WUSA9 spoke with some federal employees still going to the office, and others who have been on administrative leave for months.
WASHINGTON — It has been five months since the Trump administration and DOGE announced major cuts to the federal workforce.
Since then, thousands of government employees have been laid off; multiple groups have filed lawsuits against the administration, and thousands more workers are still left in limbo to this day.
President Donald Trump also ended remote work, so those who are still employed are now making their way back to their offices every day, like James Hedrick.
He’s grateful to still have his job as a senior financial analyst at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, but he said the situation is tenuous.
“I don’t expect I’ll be around that much longer, but I don’t know when or how or where or if or how much, and we’re just kind of, it’s kind of a day to day thing,” Hedrick said.
He’s been with the FHFA for the last ten years and has worked for other departments with the federal government even longer.
“I started out during the Bush administration, working through part of the Obama administration, came back before Trump, then Trump, then Biden, and now Trump again,” Hedrick said. “This kind of chaos and disrespect, I think for the, for the federal workers is unprecedented.”
That feeling of disrespect is a sentiment that many federal workers have shared, including National Institutes of Health employee Izola Shaw.
“Weeks after this administration started, [we were] getting notices around DEI,” Health Communications Specialist Shaw said. “That really hit hard because … we as a federal workforce, we should have diversity of thought, we should think about fairness, because we really want to serve the diverse population that we have in the United States.”
She received a RIF or Reduction in Force letter a few weeks ago and has been working to clarify what that means for her employment status ever since.
“This is a culture of confusion and chaos, and it’s very stressful, not knowing about your job status,” she said.
Other federal workers lament that some of their colleagues have been forced into early retirement. Others, still, are counting down the days on administrative leave in the hopes that they can reach retirement status to access the benefits they’ve spent their careers working toward.
Shaw is also worried about the future of the country.
“There are cures, there’s research that’s not happening right now. They have cut billions of dollars,” Shaw said.
She and Hedrick said these moves could have long term, serious ramifications for all Americans.
“Nobody wants the housing crisis again. Nobody wants the great recession again,” Hedrick said. “One of the things that we do with our regulation and our work is to try to ensure that that doesn’t happen. And not only that bad things don’t happen, but that good things do… And we want to keep making it work, you know, for the American public and it’s getting harder and harder to do that on a daily basis. Pretty soon, something’s going to crack.”
At that point, he fears the country won’t have the people in place to mend it.