With mass layoffs creating chaos across various agencies, such as the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Department of Veterans Affairs, and more, federal employees impacted by the terminations are speaking out—and they want you to know, this is not okay.
Terminated from her role as senior litigation counsel for the Division of Enforcement at the CFPB in Washington, D.C., Hanna Hickman stated, “It’s scary … I had a real moment—I was at CVS the other day and … it kind of came on me all at once that I might not have health insurance in a few weeks, and that really hits you. I think it underscores the fact that we’re just regular, middle-class people, just like the people we’re trying to serve.”
Hickman is only one of thousands of—mostly new—employees who are now known as probationary workers laid off in recent weeks across the federal government. Most of these workers have joined the federal workforce within the last one to two years, meaning they had fewer protections that helped keep them employed.
Seeing the termination notice pop up on her phone late last week, Hickman shared with ABC News, “It was shocking, frankly—not just to us but to our direct managers, who had not been told this would happen and received notice of the terminations at the same time we did because they were CC’d.”
The Impact of Federal Employee Terminations
Before the terminations, many CFPB employees had already been told that they could not show up to work in person. For Hickman, her belongings were still inside the bureau and she hasn’t been back inside since Friday, February 7, when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency hit the CFPB headquarters. Musk’s response was a post on X that said, “CFPB RIP.”
The billionaire’s response doesn’t recognize the many Americans who are now afraid of what’s next. Hickman stated that she believes Musk is attempting to “destroy” the agency that Congress started; however, she and several of her former colleagues are dedicated to continue fighting, looking into all available legal options, sharing that this is what civil servants do.
“Civil servants do this work to fight for regular Americans,” she said. “That’s what the job is. That’s why it’s intended to be insulated from partisan swings. That’s why it requires expert people skills and experience, and that’s why there are these protections around the jobs. I mean, we are people who go to work every day to fight for regular people.”
CFPB employs the “cops on the beat for the financial market,” stated Hickman, with her job being critical to safeguarding the public from financial market crashes, loan schemes, and hiked interest rates.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk can just call their lawyers,” Hickman said. “But regular people don’t just have a lawyer they can call, and these agencies are intended to fill that gap and to keep people safe. For me, this was, you know, a calling.”
Nobody Has Answers
Several other federal government probationary employees, who had also been fired by receiving notices that stated, “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” are also speaking out.
Fired last week from the Department of Education, Chelsea Milburn, a disabled veteran, shared that the memo “didn’t give any specific reasons as to why” she was terminated.
“I was definitely upset,” Milburn said. “I’ve only ever gotten positive feedback from my team and leadership, so I was pretty surprised to get that email.”
A former Federal Student Aid probationary hire at the Department of Education whose supervisor called (and was on the other line crying) was told that they have been terminated. The employee expressed how “devastating” the termination has been and that they don’t know where, or when, their next paycheck will come from.
“It was heartbreaking,” the former employee said. “When I went up to my computer, it was already locked down. I couldn’t access anything. I’m still trying to reach out to HR to find out, do I get a severance package? What is my health insurance benefits? When does it end? Nobody knows anything.”
