHS. Poor performance is cited as the reason for dismissal for most, if not all, of the recent firings.
Rachel believes that is because DOGE wants to have a reason other than simply being a probationary employee as the reason for the firing.
“They’re hoping most people will go quietly,” she said. “I am not young in my career. I am an experienced professional. And so I am not going to go quietly.”
Disabled Army veteran says losing job was ‘almost a sense of betrayal’
Jason King, a disabled Army veteran, was terminated just before the end of his probationary period at the Federal Aviation Administration. King served as a data analyst and assisted the director of safety for the agency.
He received an email that said he was being let go for performance reasons.
“It was a total shock, a total surprise. Almost a sense of betrayal,” he told WTOP.
King said he thought his job was safe because of his military service and background as well as the importance his position played in public safety.
“Being a disabled veteran, I also thought I’d be exempt from those types of actions,” he said.
He said he wants the public to know about the dangers of terminating federal employees — particularly those who work in public safety.
“The recent plane crash in D.C. reflects upon the dangers of a weakened safety infrastructure,” he said.
“Every lost position translates to a weaker FAA. And every budget-driven decision that compromises safety is a decision that puts another life at risk.”
He spoke directly to DOGE administrators to reconsider these firings, especially for those whose positions influence public safety.
Impacts throughout the federal workforce
Two women, who spoke to WTOP on condition of anonymity for fear of being retaliated against, spoke about their situations.
One, a soon-to-be ex-employee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said she was notified Friday that she was being placed on administrative leave for 30 days — and then terminated.
“I think there’s a lot of fear,” she said. “Clearly, I’m terrified to do this interview, but I think it’s important to be heard.”
She had been a probationary employee at HHS since September.
“A lot of us had somewhat prepared for this, given what has been in the news that this was coming,” she said. “It’s just the emotional roller coaster that led up to the actual notification.”
She said the whole purge does not seem to have a method or reason. She also thinks it is illegal.
Another woman, who said she had gotten an offer to be a deputy director of cybersecurity at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said her job was eliminated after even agreeing to a start date: Feb. 10.
The job was posted last March. She expressed interest in it and began a series of interviews and background checks that took months to complete.
Ultimately, she was offered the job last year. But then didn’t hear anything else from the agency.
“So I wrote to them, and I said, ‘Hey, what’s happening? I haven’t heard anything,’” she said. “That’s when HR wrote back and said, ‘Sorry, the position is on hold.’”
Ultimately, the position was eliminated.
Good news for her, however. She was able to return to her former contracting firm, but only after resigning and moving from California to take the government job.
NAACP lists companies that dump DEI in its tactical spending guide for Black Americans
The NAACP wants Black Americans to steer their buying power toward companies that haven’t pulled back from diversity, equity, and inclusion programs under conservative pressure, and the nation’s oldest civil rights organization is listing which brands have stood by — or reversed — past commitments to DEI.
The NAACP says the spending guide it published Saturday is needed because DEI initiatives promote the social and economic advancement of Black Americans, who are projected to consume nearly $2 trillion in goods and services in nominal dollars by 2030, according to the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility.
“Diversity is better for the bottom line,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in an exclusive announcement to The Associated Press. “In a global economy, those who reject the multicultural nature of consumerism and business will be left in the past they are living in.”
Keisha Bross, an economic strategist at the NAACP, says they are not calling for a “boycott” of companies but instead encourage consumers to “buy in” on companies that back their values. People of all backgrounds are encouraged to use the Black Consumer Advisory.
The NAACP is speaking with executives at companies named in the advisory for reversing their DEI policies — including Lowe’s, Walmart, Amazon, Meta, McDonald’s, and Tractor Supply — and will update its guidance as companies roll back or reaffirm commitments to DEI.
The advisory praises Costco for standing by previous commitments, as well as Apple, Ben & Jerry’s, Delta Airlines, e.l.f. Cosmetics and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
The effort comes as corporations, governments, and other major institutions face pressure to roll back DEI policies amid a backlash from the Trump administration and Republican-led state governments.
Soon after taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to end “illegal preferences and discrimination” in government and instructed federal agencies to find ways alongside the Justice Department to “encourage the private sector to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI.”
DEI policies are a catchall term for programs meant to promote fair treatment, impartial hiring, and cooperation between people from different backgrounds. Such policies vary wildly but often include anti-discrimination mandates and training meant to inform people about how to promote inclusive values. Some institutions hire staff who focus on implementing DEI policies.
The advisory looks at which companies are backtracking on prior commitments, including by eliminating diversity officer positions, ending hiring practices meant to boost staff diversity or supplier diversity standards, or reducing investments in Black communities such as support for historically Black colleges and universities.
The study by McKinsey also found that Black Americans are more likely to live in communities that lack access to the goods and services of major companies.
Johnson, the NAACP president, said he wants to provide a framework for Black communities “as we make difficult decisions on where to spend our hard-earned money.”
“If corporations want our dollars, they better be ready to do the right thing,” he said.
Trump’s orders also face legal pushback. In February, a group that included the mayor of Baltimore and an association representing university professors sued the Trump administration over the orders, claiming that the directives violated civil rights law.
“In his crusade to erase diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility from our country, President Trump cannot usurp Congress’s exclusive power of the purse, nor can he silence those who disagree with him by threatening them with the loss of federal funds and other enforcement actions,” the plaintiffs in the lawsuit wrote.
More litigation surrounding DEI in the private sector is pending. The Federal Communications Commission recently sued Comcast over its DEI policies. And the state of Missouri in February filed a lawsuit against Starbucks over its DEI policies. Companies including Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Coca-Cola, IBM, Mastercard and Pepsico face shareholder resolutions challenging their DEI practices.
Even as he’s vowed to push the United States ahead in artificial intelligence research, President Donald Trump’s threats to alter federal government contracts with chipmakers and slap new tariffs on the semiconductor industry may put new speed bumps in front of the tech industry.
Since taking office, Trump has said he would place tariffs on foreign production of computer chips and semiconductors to return chip manufacturing to the U.S. The president and Republican lawmakers have also threatened to end the CHIPS and Science Act, a sweeping Biden administration-era law that also sought to boost domestic production.
But economic experts have warned that Trump’s dual-pronged approach could slow, or potentially harm, the administration’s goal of ensuring that the U.S. maintains a competitive edge in artificial intelligence research.
Saikat Chaudhuri, an expert on corporate growth and innovation at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, called Trump’s derision of the CHIPS Act surprising because one of the biggest bottlenecks for the advancement of AI has been chip production. Most countries, Chaudhuri said, are trying to encourage chip production and the import of chips at favorable rates.
“We have seen what the shortage has done in everything from AI to even cars,” he said. “In the pandemic, cars had to do with fewer or less powerful chips to just deal with the supply constraints.”
The Biden administration helped shepherd the law following supply disruptions that occurred after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — when a shortage of chips stalled factory assembly lines and fueled inflation — threatened to plunge the U.S. economy into recession. When pushing for the investment, lawmakers also said they were concerned about efforts by China to control Taiwan, which accounts for more than 90% of advanced computer chip production.
As of August 2024, the CHIPS and Science Act had provided $30 billion in support for 23 projects in 15 states that would add 115,000 manufacturing and construction jobs, according to the Commerce Department. That funding helped to draw in private capital and would enable the U.S. to produce 30% of the world’s most advanced computer chips, up from 0% when the Biden-Harris administration succeeded Trump’s first term.
The administration promised tens of billions of dollars to support the construction of U.S. chip foundries and reduce reliance on Asian suppliers, which Washington sees as a security weakness. In August, the Commerce Department pledged to provide up to $6.6 billion so that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. could expand the facilities it is already building in Arizona and better ensure that the most advanced microchips are produced domestically for the first time.
But Trump has said he believes that companies entering into those contracts with the federal government, such as TSMC, “didn’t need money” in order to prioritize chipmaking in the U.S.
“They needed an incentive. And the incentive is going to be they’re not going to want to pay at 25, 50 or even 100% tax,” Trump said.
TSMC held board meetings for the first time in the U.S. last week. Trump has signaled that if companies want to avoid tariffs they have to build their plants in the U.S. — without help from the government. Taiwan also dispatched two senior economic affairs officials to Washington to meet with the Trump administration in a bid to potentially fend off a 100% tariff Trump has threatened to impose on chips.
If the Trump administration does levy tariffs, Chaudhuri said, one immediate concern is that prices of goods that use semiconductors and chips will rise because the higher costs associated with tariffs are typically passed to consumers.
“Whether it’s your smartphone, whether it’s your gaming device, whether it’s your smart fridge — probably also the smart features of your car — anything and everything we use nowadays has a chip in it,” he said. “For consumers, it’s going to be rather painful. Manufacturers are not going to be able to absorb that.”
Even tech giants such as Nvidia will eventually feel the pain of tariffs, he said, despite their margins being high enough to absorb costs at the moment.
“They’re all going to be affected by this negatively,” he said. “I can’t see anybody benefiting from this except for those countries who jump on the bandwagon competitively and say, ‘You know what, we’re going to introduce something like the CHIPS Act.’”
Broadly based tariffs would be a shot in the foot of the U.S. economy, said Brett House, a professor of professional practice at Columbia Business School. Tariffs would not only raise the costs for businesses and households across the board, he said — for the U.S. AI sector, they would massively increase the costs of one of their most important inputs: high-powered chips from abroad.
“If you cut off, repeal or threaten the CHIPS Act at the same time as you’re putting in broadly based tariffs on imports of AI and other computer technology, you would be hamstringing the industry acutely,” House said.
Such tariffs would reduce the capacity to create a domestic chip-building sector, sending a signal for future investments that the policy outlook is uncertain, he said. That would in turn put a chilling effect on new allocations of capital to the industry in the U.S. while making more expensive the existing flow of imported chips.
“American technological industrial leadership has always been supported by maintaining openness to global markets and to immigration and labor flows,” he said. “And shutting that openness down has never been a recipe for American success.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Congress established to monitor credit card companies, mortgage providers, debt collectors, and other segments of the consumer finance industry, is the latest U.S. government agency to have its work halted by the Trump administration.
Conservatives have long targeted the work of the CFPB. Critics complain the independent agency, funded by the Federal Reserve System, lacks sufficient supervision and regularly exceeds its regulatory authority. Defenders argue the bureau’s watchdog mission has strong bipartisan support.
Here’s some background on the scope of the CFPB’s activities and how the agency’s tenuous status might affect consumers:
What does the CFPB regulate?
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is charged with creating rules and taking enforcement actions to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices by a wide range of financial institutions and businesses. Its actions involve banks, mortgage servicers, credit card companies, student loan processors, payday lenders, money transfer providers, credit reporting agencies, and debt collectors.
During the Biden administration, the CFPB passed rules capping bank overdraft fees and removing medical debt from credit reports. The bureau sued financial services companies for misleading consumers and employers for misleading workers. It also focused on curbing junk fees and predatory lending practices.
How long has the CFPB been around?
Congress established the agency as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. The legislation was intended to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage lending scandal. The CFPB says it has obtained nearly $20 billion for consumers since then in the form of monetary compensation, canceled debts, reduced loans and other financial relief.
What has the Trump administration done to the CFPB?
Russell Vought, the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget, told the CFPB last weekend to stop its investigations and work on proposed rules. He instructed the agency to suspend the enforcement dates of any rules that had been finalized but not yet put into effect and closed the CFPB’s offices for a week.
Vought sent an email to employees on Monday morning saying they should “not perform any work tasks.” They were directed to contact the top lawyer for the Office of Management and Budget “to get approval in writing” before doing anything.
Vought also said in a social media post that the agency would not withdraw its next round of funding from the Federal Reserve, which Congress assigned as the CFPB’s funding source to avoid the political wrangling of the congressional appropriations process.
Two top officials resigned Tuesday in protest. Also Tuesday, Trump named Jonathan McKernan, a former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation board member, as the agency’s new director.
What put the agency in the crosshairs?
Before Trump took office, banks and industry groups sometimes sued to block some of the agency’s rules.
For example, when the CFPB issued a rule in 2017 to limit the number of payments the providers of payday loans, vehicle title loans, and high-cost installment loans could take from customer bank accounts, trade associations for payday lenders challenged the bureau’s Federal Reserve funding as unconstitutional. In May 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected their argument and upheld the CFPB’s funding and oversight model.
Trump on Monday defended his administration’s efforts to reform the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, saying the agency was “set up to destroy people.”
What Biden-era rules and regulations are on hold?
The overdraft fee rule was finalized and set to take effect in October, but Vought’s directive puts it on hold. Banks had previously sued to get the rule thrown out.
The rule would require the largest banks to pick one of three options: to reduce overdraft fees to $5, to reduce them to a rate that reflects how much an overdraft costs them, or to disclose, along with the fee, the fees Annual Percent Rate (APR) as they do with other short-term loans. Overdraft fees currently run about $35 on average.
The CFPB finalized a rule in January that would remove medical debt from credit reports. The agency had said the change could potentially improve the credit scores of millions of people and make it easier for them to get mortgages and other loans. The rule was set to take effect 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register but is now suspended. It also was the subject of a legal challenge.
“President Trump campaigned on lowering prices, and a lot of people voted for him because of high prices. and yet we’re seeing Republicans move to make them pay high overdraft fees and pay more for loans on their credit,” said Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center. “The public broadly thinks that overdraft fees are unfair and medical debt shouldn’t be on credit reports. If you ask ordinary people, these are not partisan issues.”
How is the industry responding?
Lindsey Johnson, president and CEO of the Consumer Bankers Association, characterized the CFPB’s work under Biden as “aggressive.” She said the agency took action in recent years without going through the appropriate procedures.
“We don’t believe they had the proper oversight,” she said.
Miranda Margowsky, a spokesperson for the Financial Technology Association, an industry group that counts many financial technology companies as members, said her organization anticipates and hopes several CFPB rules, including those governing “buy now, pay later” plans and other fintech products, will be reversed “with the stroke of a pen.”
She characterized the rules as “overly broad, overreaching, and harmful.”
How are consumer advocates responding?
Supporters of the CFPB protested outside the bureau’s shuttered Washington headquarters this week. NAACP President Derrick Johnson and others have demanded the office’s reopening.
“The CFPB has provided crucial protections against big banks and lenders,” Johnson said in a statement. “Without this critical oversight, consumers — especially Black and Brown communities — will be vulnerable to fraud, predatory lending, and discriminatory financial practices.”
Kitty Richards, senior strategic advisor at the advocacy group Groundwork Collaborative, said consumers today are more vulnerable to data privacy violations, junk fees, and financial scams. Without the CFPB, corporations are “freer to prey on the American people without fearing they might have to give back the money,” she said.
The Trump administration’s effort to slash the size of the federal workforce reached the Food and Drug Administration this weekend, as recently hired employees who review the safety of food ingredients, medical devices and other products were fired.
Probationary employees across the FDA received notices Saturday evening that their jobs were being eliminated, according to three FDA staffers who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The total number of positions eliminated was not clear Sunday, but the firings appeared to focus on employees in the agency’s centers for food, medical devices, and tobacco products — which includes oversight of electronic cigarettes. It was not clear whether FDA employees who review drugs were exempted.
On Friday, some officials expected the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to fire 5,200 probationary employees across its agencies, according to an audio recording of a National Institutes of Health department meeting. HHS oversees NIH, FD,A and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other things.
People who spoke with the AP on condition of anonymity on Friday said the number of probationary employees to be laid off at the CDC would total nearly 1,300. But as of early Sunday afternoon, about 700 people had received notices, according to three people who spoke on condition on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. They said none of the CDC layoffs affected the young doctors and researchers who track diseases in what’s known as the Epidemic Intelligence Service.
The FDA is headquartered in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington and employs nearly 20,000 people. It’s long been a target of newly sworn-in health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., who last year accused the agency of waging a “war on public health” for not approving unproven treatments such as psychedelics, stem cells, and chelation therapy.
Kennedy also has called for eliminating thousands of chemicals and colorings from U.S. foods. But the cuts atthe FDA include staffers responsible for reviewing the safety of new food additives and ingredients, according to an FDA staffer familiar with the firings.
An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday afternoon.
Nearly half of the FDA’s $6.9 billion budget comes from fees paid by companies the agency regulates, including drug and medical device makers, which allows the agency to hire extra scientists to swiftly review products. Eliminating those positions will not reduce government spending.
A former FDA official said cutting recent hires could backfire, eliminating staffers who tend to be younger and have more up-to-date technical skills. The FDA’s workforce skews toward older workers who have spent one or two decades at the agency, and the Government Accountability Office noted in 2022 that the FDA “has historically faced challenges in recruiting and retaining” staff due to better money in the private sector.
“You want to bring in new blood,” said Peter Pitts, a former FDA associate commissioner under President George W. Bush. “You want people with new ideas, greater enthusiasm, and the latest thinking in terms of technology.”
Mitch Zeller, former FDA director for tobacco, said the firings are a way to “demoralize and undermine the spirit of the federal workforce.”
“The combined effect of what they’re trying to do is going to destroy the ability to recruit and retain talent,” Zeller said.
The FDA’s inspection force has been particularly strained in recent years after a wave of departures during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of the agency’s current inspectors are recent hires. It was not immediately clear whether those employees were exempted.
FDA inspectors are responsible for overseeing thousands of food, drug, tobacco, and medical device facilities worldwide, though the AP reported last year that the agency faced a backlog of roughly 2,000 uninspected drug facilities that hadn’t been visited since before the pandemic.
The agency’s inspection force has also been criticized for not moving faster to catch recent problems involving infant formula, baby food ,and eyedrops.
A now-deleted Substack post by Gavin Kliger, an engineer working for Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has drawn attention due to its acknowledgment of Ron Unz's influence on his political radicalization. Unz is a controversial figure who has written extensively on race science, donated to the white nationalist site VDare—classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—and been accused by the Anti-Defamation League of "hardcore antisemitism," including Holocaust denial.
Kliger’s post, titled “Why I Joined DOGE,” was published on Friday and remained online until Sunday morning before being removed. In it, he credits Unz's 2013 essay "Our American Pravda," published in *The American Conservative*, as pivotal in sparking his "political awakening." This essay criticized systemic media failures, but Unz later expanded this critique into a series called "American Pravda," which included claims denying the Holocaust, questioning the events of 9/11, and promoting anti-Black racism.
Kliger described reading Unz's work as transformative, comparing it to "putting on glasses for the first time." He claimed that the realization wasn't merely about bias but rather that widely accepted narratives were "carefully curated illusions." Kliger currently holds a position as a senior advisor to the Director for Technology and Delivery at the Office of Personnel Management, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Unz himself has a contentious history, having run unsuccessfully for governor and Senate seats in California. His campaigns often focused on issues such as opposing bilingual education ("Keep English. Vote Ron Unz!") and criticizing media coverage of movements like Black Lives Matter. The 2013 essay cited by Kliger gained traction on the right but formed part of a larger body of work by Unz that includes deeply troubling views. For instance, in a lengthy 2018 blog post, Unz wrote:
"Anyone who reads serious history books knows that Jews have generally enjoyed a reputation for producing many of the world's greatest swindlers and frauds, hardly surprising given their notorious tendency to lie and dissemble."
Additionally, Unz has questioned the authenticity of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting Israeli Mossad agents might have been involved. These conspiracy theories are characteristic of his broader output, which frequently engages in antisemitic rhetoric and pseudoscientific arguments about race.
When contacted by *Mother Jones*, Kliger defended his reference to Unz's 2013 piece, stating he had not read subsequent installments in the "American Pravda" series. He emphasized that his recommendation pertained solely to the original article from *The American Conservative*, noting that even Conor Friedersdorf of *The Atlantic* had highlighted its value. However, Kliger did not address whether associating with Unz's ideas troubled him, given the writer's subsequent embrace of Holocaust denial and other extreme positions.
Prior to joining DOGE, Kliger faced criticism for sharing content linked to white nationalism. According to reports, he reposted material from Nick Fuentes—a prominent far-right figure known for disparaging minorities—and used derogatory language towards Hillary Clinton and undocumented immigrants on his now-private X account, as documented by *Rolling Stone*.
In his Substack post, Kliger recounted a series of grievances contributing to his disillusionment with traditional institutions: flawed polling during the 2016 election, violent protests associated with antifa at UC Berkeley (where Kliger studied), gun control measures, and pandemic-related restrictions such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He framed DOGE as offering solutions to these perceived failures, describing it as a "genuine attempt to reform the federal government from within."
Kliger concluded his post with a call to action, urging readers with technical skills and a willingness to challenge bureaucracy to join DOGE. Despite the deletion of the post, its contents raise questions about the ideological influences shaping individuals within Musk's organization and the potential implications for its mission. As of publication, neither Kliger nor White House representatives had responded further to inquiries regarding these matters.