Honest question - what are government employees planning on doing if they're fired?
My wife is a VA therapist who works with combat veterans. Each day she sits with veterans who have gone through fucked up shit worse than one can possibly imagine, and helps them process their trauma.
She earned a doctorate degree after 8 years, took nearly $200K in student loans, worked 6 as a trainee with no pay, one year of minimum wage and one year slightly more than minimum wage. We relocated twice for her to be able to work at different VAs as part of her training. Last year she received and accepted an offer from the VA to be a full-fledged staff member. The offer also included a program to pay off her grad school loans over 5 years.
We just recently bought a house near her VA facility and made a serious commitment to stay at least 5 years.
If she's fired, it would pull the rug out from underneath us. Everything she worked for, all the sacrifices she made, it would all be swept away in a flash.
If that's the case, would it be possible to file a lawsuit against the government? I'm honestly asking practically. How does one go about suing the government?
P.S. It's very saddening how Elon Musk with a net worth in excess of $300B spends each day on Twitter and treats this as a joke :(
DH has worked for the feds most of his adult life in one capacity or another, and under normal conditions would have so many RIF preference points (including due to tons of performance bonuses) that his job would be secure even from deep cuts.
However, my suspicion is that the only reason DOGE has requested that most agency heads have 30 days to submit lists of RIF preference for their employees is so that DOGE can fire hundreds of thousands of career non-probationary feds indiscriminately next month while pretending to take legally required RIF processes into account. They didn't follow the law on probationary firings in several ways, so there's no reason to assume they will follow them with nonprobationary firings.
USGS (science agency) higher ups indicated that one or two of Musk's interns are making all these hiring/firing decisions rather arbitrarily for each huge agency. Again, these people have zero experience, so how could they possibly understand how to properly execute RIF layoffs? And since no one is stopping them, why would they bother to care?
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My husband's feeling, and I agree, is that either his job is almost certainly safe, or else entire giant chunks of the government will cease to exist between March 10-15th.
If the latter, we expect his own entire scientific department (established by act of Congress and in existence via legally binding cooperative agreements with each state government) to be 100% axed (or all employees fired but one or two admin people/heads of empty dept, leaving it a legally existing 'zombie' agency).
My gut feeling is it's the latter.
We are 2.5 years from him retiring. We really needed those two years of salary/retirement growth so it's agonizing to know what to do right now.
If it was just the two of us, no big...he could retire right now and we'd have enough. But we are almost fully supporting a parent and need enough to buy a much larger house in a more expensive market (as opposed to a small house needed if it were just us).
We are heavily invested in stocks in his federal 401k b/c under normal conditions we have nerves of steel and would ride out uncertainty like this. But the possibility of massive gov't workforce cuts triggering a recession at the same time my husband loses his job (the great majority of our income)? I think we are going to pull his retirement savings out of stocks sometime in the next week.
Then I guess he starts job hunting in a location we would vastly prefer to live. He's really well known in his field, but he's in his early 60s and the job market will be flooded with fired federal scientists, and possible state scientists as well (we just heard from a friend employed as a biologist in NM that his job might also get cut as a result of the soon to pass budget, meaning even STATE jobs could be lost as part of this blood bath).
What's excruciating is RIGHT NOW there are two good positions open in Tucson (one of the places we'd potentially want to move to), that DH would be very competitive for (much lower earning but good jobs that he'd probably like a lot), and he's trying to decide whether to go ahead and apply (just in case he loses job next month) and then risk pissing them off and burning a bridge by not taking it if his Federal job ends up safe.
I think I'm going to urge him to apply; better to get a foot in door before the market is flooded. If they offer him the job and want a decision before middle of next month, it sucks, but not as much as if he doesn't apply, gets fired, and the job opps close or are flooded by other laid off scientists.
If he can't get something like those jobs, he'll work his contacts to try to work contracts or consulting (again, the market will be flooded, so...).
Or worst case scenario, he takes a shitty retail job or whatever he can get, in a city we want to move to. Then we try to get a mortgage on a house big enough to accommodate our 'special needs' and do a staged move over the following year.
Then I look for a job in the new location.
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And we would certainly be joining any lawsuits against Musk, if his firing appears to be illegal.
