A fork (still) in the road

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How are you sleeping? Oh, there's been discussion, I think, relevant to this on r slash Fed News. There's the Doge 15. Have you heard this? Like the freshman 15? Everybody's like, why are my pants tight? It's the Doge 15. This is Fearful Fed. That's how we'll be referring to him anyway. He works for the federal government. Doing what? I'm going to try to talk around which agency exactly I work for. I've been on the job for about 10 years.

And I served in the military before that. So what else can you tell us about your job? They have creamer in the refrigerator. If... If you buy it, there's no free coffee in the federal government, for sure. A decade ago, Fearful Fed was working in the tech sector, where there was a lot of free coffee, he says, and free breakfast. And lunch. And free dinner.

You know, I took a $30,000 pay cut to join the federal government and also left all the free food behind. So why did you want to work for the federal government? Service. I was making tools for people in the federal government and... That was fun and compelling, but whenever I would sit down with somebody and teach them how to use the tool, I was like, really, I kind of wish I was doing your job, you know, fighting the bad guys, fighting the good fight. We are keeping things...

Pretty vague here, clearly. This isn't even Fearful Fed's actual voice because he's fearful. In part because of the nature of his work, which he did tell us much more about and does involve... Actual fights being fought in some cases. But also more recently because of things like this. One of my very good friends was fired yesterday. Their entire office was closed. These dozens of people are just gone. They just don't have a job.

We spoke to Fearful Fed back in April when he and a lot of other federal workers were spending a lot of time in a particular community on Reddit. How long have you been part of r slash Fed News? I did not discover r slash Fed News until probably January 20th, somewhere around then. All right. All right. Fed News. a, quote, vital independent hub for U.S. federal employees to navigate the bureaucracy, protect our careers, and support one another.

That's what it's become, at least. It's also our hub for this episode. But from what Fearful Feds heard, for most of its dozen years of existence, this subreddit was a pretty boring place. You know, what are the cost of living adjustments going to be this year? I don't know, maybe it'll be 0.5% instead of, you know, 0.2%. Very nerdy. Not at all political and not at all known outside of some pretty niche audiences. But on January 20th, of course, a new administration took office.

That same day, an executive order officially established the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Days later... Federal employees like Fearful Fed heard from the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, basically the government's HR department, in the form of a very unofficial-looking, maybe spam, email. We all assumed it was fake. And then we had to get another email from our agency saying, no, no, no, no, actually, that's a real email. But it's just a test. Don't worry about it.

Then the so-called fork-in-the-road email came. Remember that old chestnut? This was the message that went out to nearly all federal employees about a week into the new administration, announcing that the majority of federal agencies were likely going to be downsized through, quote, restructurings, realignments, and reductions.

in force or riffs. For like the first couple weeks of the administration, I was on Fed News every day. And around the time that the fork in the road email came out, everybody was trying to understand it. And I think that that was the platform for trying to understand what was going on. OPM also updated its FAQ section, encouraging employees to look for work in the private sector. It was just so condescending.

that it was hard to believe it was real. Condescending how? The phrase that sticks out to me was, we think you can be more productive outside the federal workforce. And it was just like... You don't have a clue who I am as an individual because you sent this to everyone. And how do you measure productivity? You know, I think I deliver a lot of value for the American people. It's not easily quantifiable, maybe, but it felt...

Naive and insulting at the same time. It's safe to say there's been a fair amount of uncertainty for federal employees across bureaus and agencies since January. And for tens of thousands of them, Fearful Fed included... The Fed News subreddit has been a lifeline. I would say Fed News is now, you know, one part emotional support group, one part...

What the hell is going on? Please, you know, confirm if this is true. One part, like legal aid, you know, there's a lot of people who have already lost their jobs and who kind of don't know where to turn. Why does it feel like nobody outside of the government cares what's happening right now? I'm going to work tomorrow just to get fired. You literally can't make this stuff up. Hold the line. Don't resign. Supervisor told us to stop.

posting on Reddit. Those were our colleagues reading from Fed News, but today we're hearing from three members of this online community. Federal workers, present and former, who have had to rethink what it means to serve their country at a fork in the road. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Anne-Marie Sievertson. And this is Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's federally defunded NPR.

title of my post says grieving for our country, just grief. This is E, a Redditor. Real voice, not real name, just her first initial. I am newly resigned federal employee. Newley resigned as of April, when he opted into the second round of the Deferred Resignation Program, or DRP. It was a wrenching decision, as she shared in this post on FedNews.

I want to hold the line, but the reality is getting fired next week the moment the DRP deadline passes. If there's a government left standing, it will be because good people stayed, and I'm walking away. I feel like I'm abandoning the country I love. But it's like quitting with a gun to my head. I'm just so sad. Solidarity to you all. We don't deserve what has happened. What can you tell us about the federal job that you just left?

I'm proud to say I worked for the United States Department of Agriculture. Can you give us like a broad strokes piece of this? Yeah, I worked in an agency called the Food and Nutrition Service, which administers things like SNAP, or you might have heard them called food stamps, WIC, school lunch. food for food banks, programs like that. So helping people who have some level of food insecurity have more food security. Yep, exactly.

E lives and works not in D.C., as you might be imagining for a federal employee, but in the capital of a southern state. Again, keeping it vague here because E is choosing to share her story at a time when she's also back on the job market. She calls her work with the USDA her dream job. She'd only been doing it for about two years.

Before that, she'd been working as a lobbyist on food security issues. You're kind of orbiting government. You're not in it. But the hope for me, at least always, was to be serving my country from inside the agency that... you know, that we lobbied all the time. I think also for me, you know, just as long as I can remember every federal employee I interacted with in life, even as a little kid, whether it's the mailman or the lady at the...

the driver's license place, I always thought to myself, like, what a cool job. So wait, you like the lady at the driver's license place? You're one of the few people? Who likes those people. Those are people too, Ben. Those are people too. I think that, you know, I'm probably the person at the driver's license place that's telling her she did a good job and thanking her for her service.

Knowing that the person before me might have yelled at her. For the record, I have not yelled at the DMV worker. But as you can tell, E, like fearful fed. reveres this kind of service. Unlike fearful Fed, she obviously did leave her government job, though she really didn't think she would when she first got the fork in the road email explaining the deferred resignation program.

I started out very resolute, like many of the fellow posters on the Fed News Channel, and they were going to have to pry my oath of office from my cold, dead hands. As time went on and weeks went on and... You know, the conversation shifted a bit. It also just became very stressful and fearful, which is the point. They've said that's the point. After the fork in the road email.

OPM started ramping up its employee monitoring, demanding a bullet-pointed list of accomplishments each week. They also ramped up the pressure, he says. We just got email after email after email about the DRP program. Quit. We'll pay you to quit. You should quit. There's going to be rifts. We're going to reorganize. Have you heard about quitting? You should quit.

There are so many posts in the Fed News community about these emails, with titles like These OPM Emails Feel Like Harassment and Responding to OPM Know Your Rights. It was clear that this was a decision that they wanted us to make without all of the information and on a very short timeline. And E wasn't just making the decision for herself. She has three kids.

I am a single mom. I just bought a house in October. You know, it just became a math problem. This is not a choice between keeping my job or not. It's a choice between getting paid X amount through DRP or getting paid X amount through severance. But the outcome to me was always going to be the same, which is that you don't get to keep your job anymore. The decision for E was hard to accept, but not necessarily hard to make, because the math of it all was easy.

If she resigned, she'd get her full salary and benefits through the end of September, about five months of pay. If she got riffed, so to speak, she'd only get a week of pay for each year of service. So two weeks of pay, five months. versus two weeks with three kids and a new house. And E says a lot of people from her team made that same choice for their own reasons, family math or otherwise.

Since January, 14% of the USDA's staff took some sort of buyout, like the DRP. The Trump administration has requested a $7 billion budget cut for the department in 2026. And now...

the department is in the process of a reorganization that will consolidate its offices and relocate many of its remaining employees. They are working under incredibly stressful circumstances with an administration that... is quite hostile to them and now they're doing the work of what used to be a much bigger team so i wish all of them luck and strength and you know fortitude in the days ahead

We spoke to E back in April, when her decision to leave was still really fresh. She told us at the time that she actually had to step away from the Fed News subreddit. it's so stressful to log in and just immediately see 17 more executive orders and the unions are falling and like, just, it's, it's so overwhelming. Yeah. It's gotten a lot bigger, a lot more attention. It's gotten much more, you know, the times we're living in are bigger than just questions about how do I change my...

PTO days or like, should I ask my boss about this, you know? And now there's all these spinoffs of what used to just be the Fed News Channel. There's all these spinoff ones because people felt like it got too big and it got full of bots and stuff like that. The moderators of the Fed News subreddit declined to comment on just how much the community has grown since Trump took office in January. But we know it's more than tripled.

At the time we're recording this, it has more than half a million members, not all of whom are federal workers necessarily. And there were concerns that people from OPM could be lurking in the community and keeping tabs on the conversation. being had there. But mostly, Ease just found words of support. You gotta look out for yourself and your family and serve your state, serve your community, go be on a school board or PTA or...

You know, federal service is not the only way to serve your country. Like, find your next thing. Its support, E says, she hasn't always gotten from her IRL community. I mean, some of them are realizing, like... Well, I really support you and I wish you hadn't lost your job. You know, but I think for most people, the, you know.

People who work in government are the lady at the driver's license office who maybe they didn't have a great experience with, or they call the IRS and nobody answers the phone. So they have this abstract idea of who government employees are rather than realizing. We are your next door neighbors. We're the mom at school drop off. We're just regular people trying to pay our bills and raise our kids like anybody else. So what's next for you?

Yeah, I am going to get back into consulting with nonprofits and a lot of nonpartisan organizations that work on voter registration and democracy reform. And I joke, but it's not a joke. Elon Musk is not going to kill my civic spirit. I have to keep that alive. So I'm going to keep doing that. How old are your kids? Six, five and two. So I'm also going to be busy with that.

Yeah. How do you think about talking to them about what's going on in your life? And I guess, are you worried about your ability to provide for them? Yes and no. You know, I try really hard to instill patriotism in my kids. That's an important value to me. I have a whole... nerdy shelf of books about the Star Spangled Banner and the, you know, it used to be more about crying when I'd see the Capitol and teaching my kids the song, this land is your land and stuff like that.

But it's also become a little bit difficult, right? Because I don't know if that stuff exists anymore. I don't know if I can look at them with a straight face and say the United States of America is the best democracy that's ever been. As far as... you know, what's next in my work life. I'm still educated and experienced and somebody somewhere will want to hire me.

Coming up, one more member of the Fed News community at the beginning of his career, looking forward to the stability of a government job. Until? They say ignorance is bliss. I really did not think any of this was going to happen. I had never even imagined it, really. Bliss disrupted in a minute.

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Hey, it's Roman Mars from 99% Invisible, the podcast about the unnoticed architecture and design that shapes our world. And it's Ben Brock Johnson from WBUR's show about online communities, Endless Thread. And we're bringing you a brand new limited series that we made together. It's about how the video game world has changed the world beyond video games. From the history of the joystick to one of the strangest games

that Sega ever made. We're calling our series Hidden Levels, and you can get it in the Endless Thread feed or the 99% Invisible feed. Hit start wherever you get your podcasts. January 13th, 2025.

Exactly one week before the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Jacob Saunders, real name. A guy in his mid-20s who had recently gotten a master's degree in Homeland Security, a real degree that you can get, starts a government job at... The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A lot of great benefits and was on a good track to start my career. Five weeks later. On February 15th, I believe, I was let go as a probationary employee.

A part of the probationary layoffs. Probationary as in he'd only been on the job a month. And February 15th as in checks calendar. A Saturday. His job was terminated on a frickin' Saturday. I knew it wasn't performance related as to why I got let go. I knew it was because of the Donald Trump news, the news that he wanted all the federal agencies to. Fire the probationary employees. And so, Jacob and upwards of 200,000 probationary federal workers suddenly were federal workers no longer.

But in the email Jacob got from the Office of Personnel Management, that's how people should lose their jobs, right, Ben? An email? That's how I would prefer to lose mine, yeah. Specifically a Saturday email. That's what I want. Gotta be a Saturday. And it did say like, oh, we've deemed that you're unfit for the position. But I knew that was kind of just a mass email. I knew that didn't really apply to me. So. Wow. That's the language that they used. You are unfit for the position.

Yeah, it's pretty cold hearted, but it's like, wow, I was just hired five weeks ago. So five weeks I was qualified and now I'm not. We have seen this email, which does include the line, quote, to which Jacob says, what performance? I hadn't even really been given any responsibility in those first five weeks. I was really just learning, doing trainings and then sitting in on meetings, taking notes, trying to learn as much as possible. So it really was like just a ridiculous statement to me.

This email also had clearly been autofilled, with Jacob's title in all caps throughout, like a Mad Lib or something. Quote, I am removing you from your position of... management and program analyst, and federal service consistent with the above references. Oh, except in one spot, they forgot to autofill. Quote, on blank, the agency appointed you to the position of... Management and program analyst. It is a joke. And, sadly, not a joke.

It almost seemed like it was AI generated. It didn't even feel like a person wrote it. And it didn't come from a person. It didn't come from their email address. It came from OPM, Office of Personnel Management. Jacob was new to everything at the time when it comes to being a federal employee, including being a member of the Fed News subreddit. At first, it was a godsend. I mean, it still is. I love it. I'm still in it, even though I'm not a federal employee anymore.

It was so nice to know that some other people felt like I did, because they really did feel like it was just me who was panicking about everything that was going on. But no, there was a whole group. All the stories started to sound the same, you know? People say, hey, like I had performance reviews and I had absolutely no problem. Like they were all satisfactory. And then I got fired for what was stated as a performance related issue.

Reading other people's stories in Fed News also started to make Jacob feel pretty lucky in some ways. I thank God that I got... the news via email. So I know people were saying, hey, like I started crying at my desk when they fired me, you know, and that's you really feel for those people. You really feel for the people who, you know, maybe they're sick and they.

now are losing access to their health insurance. I've heard stories like that. And so those are the stories that really resonate with me is the emotional feeling behind getting fired more so than just the act of getting fired. We found Jacob because of a particular post he made in the Fed News subreddit after being laid off. But this post is not what you might expect. So yeah, I was unemployed for about a month and a month later.

They offered the job back to me. And Jacob got his job back and lived happily ever after. Just kidding. The title of his Fed News post? I declined my reinstatement offer. Here's some more of that post. So they gave me less than 24 hours to make a decision, which was not ideal. I'd also have to start immediately after some thought.

I declined my offer, mostly because I had to call in favors to get my old part-time jobs back after I got fired in February. And it wouldn't be right to leave those part-time jobs high and dry without a proper two weeks notice, especially since they helped me when I was in need. Of course, I want my old job back, but I don't want to go back to work if I'm just going to get fired again. My time and my mental well-being are both more valuable than the money I'd make from my old job.

One of the part-time jobs Jacob referenced there is coaching high school lacrosse, which doesn't pay a lot, he admits. But he says it's been a healthy distraction. You must get sick as shit of people saying this to you, but you're at the very beginning of your career. What does it feel like to be in this position of...

I was headed in this direction. I had a plan. I had a job. I had a master's degree. I had a master's degree. I did the thing that you're supposed to do. I went to school. I got a job. And like, it's like a real sputtering start to something that's supposed to be like the rest of your life. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, I would be lying if I told you it wasn't tough because, you know. here i am with no job again but there's the story of um it's an ancient story i don't know what the title is but

The moral of the story, I won't tell the story, but the moral of the story is... No, I want the story. I want the story, Jacob. Let's have the story. I'll tell the story. I'm going to mess it up, so forgive me. There's a man, right? And he finds a wild horse. The man's neighbor comes up to him and says, basically, wow, you found this wild horse that's going to help you so much. The man says, who knows what's good or bad.

Who knows what's good or bad? A week later, the man's son is riding the wild horse and he falls off, breaks his arm. And then the neighbor comes up and says, oh my gosh, your son has a broken arm. Now he's not going to be able to work. You know, what are you going to do? And the man's like, who knows what's good or bad? The next week, someone from the army comes by the man's house. There's a war going on. They're looking for able-bodied young men. But the son has a broken arm.

Can't go. And then the neighbor comes up to him and says, oh, well, that's good. You're starting to get drafted. And the man says, who knows what's good or bad? And so the moral of the story is, who knows what's good or bad? Like, it could be. This is a bad situation to be in. But ultimately, like, who knows what's going to happen next in my life? I'm still young. Like, maybe this is the next opportunity is waiting right around the corner.

It's been six months since we first spoke to all three of these Fed News members. Jacob hasn't found another full-time job yet, but he says he's throwing his resume out there and hoping for the best. He still feels like one of the lucky ones, not having a mortgage to pay or kids to feed. E, the former USDA worker who took part in the Deferred Resignation Program, has both a mortgage and kids to feed. Her DRP pay and benefits ended at the end of September.

We haven't heard back from her yet about whether she's found another job. But Elon Musk has. He left Doge at the end of May. By that point, upwards of 100,000 federal employees had taken the DRP buyout. Even more had been fired. We can't know the full ripple effects of the administration's cuts in executive orders yet, or even which ones will survive legal action. And in some cases, like Jacobs, federal employees are being offered their jobs back. Not that they will necessarily take them.

Then again, at the time we're wrapping this episode, Thursday, October 2nd, 2025, federal workers are in a new kind of precarious position. The government shut down this week after the Senate failed to pass a spending bill. The White House has said that this could result in more rifts, specifically of federal jobs that are, quote, not consistent with the president's priorities.

Those notices are supposedly coming in the next couple of days, to which people in Fed News have asked, aren't rifts explicitly barred during shutdowns? Historically, yes. Legally? unclear, particularly at a time when legal precedent doesn't necessarily mean case closed. In the meantime, millions of federal workers are expected to be furloughed. And the precarity in Fed news is palpable. Comments like, damn, my agency leadership has still not told us what to do today. And.

The whole riff thing is kind of killing the Snow Day vibe. Another Redditor urged people to show compassion for their fellow feds during this time, regardless of their politics. We don't know what tomorrow brings for any of us, they wrote. But we do know that kindness costs nothing, and it matters most when people are at their lowest. As for Fearful Fed, he's still a Fed.

Still has the same job. But as he told us in a follow-up interview, he's also, in some ways, still fearful. My loyalty has always been to America. And that's been a very simple equation. Now it's more... complex and it's uncomfortable. I think they're making it uncomfortable, like deliberately. And right now in this kind of new atmosphere, I fear that many of us are going to get fired, not...

because we're disloyal to the Constitution, but because we will not sacrifice that loyalty to the Constitution. And that's just a completely fundamental shift from every other administration change. You never had to consider that. So, Fearful Fed says a lot still feels unpredictable. He doesn't know what's good or bad, at least in the long term. One thing he does know, as he told us in our initial conversation...

He can't control the federal government. He can't control his agency within it. But he hasn't lost sight of the agency he has. I only want to serve if I can serve with integrity. And... Once I can no longer serve with integrity, I'll just leave. And once I came to that realization, it was actually pretty liberating.

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by me, Anne-Marie Sievertson, and co-hosted by me and... Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Meg Kramer. Mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vykus. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Frannie Monaghan, Grace Tatter, managing producer Samata Joshi, and Emily Jankowski, who also lent her voice to this episode, along with...

Paul Vykus, and some of our other colleagues, Caleb Green, Steph Brown, Allie Jarmanning, and Mike Moschetto as Fearful Fed. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and patriotism under duress. This is probably also a great time to remind you that we have a secure tips line. It is a great time. You can email us at... WBUR Secure Tips at proton.me. And you can text or call us via signal at 646-456-9095. Hope to hear from you.