Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 8.4% (202 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0.8% (19 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 6% (145 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 6.3% (153 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 1.4% (33 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 0%
• Framing Effect - 1.5% (36 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 6.2% (150 hits)
• Status Quo Bias - 1.8% (43 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 1.2% (28 hits)
• Optimism Bias - 3.1% (76 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 3.9% (95 hits)

Article text

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

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.

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.

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 a hostile job market—even if overqualified.

“There are a lot of families who are two-fed households, one was probationary and the other was RIFed,” Lucy notes, using the acronym for “reductions in force,” a.k.a. layoffs.

The survey focused on probationary employees, whom the administration went after first.

Legally, they were easier to terminate because they’d been in their roles less than two years, though many were longtime contractors or seasoned civil servants transferring from other positions.

“Probationary sounds like they’re just out of college,” former IRS chief John Koskinen told one of my Mother Jones colleagues as DOGE hit his agency.

“A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds…They weren’t 25-year-olds.

They were filling important positions.”

Either way, many of the fired workers shouldered financial risks for the opportunity to serve the public.

“I uprooted my life and moved across country to take this new position to a place where I had no community,” one of them, a single mother, wrote in her survey response.

Another said their spouse had quit their job to enable the move.

Nearly a third of the surveyed workers reported financial losses related to moving or housing instability.

Some drew down their retirement savings—nearly one in six took out a loan.

The Federal Harms Tracker, a project of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, estimates that Trump’s layoffs have cost taxpayers more than $70 billion, and that’s not even counting the inevitable fallout when the country’s largest employer sheds more than 7 percent of its personnel.

Nearly half of respondents in the probationary workers’ survey said they’d delayed major life events, like getting married or buying a home.

“It’s comparable to the pandemic,” notes Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institute who tracks economic indicators in the DC area to study the layoffs’ impacts.

A recent report by Loh and her colleagues found that home prices in DC, which boasted the nation’s highest unemployment rate in 2025, have dropped by a quarter compared to 2019, and inflation-adjusted rents have plummeted, though “no tenant feels like the rent went down.”

Housing remains expensive relative to incomes, and as fired federal workers tightened their belts, the researchers saw declines in all types of spending.

But the majority of federal workers resided outside the capital, and unemployment spiked in states where they had the biggest presence.

Locales with strong federal ties were also vulnerable.

Ryver, for example, worked at the only wildlife refuge designated for the protection of Florida’s manatees: “The local economy was very based on manatee tourism.”

Ryver managed the commercial permits that allowed tour groups to operate, and assessed buildings, boardwalks, and other facilities to ensure they were safe for public use.

The refuge was understaffed even before DOGE came along.

“We were already drowning in work and deferred maintenance,” Ryver says.

Beyond the inevitable deterioration of government services, the firings have been terribly wasteful—a serious brain drain.

“They lost all this money that they spent training us and recruiting,” Reynolds explains, and rehiring fired workers as contractors, which happens a fair bit, is generally more costly—and less stable.

“I don’t feel secure,” Lucy told me.

“I feel like any day they could pull my contract.”

“There can be people who, of course, get new jobs, and they can look fine from the outside, and they can feel better, but the nervous system is really changed,” says Rosalyn Beroza, a therapist who specializes in trauma.

“It’s a state where none of the givens held, and you can draw a line between before and after—nothing feels the same afterwards.

That’s what has happened to federal employees.”

Beroza, a DC local and daughter of a government scientist, has spent her entire life around civil servants.

And so, in early 2025, she began assembling a network of therapists willing to offer free or low-cost therapy to departing federal workers.

“The demand was huge,” she says.

“I got so many people wanting help, and it was so sad.”

Russell Vought, director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, had promised to put federal workers “in trauma” and the data suggest he succeeded: In the survey Lucy and her colleagues designed, 95 percent of the fired employees reported new mental health symptoms, including nervousness, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and thoughts of self-harm.

“If it weren’t for my family, if it weren’t for my friends, my community around me, I would not be here,” Lucy says.

When I reached out to Reynolds, the mental health stats were the first thing she wanted to talk about, but she wasn’t sure the public would care.

“I’ve heard other people be like, ‘Oh, well people lose their jobs every day,’” she says.

“It’s hard to explain.

Like, this is not a normal job loss.”

Beroza agrees.

“It’s not an overreaction, because of the way that these firings took place,” she says.

“It’s essentially a natural disaster, because you lose everything.

You lose finances, but you also lose your identity, your sense of purpose, your sense of the future.”

If there were any guardrails, federal workers no longer trust them.

“I expected some bad things to happen, but I thought that they would follow laws,” Reynolds recalls.

If not, she figured Congress or the courts would step up.

But Congress demurred and the courts were too little, too late.

Another survey, conducted last year by the Federal News Network, suggested that 95 percent of federal employees who stayed on have experienced increased anxiety and depression since Trump came back to office.

More than four out of five considered quitting for mental health reasons.

In a recent analysis, the Government Accountability Office classified more than three quarters of last year’s federal departures as voluntary.

But though opting into the deferred resignation program—Musk’s notorious “fork in the road”—was technically a choice, it wasn’t much of one.

“Many people did that because they were told that their jobs were going to be eliminated, so how voluntary is that?”

Loh, the economic analyst, asks.

I can relate.

A few weeks after Trump returned to office, my government-supplied laptop wouldn’t let me log in.

It turned out to be a technical issue, but for 30 minutes I thought I’d been fired.

Colleagues had already been placed on administrative leave, articles and educational materials I’d worked on were scratched off federal websites, and I’d been all but prohibited from doing my job.

Once my first colleague was axed, I’d been jumpy at every email and increasingly nauseous every day I clocked in.

When the password to my work computer was suddenly defective, I mostly felt relief.

I put in my resignation a few days later.

On paper, my departure was voluntary, though I wouldn’t have left if not for the hostility Musk, Trump, Vought, and the rest leveled at dedicated civil servants.

Like Lucy, despite countless applications, I spent more than six months unemployed, resorted to gig work to pay my bills, and (like one in four fired workers surveyed) began taking a psychiatric medication—in my case to deal with new heights of anxiety.

It helped, but that period still haunts me.

Roughly 90 percent of the survey respondents reported that mental health symptoms triggered by their job losses were still affecting them a year later.

Ryver recalls “some skill regression” as a result.

“It erodes your cognitive abilities, your problem-solving abilities, to have to operate at such high levels of activation,” says Beroza, the trauma therapist.

Many fired federal workers say they wouldn’t go back to working for the government.

Lucy, who did so out of necessity, can understand that.

Her reinstatement process, too, was anxiety inducing.

It lasted half a year, for most of which she couldn’t reach anyone in human resources and had nothing in writing—and no functional health insurance.

Which is why she had to find an obstetrician willing to see uninsured patients.

During her first appointment, the doctor couldn’t detect a fetal heartbeat, and Lucy was told to schedule a followup.

“Those were the longest two weeks of my life,” she remembers.

Her pregnancy, it turned out, wasn’t viable, which threatened to become a financial blow in addition to an emotional one.

Lucy required a procedure the doctor’s office said would cost $5,000 out of pocket.

She and her partner hit the phones and eventually learned she could get the same treatment at Planned Parenthood for $650—which still wasn’t easy.

“That time would have been a lot less stressful if I had insurance,” she recalls.

In the workers’ survey, a third of the fired employees said they had delayed medical care.

Those with chronic diseases reported worsening symptoms, one writing, “My life was in danger during that time.”

DOGE officially came to an end on July 4, according to the executive order that created it.

The passing of this expiration date feels weirdly anticlimactic—perhaps because Musk and his underlings haven't been active in the onslaught for some time now, or because some parts of the government are showing signs of returning to normalcy, at least on paper.

Hard-hit agencies, including the IRS, are now hiring, sometimes at rates surpassing the earlier layoffs.

Health and Human Services, where Lucy and Reynolds both worked, is looking to add 12,000 workers—20 percent more than it shed.

Agencies are recruiting former federal workers for many of the roles, but the vast majority of those workers are wary—if not shellshocked.

When the Partnership for Public Service surveyed more than 11,000 remaining federal workers last fall, 58 percent said they were "less engaged" than a year earlier, and only 10 percent trusted the political leadership—which, as Reynolds points out, has "been upfront about not respecting us and not caring for our work."

Reynolds doubts the damage this administration has wrought—on institutional knowledge and the trust and dedication of career employees—is reversible.

"It gets beyond that personal feeling of hurt for being fired," she says.

Because even if federal agencies are repopulated, it's hard to be confident they'll adhere to the public-facing missions that once motivated Reynolds and other civil servants.

“The long-term effects” of the layoffs, she says, “are definitely one of the more stressful things for me.”