They used to work in now-shuttered regional social security offices, or protecting our National Parks or nuclear security. Then President Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE terminated their positions — and thousands more.
Guests
Emily Spilker, former facilities engineer, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Laura Goulding, deputy director at the Office of Communications at the Office of Personnel Management. They have been on administrative leave since February 15.
Arielle Kane, former health policy analyst at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Also Featured
Mahri Stainnak, former director of the Talent and Innovation Group at the Office of Personnel Management.
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: President Donald Trump’s administration and billionaire Elon Musk have worked steadily for weeks to drastically reduce the size and scope of the United States Federal government. Federal workers have been fired, placed on leave, or left their jobs by the tens of thousands.
This includes the employees charged with issuing Medicare payments, protecting national parks, protecting nuclear security, and providing relief following floods, hurricanes, or wildfires. And soon the numbers will likely include employees of the Department of Labor and federal workers responsible for doing things like ensuring food safety across the country.
As the New York Times reported last week, the workforce cuts could affect at least 12% of the nation’s 2.4 million civilian federal workers. And that number could grow in coming weeks.
So today we are joined by three federal employees who lost their jobs, were forced out or placed on administrative leave by the current administration, and we want to get their view on the impacts the cuts have had, of course, on their own lives and the impact they could have on the nation at large. And I’m joined today by Emily Spilker, a former facilities engineer with the Department of Defense. Emily, welcome to On Point.
EMILY SPILKER: Hi, Meghna. It’s great to be with you today.
CHAKRABARTI: Also with us is Arielle Kane, a former health policy analyst at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Arielle, welcome to you.
ARIELLE KANE: Thank you so much for having me.
CHAKRABARTI: Laura Goulding is with us as well. Deputy Director at the Office of Communications for the Office of Personnel Management. LG, welcome to On Point.
LAURA GOULDING: Thank you for having me.
CHAKRABARTI: So I’d like to just hear briefly from all three of you, what your experience was that brought you to your current state of employment, whatever that might be.
Emily, let me start with you. Did you have any sort of upheavals in the last two months in your job life?
SPILKER: Yeah, that’d be an understatement, I would say. Yeah. So I moved from Dayton, Ohio. I worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base during COVID, when my husband started a PhD candidacy program at Purdue University.
And I as well started a master’s program there, funded by the DOD. So I had been working remotely since COVID era for the last five years, and when Trump signed the return to office executive order. Although I am working remotely, I’m not an official remote employee, so I was not sure how I would be affected.
And what I did not expect was an email, a Monday morning, just a few weeks later, saying that I was expected to show up in the office that Thursday, three days later, with no exception. So I had about three days to uproot my life, move back to Dayton and work in an office I had never worked for.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay.
So help us explain the geography for a second.
SPILKER: Sure.
CHAKRABARTI: Because I’m not sure I caught that you were be, because you were allowed to work remotely as a federal employee because of COVID. Where were you physically?
SPILKER: I was in Lafayette, Indiana, which is about 200 miles from Wright-Patterson. Oh, it’s about a three- or four-hour drive.
CHAKRABARTI: Yes. Okay. Okay. Because your husband was at Purdue, you said.
SPILKER: Yes. And then I did a master’s degree funded by the DOD, so I was technically you’d say a special project remote employee for the government.
CHAKRABARTI: Got it. Okay. And you were doing work for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base?
SPILKER: Yes.
Since that time? Yes.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So then what happened?
SPILKER: Yeah, like I said, Monday morning, yeah. I get an email that says be here on Thursday, like the rest of every other employee. Although everyone else in my office, it’s just a mere drive to work. For me, it’s a trek.
CHAKRABARTI: Are you still doing that?
SPILKER: I am no longer doing that.
No, I did that for about two months before taking the federal buyout. I just decided, this is just not practical for my life.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. You took the buyout, understood. That’s right. And then when you said you’re employed, you have a new job now.
SPILKER: I’m actually in the middle of an interview today, so –
CHAKRABARTI: not for the federal government, I presume.
SPILKER: Not for the federal government. No.
CHAKRABARTI: Arielle, let me turn to you. I understand that what I should be saying is that you are a former health policy analyst for CMS. Is that right?
KANE: Yeah, I’m in a bit of a gray zone in that I was terminated. I was a part of the waves of probationary employees getting laid off because we have fewer protections.
And I had served in the federal government for less than a year. However, there are some legal challenges to those firings, because they were done illegally and currently, I have been allegedly reinstated, but I’m sitting at home talking to you. I have nothing in writing that says I’m reinstated.
I did receive a paycheck last week, so again, I’m in the grayest of gray zones, and the judge that is ruling on this issue is actually making a decision, I believe today, the same day that thousands of HHS employees are being laid off as a result of the reduction in force. So I truly have no idea what my employment status will be after today.
CHAKRABARTI: Oh, wow. Now, how did you find out about again, I’m glad you mentioned your provisional status, right? Because you had been an employee for what, less, less than a year. And DOGE and the Trump administration had particularly targeted provisional employees with the assumption that they hadn’t had enough experience to justify remaining in their jobs.
Although, to be clear, some, many provisional employees were actually people who had been promoted into new positions.
KANE: Yes.
CHAKRABARTI: And may have had a lot of experience, but how did you find out about when, you know, you got cut?
KANE: It was very chaotic. So what happened was that, again, I was watching the news, and I had seen that probationary employees were getting fired across HHS.
I worked at CMS, which is the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid, which is a sub-agency of HHS. And so I’m seeing in the news that CDC probationary workers are being fired and NIH probationary workers are being fired and FDA probationary workers are being fired.
And so I am waiting for news for me. However, I was able to talk to our division leadership. And she assured me that the office I was in was aligned with the mission of DOGE. And that we were not going to be cut, and my job was as safe as she could promise. That was on a Friday afternoon, and then Friday evening rolls around.
I received no news, so I assume I’m safe until Monday, then the next morning I get a panicked text from my boss that says, everything we learned yesterday was a lie. They’re firing people. We have no idea who they’re firing. Please call me when you can. I saw that and I went on a run, and I came back from a run and I had a message from my colleague saying that she had gotten fired.
She was also probationary. And then as I was calling people and reacting to this news. I got an email that said that I too had been fired.
And then as soon as you open the email, you lost access to your computer and your PIV card was canceled, and then you could no longer communicate with anyone.
CHAKRABARTI: I should note that even though you were a probationary employee for the federal government, you had, what, a decade and a half of experience in this field.
KANE: Yeah.
CHAKRABARTI: Beforehand.
KANE: Yes, I am a mid-career professional, and I started working at a CMS last year. I was hired as a part of a new project that launched January 1st.
And we were working to improve maternal health outcomes in Medicaid. So the reason that, again, I was new was because it was a new line of work. It’s not that poor performance or anything puts you in this probationary category. It’s like anytime you take a new role. So for example, one of my colleagues was also fired and he was a nine year, I’m gonna use the word veteran twice, but veteran of the agency.
And then he was also a veteran of the army and an active reservist, and he was fired. I’m very grateful to say that he has been reinstated, but it took a full 30 days, and it was really chaotic on his life.
CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. LG, I really appreciate you patiently listening along, but speaking of veterans, you’re a veteran as well, is that right?
GOULDING: That’s correct. I served in the Navy for a little over five years as a public affairs specialist and a journalist.
CHAKRABARTI: Are you still in your job as deputy director in the communications office at OPM?
GOULDING: Effectively, no. I am on admin leave right now for a couple more weeks, but we found out, I found out that both my entire team and I were all being let go on the same day and we were all put on administrative leave, immediately, a similar experience, we got a notice via email. And very quickly lost access to the network and couldn’t access anything. It was the end of the workday.
And so those folks who were in the office had to pack up their things and get out of there. And there were people who were not in the office that day or were on leave and were not able to get the notification, were not able to get anything out of the office.
So it was a very sudden, I had about an hour heads up, and I was told it was imminent. And then when it seemed apparent that it was not imminent, I just went ahead and told my team, Hey. We’re about to all get RIF, if you need to save phone numbers of your colleagues, make sure that you send that RIF notice to your personal email.
I don’t know how long we’ll have before we’re shut off from the network, so it was a very sudden and jarring experience.
CHAKRABARTI: RIF, is that a government acronym?
GOULDING: (LAUGHS) Yes. RIF stands for reduction in force. So there was nothing from my team. And my team, I had long tenured folks and I had probationary folks, and so for us, it wasn’t anything about poor performance.
It simply said, your position is being abolished. So everyone’s position in the Office of Communications at my agency, our positions were abolished. So everything that you can think of that a communications team would do. That capacity just simply went away on that day.
CHAKRABARTI: Abolished, is that the actual word that was used?
GOULDING: That is correct. And so in the RIF notice you get a lot of information, very technical information, very official speak, but the phrase was that your position is being abolished.
CHAKRABARTI: Is the word abolish a normal phrase that you’d see in our RIF, or was this sort of a new DOGE touch to this?
GOULDING: I will be honest, I have 16 years of both military and civil service and have not gone through a RIF before. But I’ve never seen that word before. I don’t know if it’s the usual word, but it sure feels a little alarming when you see it.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: I just wanna play a little bit for all of you of one of the many things that President Trump has said about the massive reduction in the federal workforce. It’s part of a push, he says, towards improved government efficiency.
DONALD TRUMP: We have to make our government smaller, more efficient, more effective, and a lot less expensive.
CHAKRABARTI: This is the constant line that the president, that Elon Musk, that everyone associated with this really large reduction in force is giving, that the federal government is bloated, the size of the workforce is too large. It can get the same work done faster and more efficiently with fewer people. Emily, do you have a retort to that?
SPILKER: Oh yes. I would say this, all of these ways of attacks of firing civilians and federal employees are not going to make the government cheaper in the long run. I would say.
CHAKRABARTI: Why?
SPILKER: One aspect of the DRP is that position really ceases to exist, but what doesn’t change is the size of our mission and the work that we need to accomplish every day.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if they could possibly need to hire an outside contractor, which would be a lot more expensive than what we could have done as an in-house civilian.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Arielle, same question for you. CMS is huge, right? Aside from the Department of Defense, Health and Human Services is the largest expense, essentially, other than social security, that the federal government has. Arguably there’s room for squeezing some efficiencies out. What do you think?
KANE: Medicare and Medicaid are already very efficient programs. Overhead in the private insurance market is 15% to 20% of administrative costs for running a health care program.
In the public sector it’s around 2%. So you can already see that we are much more efficient than the private sector. There are ways to make things more efficient. But it’s not through blanket, untargeted firings. First of all, I have now been paid for six weeks that I haven’t done any work, because of how they fired me.
So that’s not efficient. Secondly, they didn’t give us time to do any sorts of handoffs. So I was working, and I had no opportunity to pass off the work that I was doing or the emails that were threads that were in my inbox to anyone else, before I lost access to my computer. So that’s not efficient.
When I was working on a program that was intended to improve efficiency in Medicaid and improve outcomes, I know that Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t like to hear this, but to change public policy and to make it work better, takes time and evidence. You don’t want to just do across the board changes that you think might work.
You want to make sure that a policy idea does have the results it’s intended to have. And so that takes time and expertise. And then once you know whether or not it’s effective, you scale it, or you end it, if it’s not effective. And in these large unconsidered cuts, we aren’t doing things in a way to make them more efficient.
Passing legislation to reform the government to maybe get rid of some onerous, outdated reporting requirements or whatever. That takes time. You have to change the law to do that, and they aren’t doing the hard work that requires. So I just don’t think that what they’re doing will make anything work better.
CHAKRABARTI: I want to lean on your experience in the private sector before you came to work for the federal government. Because a lot of people look at what the three of you described about, the sudden notice, the immediately getting cut off from IT systems, et cetera. And they say, I’ve been through that a bunch of times working for corporate America.
That’s just how it works. You get walked into a room, if you’re lucky and someone says, Nope, you are surplus to requirements, now you are being downsized, and they just walk you straight out of the building. So I think folks may come to this conversation with perhaps not that much sympathy on that front, just saying, federal employees have been insulated from the realities of the private sector for a long time.
And, welcome to our world.
KANE: Yeah, I get that maybe that’s the expectation. I do think that I have two responses to that. I was working in public service, and the idea is that you’re not working on behalf of a company’s bottom line, but instead you’re working on behalf of the American people to serve them.
There’s like this social contract that’s in place, is that in exchange for less money and less flexibility, you have stability. People make that trade off every day, because they value serving the American people. But when you erode that contract, or that social understanding that we’ve long had, between the tradeoffs of working for the federal government and the tradeoffs of working in the private sector.
Why would anyone want to go work for the federal government? Because we already know that the opportunities are more lucrative. Yes. Maybe more risky, but more lucrative in the private sector. And I just worry that in the way that they’re handling this, no one in their right mind would go work for the federal government, and that is a loss to the American people, not to me.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Yeah. Point well taken. Because one of the things that has long been thought about is that you want the best people to be able to do the kind of complex enacting, the kind of complex policy that the federal government is charged with doing.
Now, LG, let me just be blunt here. Because again, I’m trying to reflect on what listeners may be thinking. Why would the Office of Personnel and Management even need an office of communications? Like what does that actually have to do with serving the American people?
GOULDING: Yeah, I can understand on one hand where that might be coming from, but the Office of Communications does a lot to make sure that the American people, the press, other agencies, other stakeholders know what our agency is doing.
Our agency dealt with workforce policy for the federal workforce, and that can be hard to understand. OPM is essentially the HR arm of the federal government, so we worked with concepts and products like health care retirement, and anyone who has worked in health care or retirement, or employment and performance management, that can be complex.
So we did a lot of work to translate that really complex policy and those complex actions to people, so they understood what their government was doing for them. In addition, when we would have questions from press, public, anyone who wanted to reach out to our agency to get more information, it was our responsibility to respond or make sure that we were working with the various subject matter experts to get that information and be able to translate that for folks, so they know what’s going on.
In addition, we had folks who worked to make things accessible. So folks with disabilities who may not be able to just listen to a radio show, go online to read the latest memo, or the latest policy. My team worked to make those accessible so that people with disabilities would be able to have the same access to this really incredible and important information.
CHAKRABARTI: Emily, can I just ask you a quick question as well? Because you had mentioned this earlier in the show that did the federal government actually pay for your graduate education? Did I hear that right?
SPILKER: Yes, that’s true. They paid for it in full. And I was also paid full salary on top of that.
So it was really a big investment in me as a future leader for the Air Force.
CHAKRABARTI: And was there an agreement that you would work for the federal government for a certain number of years in return?
SPILKER: There was, and part of the terms of accepting the deferred resignation program was that any monetary or time, service commitment that anyone held was totally waived if they accepted the program.
CHAKRABARTI: So you essentially got student loan forgiveness from the Trump administration.
SPILKER: 100%. Yeah. I wouldn’t call that efficiency.
CHAKRABARTI: The irony of that is quite biting. Can you tell me a little bit about what you did as a facilities engineer for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base?
SPILKER: Yes, our Air Force plants are scattered across the country.
They are each a plane flight away, but we sit at Wright-Patterson and work with our onsite lease contractors. They pay the Air Force lease, and in turn, those funds are turned around to maintain these facilities, since a lot of them are World War II era and they have a lot of aging infrastructure. I was mentoring under a senior engineer within our office who had almost 40 years of experience in a really specialty skillset of engineering in the fire protection industry.
So we did design reviews together and ensured that new systems were installed correctly and maintained up to snuff. And kept the employees as well as the production lines for these really critical defense weapon systems intact and prepared for any emergency.
It was the intent of our office that I would be our senior engineer’s successor, I would take over his position as the authority, having jurisdiction, as the lingo there. Just to say that I would be the lead fire protection engineer over all those sites. And that is obviously no longer the case. And unfortunately, he also took the deferred resignation program as well.
CHAKRABARTI: I was just gonna ask about that. So who is leading fire protection then?
SPILKER: At this moment it’s going to be an all-hands-on-deck effort, I would assume with the folks that are still in the office, everyone is cross-trained to some extent, so other engineers will have some awareness of that, but I think that they’d need to reach back to higher up in the Air Force at this time.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Again, just arguing on behalf of what I think some listeners might be thinking, Emily. I hear you when you say, not just you, but your supervisor who had four decades worth of experience on these highly specialized types of equipment, that were both sent out the door here. But you said that there’s cross specialties, or there’s some knowledge still in the building.
Is that enough? Is it the same level of expertise you think that’s still in the building, so therefore, and forgive me if this sounds just crude, but it’s not a great loss that both you and your supervisor are no longer working there?
SPILKER: It’s going to have to be enough, because they really don’t have any other option.
But no, I would argue it’s absolutely a great loss and it’s not the same. These systems are not going to get the same attention to detail by such an industry expert as they were receiving before.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Let me just ask this question, and I’ll throw it open to any of you. What’s really been interesting to me so far in talking with you, is that even though some of you are not working anymore for the federal government, all of you still talk, you’re using the terms “we” like, “we” do this, “we” do that.
It’s feels like you still have a very strong and active connection to the work you did for the federal government. Does the feeling run that deep?
KANE: I’ll take a stab at that.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, go ahead, Arielle.
KANE: I am someone who doesn’t normally drink the Kool-Aid of where I work.
Like I recognize that I work for an employer, and I am doing policy work on behalf of them, not necessarily on behalf of myself. However, I was really excited about joining the federal government. I come from a family of public servants. My dad was a schoolteacher. My sister actually still works for the federal government.
An uncle of mine also works for the federal government. And I really wanted to work in public service. I moved to D.C. like 12 years ago and I’ve bopped around the private sector, but I felt like I couldn’t leave D.C. without doing public service, like why would you get a master’s in public policy and not work on, in some capacity, on behalf of the American people?
And then when I landed this job, I ended up doing work that was really meaningful to me, which was on maternal health policy. And I also had a good boss and a team that I really got along with. And I was just really happy. And yeah, I’m still like speaking in terms of “we,” because I still believe in the work that’s going.
I also like maybe still am holding out hope. There is a chance that I get news today that I’m reinstated for real. So I guess I’m still speaking in the present tense. But I do believe that there are a lot of people like me who want to work on behalf of the American people, who believe that the way to make the biggest impact is to design policies that work for the most people as possible, and that is very much like wrapped up in my identity. So I am not aware that I’m still using the term we, but it doesn’t surprise me that I am.
CHAKRABARTI: Emily or LG, you want to take a stab at it too?
GOULDING: Yeah, I’d love to add something there.
CHAKRABARTI: Go ahead.
GOULDING: I think when you choose to serve, I think you’re answering a calling and I think anyone who is religious may identify with that.
Folks who have served in the military may identify with that, and I know civil servants identify with that. One thing that people may not know is when you join the military and the civil service, you swear in oath. So you raise your hand, and you swear in oath, promising to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
So when I joined the civil service, the federal employment, it was a perfect fit for me, because I took the oath that first day of work, the same way I did when I enlisted in the Navy. And so when you think about the values, about commitment to the team and the teamwork, integrity, an acute sense of duty and sacrifice to accomplish the mission, I think you will find that in spades in public servants everywhere.
CHAKRABARTI: Emily and Arielle, just a yes or no. Did both of you take that similar oath?
SPILKER: Yes.
KANE: Yes.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: Before I move forward, LG, Emily, and Arielle. I try not to be emotional about the work that I do. Because we try to get our facts right. We do a ton of research. We try to be as prepared as possible for these conversations. But I have to say I was caught off a little off guard because I did not know that, what, America’s 2 million plus federal workers all take this very specific oath of office. I actually just now, during our break, LG, I went to the OPM website, and I pulled it up and here it is.
I’m just about to read the full oath of office. It says, I will support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. That I will take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I’m about to enter. So help me, God.
Now all federal employees take this oath. I did not know that. LG, can you talk a little bit more about what taking that oath implies, regarding the meaning of the work that federal employees undertake?
GOULDING: You reading that oath, you can’t see me, but I have goosebumps, because it hits the same every time. This is a serious job. That phrase to well and faithfully discharge the duties of my office. It doesn’t matter who you are in the federal government, if you are early career talent who’s just starting out in your career, or maybe this is your first job out of college, or if you are a 20-year, long-term veteran of the government.
You walk into that job every day knowing you serve the American people, and you swear an oath to that is your mission. The civil service, we were talking about this a little bit before the break, but it is a mission oriented and mission-based organization. I believe Arielle was saying we’re not intended to work like a corporation.
We’re not here to serve stakeholders, we’re not here for profit margins. We are here to serve a mission for the American people, no matter what the mission of each agency might be. And taking that oath, to me, just really solidifies how important that is.
And that’s where you talk about the dedication and we’re all saying, “we” still. As civil servants, it’s because you swear an oath into a group to take care of your neighbors. And the people down the street who maybe don’t agree with you, but you’re here to make sure that they get their services anyway.
And I think that’s a really important and sacred calling.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And it’s distinctly different from private sector service, right? No one asks you to swear in oath. I can’t speak for all private sector companies, but it’s definitely not common.
GOULDING: I’ve never, just wanna know that any of the private sector companies I worked out, that’s probably a good thing.
But yeah, because the job that we do is difficult. We are often underfunded, we are often understaffed, but everybody still comes in each day just determined to accomplish that mission no matter what. And I think the oath is the basis of that.
CHAKRABARTI: Getting back to some facts and figures here, back in January, we actually did a full hour on the history of the United States Civil Service, and even though 2 million plus federal workers seems like a really big number, I think, Arielle, as you’d mentioned before, it’s basically less than 2% of the entire civilian workforce in this country.
But even more interestingly, we spoke with a professor named Donald Moynihan at the University of Michigan, and he did an analysis where he said that in the United States, A) our federal workforce is in fact of the same, if not smaller, than peer nations. And on top of that, the federal government already privatizes a lot of services, and he did analysis and found out that the U.S. has something like three to four private contractors for every single federal employee that we have.
For Arielle, the work that you were doing, there’s three to four private contractors that are also getting paid for that same work. I wanted to lay that out. And Emily, let me turn to you, because your work was so specialized at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, I guess the Trump administration, Elon Musk, et cetera, would say, if we’re already doing that, why not further contract out the work that you were doing?
And that may be a way to get more efficiencies for the federal government. What do you think?
SPILKER: Oh, I would argue that I wouldn’t say that would be a very cost saving measure. In addition, should we have private companies that are seeking a bottom line, doing such important work for our American people?
I would argue not. And we are talking to a lot of folks today and organizations that I would say should remain public. Yeah, I’ll leave it at that.
CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more though. (LAUGHS)
SPILKER: (LAUGHS) I think we’re all aware of how expensive the Department of Defense is. It’s such a huge chunk of our expenditures, and if we used more contractors, I would not expect that number to go down.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Now, you’ve all been sufficiently warned, when you just stop in the middle of an answer and say, I’ll leave it at that.
I’m gonna pick a little more. But Emily, I’ll let you off the hook here for just a second.
KANE: Thanks.
CHAKRABARTI: Because as you all know, there’s obviously legal action against the reduction in force that’s going on across the federal workforce. And in January, Mahri Stainnak was at home in South Portland, Maine, when they received an unexpected call from a Washington, D.C. number.
MAHRI STAINNAK: It was the Office of Personnel Management HR rep, and they said, I have some bad news. And I started shaking at that point. Because I just had no idea what was coming, and they said effective immediately, you are being placed on administrative leave. While OPM, quote, investigates your diversity, equity, and inclusion work.
CHAKRABARTI: Mahri found this surprising.
STAINNAK: At that point I said, wait a minute. I used to be Deputy Director of the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility, but right now I am the director of the Talent Innovation Group, which is not a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion job. It has no part of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and the HR rep said, It doesn’t matter.
You will be cut out of your work email, and your work computer altogether, effective immediately.
CHAKRABARTI: Mahri broke down in tears.
STAINNAK: My wife is disabled and is not able to work. So I’m the sole breadwinner right now. My wife and my child are both, we’re both on my health insurance. I also happen to be a first time homeowner in the past year.
So how are we gonna pay our mortgage?
CHAKRABARTI: Less than 48 hours later, those fears were realized. Mahri’s employment with the federal government was formally terminated through another phone call. Mahri worked for the federal government for more than 16 years. First at the EPA, doing work with municipal wastewater treatment systems to limit the overflow of millions of gallons of untreated sewage into local waterways.
Then at the Office of Personnel Management, where they most recently worked to improve pay equity, ensure skills-based hiring, and develop best practices in recruiting and retaining top quality talent. Mahri is now the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit filed by the ACLU in Washington, D.C.
And the claim asserts that it is illegal to terminate an individual’s employment, simply because they once worked on a project their employer currently disapproves of. In this case, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work. The suit claims the termination is in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Because the recent cuts in federal workers disproportionately has affected workers of color, women and non-binary employees, and Mahri says their larger concern is for the American public.
STAINNAK: The Trump administration is actually hurting the people who live in this country. Because the services we provide, whether it’s making sure that folks have safe drinking water, or FEMA employees who respond in the wake of natural disasters, to make sure that people have shelter. And the resources they need to rebuild, the people who are being hurt by this are the public, because now these totally dedicated, passionate federal employees are not able to do our jobs.
CHAKRABARTI: Ultimately, Mahri hopes for just one thing.
STAINNAK: I want for all of us to get our jobs back so that we can continue to serve the people who live in this country.
CHAKRABARTI: That’s Mahri Stainnak, former director of the Talent Innovation Group with the Office of Personnel Management, and now lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit, challenging the termination of many federal employees.
LG, can I quickly ask you, what impact has this had on your family more broadly?
GOULDING: It’s tough. I am in a similar situation where I’m the primary benefits holder and breadwinner for my family. And so this throws a lot of things into chaos. There’s a micro, and Mahri addressed this, but there’s a micro to macro element of this that I think about.
Of course, it’s devastating to lose pay and benefits, for us and for our dependents. But then, job loss creates a burden. It creates a burden on the community. It creates a burden when we can’t contribute to our local economies and ecosystems. And so this really ladders up to what this does to our communities, to have Feds who are unemployed, looking for work and also not able to do the work that they were doing for the American people.
So it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty large range. I could say we’ve had some stressful conversations in my house, and also having conversations with friends and family who may not really understand what’s going on.
To the point that you were making earlier, about this happens to people all the time, and it’s the personal devastation, that you lose access to this calling. And this service that you’ve agreed to, and then it’s a devastation, also, when you see what’s happening across the government.
Each person who has been fired or intimidated into resigning early could tell you the impact that their work or their advocacy has had on communities. And the struggles that we are going to face as a country, without certain programs and funding, and that’s demoralizing on that big picture level, as well.
CHAKRABARTI: I think you’re hitting an important point here, and Arielle, I’d love to hear what you have to say about this, because it seems to me that a lot of people have no problem with the reduction in the federal workforce. Because they believe that the work that the three of you are doing, or were doing, for example, had no direct impact on them.
And there seems to be quite a gap in understanding of what a lot of federal workers actually do, or even what a lot of federal programs do. And whether or not they are influential in the lives of individual Americans. Arielle, can you just take a quick second to describe, like, the work you were doing on maternal health policy, like how could you, what would you say to someone who is supportive of these cuts, whether that has had an impact on them?
KINGKANE: Yeah, I hope I can connect a few of the dots here, which is going back to the idea about privatizing some of these services, because it would be more efficient to the federal government. When the federal government does something, it does try to do it in the most efficient way possible. Sometimes to more success than others.
But the private sector would have a profit motive. So when I think about the work that I was doing on maternal health. We have a massive problem in this country with rural hospitals closing and people in rural areas having lackluster access to health care overall. But in particular, maternal health services, because it is typically a net loser for hospitals.
And that means we have huge disparities between urban and rural areas. And again, equity doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with race or ideology, but often, there’s geographic disparities that I have been working on trying to close. And when you privatize services, there’s no reason to go into those areas that are net losers.
And so I would argue that there is a role for the government there to try and solve these problems. Additionally, when we’re telling federal workers who work on clean air and clean water to go into the private sector, there are no private sector counterparts for me. I can go work on behalf of an insurance company and do very similar work to what I was already doing. But of course, I would be doing it to a different end.
I would be serving the shareholders of these large, national insurance companies. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but I’m saying it’s a different mission to serve the bottom line of national insurance company, than it is to serve the American people, and try and solve these problems for the American people.
And that’s what I worry about us losing is that this is the role for the federal government, is to try and solve these complex problems that may hit certain communities harder than others. And there isn’t a role for the private sector, or the private sector won’t solve this on its own. And so that’s what I’ve been thinking about.
link
More Stories
Trump Undoes Decades-Old Guidelines For Locating Federal Offices In Downtowns
White House pitches layoffs, local office closures and program eliminations at USDA
Trump administration rescinds Social Security in-person requirements : NPR