The email arrived at 7:06pm on a Saturday, but had been dated the day before. With it, K. Waye, an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), became one of the thousands of federal employees that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fired on February 14, part of what has become known in Washington as the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.”
Citing that the reasons for the dismissal were based on the fact that her “skill,” “knowledge” and “aptitude” were apparently not sufficient, it also defined her “performance” as “inadequate.” Waye had been placed into the category of “probationary employees” because, even though she had worked for the government for a decade, she changed jobs and agencies last August, which technically reset her seniority to zero. In theory, her new position had been a reward, a promotion that came with a raise. A public health expert who has experience with the World Health Organization, she had always wanted to work at the CDC. But in practice, that step up the ladder led to her downfall. In DOGE’s crusade “against bureaucracy,” Musk started with the most vulnerable: the employees who, on paper, had been in their posts for less than two years and who do not have the same rights as permanent staff.
Waye has an eight-year-old daughter and is divorced. She had just bought a house in a quiet Maryland neighborhood located an hour away from Washington D.C., not far from where she’d grown up as the offspring of a Senegalese diplomat. It was there, in a room full of moving boxes that had yet to be opened, she told her story. Now she’s not sure how she will pay for the new house. The worst part is that she suffers from a chronic autoimmune disease that, “if not correctly controlled, is dangerous. A common cold can be a matter of life and death,” she says. She frequently visits the doctor. Unemployed and without health insurance, she’s not sure how she will afford that expense, either. “I never thought something like this could happen to me,” she says
Protest against the policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk in front of the U.S. Capitol building on February 17.
Protest against the policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk in front of the U.S. Capitol building on February 17.
Nathan Howard (REUTERS)
Donald Trump successfully campaigned to become president on the promise of “dismantling the Deep State,” taking back control over independent federal agencies and putting them in the service of his conservative revolution. To do this, he recruited the richest man in the world, asking him to make cuts equal to one trillion dollars. Musk and his employees, a handful of young men with iconoclastic streaks, have already managed to freeze billions of dollars in federal grants and programs and are carrying out their assault on public employees agency by agency.
First, they offered an incentive package for voluntary resignations to more than 75,000 government workers, according to the Office of Personnel Management. Then, they proceeded to fire employees on probationary status. Numbers have not been released as to the total number of workers who have been let go, but in March 2024, 220,000 federal employees had been in their positions for less than a year. On Saturday, DOGE took things a step further, sending public service workers who still had their jobs an email in which they were asked to describe what they’d done at work last week. If they did not comply within 48 hours, they would be subject to termination.
All told, there are more than three million public employees in the United States and, though you’d never know it from the Republican Party’s fiery anti-Washington rhetoric, more than 80% of them are based in other locations around the country, from Huntsville, Alabama, home of the NASA headquarters, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the Department of Veteran Affairs operates a hospital. The latter is where, prior to February 13, Andrew Lennox worked.
Thirty-five-year-old Lennox served in the Marines for a decade, stationed, among other sites, in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. When he came home, he held a string of jobs until he got the one he just lost, where he felt “like a family” and “again, happy to serve” his country. He was also fired by email. The letter said that “based on your performance,” it was not “in the public interest” that he continue at in his position. “I never heard that when I was in Afghanistan, defending the American values of truth and justice. I feel betrayed,” Lennox said in a phone interview.
