How it feels to be fired, rehired, fired and rehired again
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Plenty of adults know what it's like to be fired, but for federal workers these days, getting canned once is just table stakes.
The big picture: Many have been fired, rehired, fired and hired again, and are still waiting to find out how long their employment could last.
- It's the very opposite of efficiency or productivity, according to workers.
Zoom in: One employee at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been fired twice and had it reversed twice. They spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation at work, where things are tenuous.
- This worker has been speaking to Axios since February, after the Trump administration ordered the agency to stop all work.
- They were terminated the first time then, one of tens of thousands of "probationary" employees who were let go across agencies.
- "It's been pretty exhausting dealing with everything," they said.
What happened: The first firing was a sloppy process, done through a form letter that didn't even include this person's name. Pay and benefits were cut immediately. There was a particularly stressful period where there was no health insurance for their entire family, all covered under their plan.
- About a month later, after a federal judge ruled the probationary firings were illegal, they were reinstated and ultimately received six weeks' back pay for the time away. And it was inefficient, taking three weeks for this remote employee to get all equipment back up and running.
- Just a couple weeks after that, almost all employees at the CFPB received reduction-in-force notices. They were all fired in the RIF, part of the White House's effort to drastically scale back the federal workforce.
- They were given one day before their computer access was shut off. Then that same week, thanks to another court case, the RIF was rescinded.
Things are not back to normal now. There is not a lot of actual work to be done at the CFPB these days as leadership has put a stop to much of it.
- "We're all sweating now that we're just going to be terminated outright again," this worker said.
Zoom out: Being fired and rehired multiple times is unusual, but it does happen in the private sector.
- "It's disorienting," said Kevin Delaney, cofounder of Charter, a future-of-work startup. Back in the 1990s, working in television, he was fired and rehired multiple times. "After that I was probably less naive about what employment means in a company."
- Getting fired is already destabilizing and emotionally intense. For it to happen several times in a short period is even rougher to navigate.
The bottom line: Putting workers in a state of high anxiety was a stated goal of Russell Vought, who is now acting head of the CFPB.
- "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected," Vought said in a speech last year, first reported by ProPublica.
- "When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work," he said. "We want to put them in trauma."
