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Rose’s brief career as a federal employee ended last Thursday.

“I was winding down for the day, and then all of a sudden, I got a notification ping,” she says. She reached for her government phone, which had been issued to her just a month earlier when she took a new job at the Department of Energy (DOE).

The message was from a co-worker saying that she needed to check her email right away. She opened it up and found a letter telling her she’d been terminated.

“DOE finds that your further employment would not be in the public interest,” the letter read in part. The 26-year-old was being removed from her position, “effective today.”

Rose was shocked, and she had plenty of company. Even longtime workers 

“People who’ve been in the federal government, like 30, 40 years, are like, ‘We have never seen this before. This is unprecedented,’“ she says.

But she didn’t have much time to let her firing sink in. Her email was about to be shut off. She grabbed her personal phone.

“I had to take a picture of the attachments, because I didn’t have enough time to send them,” she says. By 11:30 p.m., she’d been locked out of her work email.

Rose agreed to discuss her experience with NPR, which is identifying her only by her middle name because she holds out hope she could work for the government again someday and because she worries she'll be retaliated against for talking to the press.

Just days before, President Trump had signed an 

 directing federal agencies to “initiate large-scale reductions in force.” Rose is 

 in those moves. The Department of Government Efficiency, overseen by Elon Musk, has also been pushing to slash the federal workforce.

 “probationary” employees were terminated at the Energy Department. Many were employees with less than two years of federal service. The DOE did not respond to NPR's request for comment on the firings.

Rose is the daughter of immigrants and grew up on the East Coast. For her entire professional life, she had wanted to work in the government. She’d done a few internships around Washington, D.C., before taking a job as a consultant. In that role, she’d worked alongside federal workers on environmental cleanup and clean energy projects.

Working with those federal employees inspired her to pursue a job as a civil servant. But, she says, she soon learned that “getting a job in the federal government is a science in itself.”

Initially, she was rejected from several positions. Undaunted, Rose steeped herself in the language of the U.S. government. She taught herself an endless list of acronyms and bought a book on how to build a résumé that would make her more attractive to federal work.

Then late last year, she got what she thought was going to be her big break. She had interviewed at the Department of Energy for a job helping to oversee a portfolio of renewable energy projects. She says the hiring process was a monthslong ordeal, during which, she jokes, she told them everything except “what my blood type is.”

In December, she got the call from human resources telling her she’d landed the role. “I was with a friend at the time,” she says. “And I just kept saying over and over, ‘I got the job! I got the job!’”

It was going to be a turning point in her life: “It really felt like … my career is beginning, because this is the job I want,” she recalls.

Rose knew that Trump had just been elected, but the HR recruiter assured her that this wouldn’t be a problem. “They told me the precedent was in previous administrations, they have honored the people that have been hired.”

HR told her she could join as late as February, but she was so excited she asked to start the job early.

“I was like, ‘Please let me start in January!’” she recalls. “Kind of silly looking back now — I didn't even work there for a month until I got the boot.”

Rose had to let her family know she’d been fired, including her dad — a military veteran living in Florida who is a big supporter of Trump.

Before she’d taken the job, she'd joked with him: “If I lose this job, I’m going to pack my toothbrush, put all my things in a little hobo satchel and be knocking on your door.

“Little did I know that door would be destroyed in the Florida hurricanes.”

Her father’s house was ruined by hurricanes Helene and Milton, she says. For Rose, it’s a particularly bitter irony, because her job was to try to help develop alternative energy sources.

“The work I was doing and supporting was directly related to climate change, which is why these natural disasters are on the rise,” she says.

Her dad was sympathetic when he heard about her firing. His response was “‘That really sucks, but you’ll bounce back.’”

Rose doesn’t feel particularly bouncy at the moment, but she doesn’t seem angry at her dad either. If anything, she feels closer to him.

“I remember I was sitting at a dinner with my dad recently, and he was talking about ‘It feels like we are forgotten, because as soon as the hurricane in Florida happened, then it was North Carolina, then it was the California wildfires,’” she says. “And there’s a relationship between all of this — federal employees feel forgotten. My dad who voted for Trump feels forgotten.

“Across the board, everybody feels this sense of loss and like ‘I’m not being heard,’” she says.

But she doesn’t have much time to reflect. She has to find work.

“Bills aren’t going to stop because I lost my job. Car payments aren’t going to stop because I lost my job. Student loans aren’t going to stop because I lost my job,” she says.

While she’s searching for her new gig, she says, she has thought about parking herself on the sidewalk outside the Energy Department, on the off chance they might take her back.

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Geoff Brumfiel

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Rose is one of thousands of federal workers who have been terminated by the Trump administration. At 26, she’s left wondering what to do now.

She worked for years to get a federal job. Within a month, she was fired

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