Fired federal workers hunt for new jobs but struggle to replace their old ones

“If you’re doing, say, vegetation sampling and prescribed fire as your main work, there aren’t many jobs,” says Eric Anderson, 48, of Chicago, who was fired Feb. 14 from his job as a biological science technician at Indiana Dunes National Park.

All the years of work Anderson put in — the master’s degree, the urban forestry classes, the wildfire deployments — seemed to disappear in a single email dismissing him.

He’s hoping there’s a chance he’s called back, but if he isn’t, he’s not sure what he’ll do next. He was so consumed with his firing that he broke a molar from grinding his teeth. But he knows he's caught in something larger than himself, as the new administration unfurls its chaotic cost-cutting agenda.

“This is someone coming in and tossing a hand grenade and seeing what will happen,” he says.

The federal job cuts are the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by billionaire Elon Musk, who has been tearing through agencies looking for suspected waste. No official tally of firings has been released, but the list stretches into the thousands and to nearly every part of the country. More than 80% of the federal government's 2.4-million-person civilian workforce is based outside of the Washington area.

Cathy Nguyen, 51, of Honolulu, was laid off last month from her job at USAID, where she helped manage the PEPFAR program, which combats HIV/AIDS.

Her firing not only brought the turmoil of finding new health insurance, halting saving for retirement and her kids’ college education, and trimming spending for things like the family subscription to Disney Plus — it also has forced her to reconsider her career goals.

PEPFAR is a landmark effort that stretches across dozens of countries and is credited with saving some 26 million lives. Nothing rivals it. So where does a former PEPFAR worker go?

“It’s requiring me to rethink how I want to spend my professional life,” Nguyen says.

As specialized as Nguyen’s work has been, Mitch Flanigan may have her beat.

Flanigan, 40, was assigned to the sled dog kennels at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska until he was fired Feb. 14. It never brought a huge paycheck, but where else could he get to work as a dog musher against such a breathtaking panorama?

He has appealed his firing with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.

“I still kind of want to fight for the job that I lost,” he says. “I’m not really making much money, it’s just fun and it’s a unique thing to be a part of.”

A November report from the Federal Salary Council, which advises on government pay, found that federal salaries were one-fourth lower than those in the private sector.

A Congressional Budget Office report released last year found pay disparities depended on workers' education. Federal workers with a high school diploma or less outearned their private-sector counterparts with 17% higher wages, the CBO found. That edge disappeared among better-educated workers. Workers with bachelor's degrees had wages 10% lower than the private sector and those with professional degrees or doctorates earned 29% less. Federal benefits were vastly better than the private sector for the lowest-educated workers, the CBO found, and about even for the highest-educated workers.

Many laid off from federal positions were drawn by stability, benefits and, more than anything, the opportunity to do work they might not be able to do anywhere else. Now, everyone from diplomats to public health workers are flooding the job market looking for suitable positions.

Gracie Lynne, a 32-year-old fellow at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who lives in Eugene, Oregon, took a pay cut when she started her job four years ago.

Her parents lost their home during the Great Recession, which led to their divorce, years of financial angst, and Lynne’s own interest in financial regulation. She found herself following the nascent CFPB’s rulemaking and poring over 1,000-page bills on bank regulations. She wrote her master’s thesis on the bureau. She couldn’t pass up the job.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she told herself.

Plus, she thought, the benefits would come in handy when she and her husband decided to start a family. Now, six months pregnant, she finds herself jobless and scrambling to get insured.

She isn’t sure where she’ll land, or if she’ll find many employers rushing to hire someone about to become a mother. But she feels more committed than ever to the work she did.

“I feel even more compelled to stay in the public sector after this experience,” she says, noting the good work protecting consumers she was doing every day, “to stay in the fight.”

Luke Tobin, a 24-year-old forestry technician who worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest, who was fired from his job Feb. 14, finds the accusations of waste by Musk and others laughable. He sees extreme understaffing and threadbare budgets.

He earned about $19 an hour and was furloughed for about half of the year but still relished a job that had him backpacking in remote areas for days at a time.

Scrambling to find a replacement job, he’s put in dozens of applications. He has pursued openings on tree farms, at tree-trimming companies and at nurseries, but so far, has only heard back from two employers on two minimum-wage jobs: one as an Amazon delivery person and the other as a line cook at a fried chicken restaurant.

“I need a job,” he says, “any job.”

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Associated Press writer Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.

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Matt Sedensky can be reached at msedensky@ap.org and https://x.com/sedensky.

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