One year later, seven fired federal workers share where they are now

Amid the chaos and fear unleashed by the second Trump administration, more than 300,000 people left the government through a combination of firings, layoffs, and resignations. The cuts have reshaped the federal workforce and left the region teetering on the edge of a recession, while fundamentally altering the trajectories of thousands of our neighbors’ lives. The 51st spoke to seven former federal workers to hear how their job losses affected them, what they’ve been up to since, and where they hope to go next. 

The international maternal health specialist who pivoted to helping laid off parents   

Kathleen Borgueta’s son was 11 weeks old when she learned she was fired from her role overseeing maternal and child health programs in eastern and central Africa. Sitting in a postpartum support group while on maternity leave, Borgueta’s contractor status at USAID meant both she and her son would lose their healthcare benefits that night.

“It was pretty jarring to have worked in maternal and child health, to have built a career here, a longstanding, decades-long career working in this space, and then all of a sudden, when I needed these benefits most, to have them pulled out from underneath us and my newborn son,” she said. (They were eventually able to switch to her husbands’ insurance.)

Borgueta worked across various government agencies throughout her 22 years in Washington, helping to provide healthcare across Africa. Her plan to be a working mother in D.C. went awry when the international aid field was gutted by mass layoffs and broken government contracts. 

“Like a lot of the type A people, I think, in D.C., I really planned out what I wanted for motherhood and my career,” she said. “And then all the plans, all the ways that I had tried to build a village for myself and have all these different supports, essentially evaporated.”

Two months later, Borgueta founded Pivoting Parents, an organization providing support and resources for parents who have been similarly laid off. She hosts virtual and in-person events focused on resilience, mindfulness, and professional development—all with her now 15-month old son Max on her hip due to unaffordable childcare options. 

“I couldn't find the community that I needed, so I needed to build it myself,” Borgueta said. More than 1,500 people have attended events in the organization’s first year. 

By connecting with former fed parents and others who have lost their jobs amid the region’s economic slump, Kathleen said she has found hope for their professional futures.

“I think hope for me is community,” she said. “It's all these incredible people that I have met in this ecosystem of fired workers. I've just been so bowled over by how all of these incredibly skilled, mission-driven people, who were essentially tossed aside, have just doubled down.”

The counterterrorism expert now running for Congress

Michael Duffin never intended to run for Congress

Duffin spent 13 years at the State Department developing counterterrorism programming to combat, among other things, white supremacy. “Working for the Department of State was a big part of my identity,” he said.

But after being fired from his role as a senior police advisor, he decided to run to represent Virginia’s 8th District, which encompasses Arlington, Alexandria, and Falls Church.

“Running for office has helped me fill part of that identity [as a public servant],” he said, and if elected, advocating for former federal workers would be a main priority. 

“We're constituents, and so we're asking our representatives to fight for us just as strongly as they are fighting for other issues,” he said. “We feel like they're not doing that.”

With more than 73,000 federal employees in Duffin’s district as of September, he worries about the economic consequences of the reductions in the federal workforce.

“It’s devastating for our economy, and the private sector has not been able to absorb it,” he said. “The further we get away from the separation date for each person or agency, the more desperate people will get and unfortunately, you're going to see more people moving out [of the region]. It's an economic time bomb that's tanking the region, and there's no certainty that things will get better anytime soon.”

Duffin ultimately hopes to cultivate a coalition of representatives dedicated to reinstating the workplace in which he spent much of his career. 

“My hope is that we find some way to compromise, or some way forward where Democrats and Republicans and independents can work together for the best interests of the country and the American people,” he said, adding that he hopes his two young kids will be able to look back and be proud of him. 

But Duffin’s future remains uncertain. “After the primary on June 16, if I don't win,” he noted, “I'm going to have to find a new identity.”

The fed who was fired for “performance” two weeks into her job

Andrea Grimaldi’s first official day as a federal employee at the Department of Health and Human Services was January 27, 2025. Just two weeks later, in what she dubbed the “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” Grimalid was one of tens of thousands of federal workers placed on administrative leave or laid off. 

“The Thursday before Valentine's Day, I was talking to a friend in Florida, and she was like, ‘I think you're gonna get fired tomorrow.’ I'm like, ‘Why would you say that?’ And she's like, ‘I'm reading it in the Washington Post.’”

Despite the incredibly short stint, Grimaldi was told she was fired for “performance” issues.

“It was the two sentences of ‘Thanks for your service, but we're firing you for your performance.’ And you're like, that doesn't feel right, because I actually haven't performed anything,” she said. “Some people were so insulted by the, ‘you were fired for performance,’ and that didn't bother me, because it was so false.”

This was the second time that Grimaldi lost her job through a reduction in force. In 2010, under President Barack Obama, her role at the Department of Education was deemed duplicative and she got a new, contracted role at HHS shortly after. The firing process in 2010, Grimaldi said, was vastly different from the Trump administration’s tactics, but she is applying the same approach to managing her newfound time.  

Grimaldi said she follows the same personal schedule, spending mornings applying to jobs or tweaking her resume, forcing herself to leave the house in the afternoon, and allowing herself leisure and relaxation time in the evening. 

“The idea is that you wake up at a certain time, you have to get out of bed, you have to get yourself motivated,” she said.

After nearly 20 years of federal service, in which she has switched jobs across a number of agencies, Grimaldi is well-versed in the application process. But jobs are few and far between in the region right now, and she has struggled to crack increasingly opaque hiring processes. 

“The learning curve is steep to try to figure out how you can get your credentials past AI first so you can get to a human and that's been really hard,” she said. “I know my worth, I know what kind of worker that I am, and I know the expertise that I bring, and also the energy and all the good things. But what on paper is not working to be able to show people that?”

The environmental justice expert who saw it coming early

As soon as Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Amanda Cronin started studying for the LSAT.

Project 2025 had specifically called for the elimination of her employer, the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights (OEJECR) in the Environmental Protection Agency. 

“I always knew I wanted to go to law school. And so when Trump won the election, I started taking that plan more seriously,” she said. “The timing made sense for me to make that pivot if I was going to be fired. And sure enough, that's what happened.”

She was placed on administrative leave in February (and the entire office shuttered shortly thereafter) and was formally laid off in August. Cronin started classes at the University of Washington Law School weeks later.

As a program analyst, Cronin brought experts and leaders together to form policy recommendations for the office, which was established in 2022 to solve environmental issues in underserved communities.   

She said working for this team was “like trying to catch a train already in motion” as they raced to use their allotted funding. 

“The energy was really incredible, because there were so many quote, unquote outsiders hired into the office. So the atmosphere was really cool, and it was kind of hopey, changey Obama vibes, because we had been appropriated a huge chunk of money. And we really were incentivized to put it to use immediately and quickly because, although we did not know what the outcome of the 2024 election would be, we knew that we had to get this money out,” she said. 

Working on these environmental issues, Amanda said, greatly influenced her decision to transition to law school.

“I am still really motivated to fight for justice in these communities that have been ignored for so long. I heard so many awful stories from so many people who live in our country,” Cronin said.  “It sounds like they live in a totally alternate reality where they can't get clean water. They're drinking polluted water and breathing polluted air, and I don't want them to be forgotten.”  

The foreign aid worker who wants to continue serving the public 

If Alicia Contreras-Donello didn’t immediately leave her post as a Foreign Service Officer in Libya in February 2025, she was told the military would remove her and her two children, then aged three and six, from the country. 

“I had to think about getting me and my kids home without my husband and still trying to do my job and then dealing with the trauma of the grief and loss of a 17-year career of giving your life to serving this country and bringing the best of the American people to the world,” she said. 

From disseminating over 40,000 metric tons of food during the war in Afghanistan to securing government partnerships with Google and Paypal, Contreras-Donello said her nearly two decades with USAID stemmed from her love for and belief in public service. 

“A lot of foreign service officers make sacrifices, right? Because we leave everything behind. We miss birthdays, we miss weddings, we miss funerals. When you serve, you serve wholeheartedly, understanding a lot of the sacrifice that needs to be made,” she said. 

After returning home safely, Contreras-Donello was shocked by the Trump administration’s apathy toward the thousands of people who had similarly served the country.

“It wasn't just about me or my children. It was about the respect and dignity that we held as an organization, as a diplomatic core, and as a representative of this country and its people. I think what hurt the most was that, for so long, we sacrificed because we knew that we were literally saving lives,” she said.

Looking for a new way to continue a career in public service, Contreras-Donello formally entered the race for delegate of Maryland’s 14th District in January. 

“Just because USAID is not a viable option anymore, that doesn't mean that I still can't serve,” she said. “Folks that are local to this area, that have been here for a while, they're like, ‘if there was ever a time to put up a candidate like you, this is it.’”

Contreras-Donello said she is determined to continue advocating for communities in need and speaking up against the current administration.

“They unleashed an army of highly talented, skilled, and competent public servants that now have the motivation and the time to fight back,” she said. “They've tried to break our souls. They tried to break us down, but they're not going to take that fighting servant spirit. They're really not.”

The longtime Republican who opted to retire early

David Downey had been at the Department of Education since the Clinton administration. 

For 31 years, he held roles in different offices within the agency, eventually honing in on policy implementation. Over the years, he implemented projects including George W. Bush’s initiative to integrate faith-based organizations into American life and regulatory parameters for human research subjects. 

Soon after Inauguration Day, Downey and his colleagues were asked to review all of their materials to identify “woke” bias, without a formal definition of what exactly that entailed. Meanwhile, dozens of his coworkers appear to have been fired for taking an internal development course encouraged by the first Trump administration. 

“It's not the Republican Party that I grew up in. It is a fascist regime,” said Downey, who described himself as a lifelong Republican until Trump upended the party. “If there was ever an effort to completely undermine this country and what it is domestically, as well as across the globe, we're seeing it happen in real time.”

At 54, Downey opted for early retirement and relocated to his hometown of Fort Knox, Kentucky. 

“It's incredibly hard to restart one's life in their 50s,” he said. “It’s the trauma that Russell Vought and this administration wanted to inflict on federal employees. When they say trauma, they mean it,” he said, referring to comments the Office of Management and Budget director made in speeches outlining a vision for Trump’s second term. 

As they settle into a new community,  Downey said he hopes to show his neighbors that federal workers are nothing to be afraid of. 

“In Kentucky, we've got a Democrat governor, but it is awfully a red state,” said Downey, who now identifies as a “compassionate conservative.” “My wife and I both see ourselves a little bit as missionaries and showing what federal people have been, what we are, how we live, that we are good neighbors, and that we're the kind of people that they would want to support.”

Downey said his frustration with the modern Republican Party hasn’t dampened his drive to continue his work as a public servant as he seeks employment – if anything, it is the opposite.

“This literally is a time where democracy, freedom, Western civilization are at stake, and I'm fueled by knowing that I want my life to be one that supports freedom and the Constitution,” he said. “They fired me, but my oath to defend the Constitution against enemies, foreign and domestic, doesn't expire. It doesn't end, and I will give everything I have to defend this nation, period.” 

The USAID worker who took to the Hill to lobby for foreign aid 

When Juliane Weis was fired from her role in reproductive health at USAID, she immediately went to Capitol Hill.

“I was not concerned about my job,” she said. “I was concerned about people's lives. I was concerned about the imminent death of hundreds of thousands to millions of people that rely on the USA for medicine, food, aid, and essential services.”

Weis, who founded the advocacy organization AID on the Hill after she was laid off, has spent the last year speaking to any member of Congress who will listen about the mortal consequences of USAID’s deconstruction. 

“I understand the implication of just dramatically turning all of this [aid] off overnight, with no other replacement in place. People will die, and that is what happened,” she said.

After months of imploring members to restore funding, Weis and her fellow advocates celebrated the passage of an appropriations bill this month providing $50 billion for foreign aid under the State Department. 

“There's a huge demand for this. Congress is very happy with [AID on the Hill’s] work. I know that it's having a huge amount of influence, and is really necessary,” she said. “If we want to build back future foreign assistance, you cannot abandon all the people and experts who know how to do this work.” 

As AID on the Hill grows, Weis intends to continue her work with the same vigor and force she has had this last year. 

“Yesterday we delivered 400 letters to the hill. We went to 150 offices.” she said, adding that, after a year with so many overwhelming and chaotic events, “I do still find inspiration in the people that continue to show up to fight back.” 

Weis said she especially values the community of former federal workers that has grown in the past year through organizations like her own, Borgueta’s Pivoting Parents, and WellFed.

“That community and camaraderie has really just been enormous,” she said. “It has helped me survive what would have been a very, very difficult year.”