I got a bonus and a raise. Then DOGE fired me for ‘performance.’

Trump and Musk are lying to get rid of people like me.

By Maxwell from Home of the Brave

As an employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a Presidential Management Fellow, my job was all about efficiency. As part of a two-year fellowship for recent graduate students, I worked on the policy team, helping liaise between the White House, CDC, and Congress. I helped connect policymakers with the relevant experts on infectious diseases, public health, or whatever else they might need.

It was a job I took seriously, and one I really enjoyed doing. Which is why it was such a gutting experience for me to be illegally fired by Elon Musk and his DOGE crew—not once, but twice. And it wasn’t just me. I watched thousands of the nation’s brightest and most promising young scientists be shoved out the door, discarded, and shown maximum contempt by a government that they had dedicated themselves and their expertise to.

Within a week of Donald Trump taking office, many of my colleagues and I realized that we wouldn’t make it to the end of our two-year fellowships. We braced ourselves for mass layoffs, with speculation rampant about when the axe would fall.

As expected, I received an email in February telling me that my employment would end in a month. The email cited “performance reasons,” and I learned that thousands of my colleagues had received the same explanation. But this didn’t pass the sniff test: I had been recently promoted and received a bonus, and my latest performance review, only a month prior to being illegally fired, was “excellent and improving.” When thousands of employees all get fired for “performance” on the same day, it’s clear no one was actually evaluated.

The next few months were an agonizing limbo. We were told that our paychecks would stop coming in a matter of weeks, and then that they would be extended indefinitely. We read in the press that our firings were illegal and that we would be reinstated, and we heard administration officials pledge that they wouldn’t allow it. Needless to say, this made it all but impossible to plan our lives and our livelihoods.

Was any of this legal? Should we appeal this decision? How would we even do that? These were the questions we were kicking around every day. When we spoke to lawyers about it, their response was: “This has never happened before. We’re in uncharted waters. We have no idea what’s going to happen to you.”

I kept in touch with my colleagues, who were fearful of losing their jobs—jobs that were now even more difficult to do, given the DOGE-inflicted staff shortage and a hiring freeze across the Department of Health and Human Services. My team of six became a team of one within a month, and entire divisions were fired en masse.

All of this continued through May, when I was fired for the second time. This time, the email acknowledged that it had been illegal to fire me for “performance” reasons. So instead, I was fired for no reason at all. An hour later, I received another notification that the second firing was paused due to a new court injunction. By this point, I had had enough. I had lined up another position, and I resigned.

All in all, it took DOGE three months to fire me, and I was paid the whole time. That’s not exactly what I would call efficiency. And while I’m happy to report that my story at least ends with me finding another job, the same can’t be said for the others who went through the same thing. I know people who had just moved cities, taken out mortgages, and started families when Trump and Musk decided to get rid of them.

Before this whole process, if you had asked me if I thought government was efficient, I would have said no. That’s part of the reason I took a job at the CDC in the first place—to try to help. But what I know from my time there is this: If you want efficiency, the very last thing you want to do is fire people. Getting rid of personnel across the board creates a vacuum of expertise and institutional knowledge that takes decades to recover from. And that’s what we’ve chosen to do to our country’s federal workers en masse.

The real damage here goes far beyond the people who were fired. Government service used to be an attractive career path for people who wanted to make a difference: stable, meaningful work where expertise was valued. This administration has shattered that trust, ensuring that future administrations will struggle to attract capable people who’ve now seen how quickly dedication and competence can be discarded.

DOGE’s indiscriminate, slash-and-burn approach is a preposterous and cruel way to treat the nation’s best and brightest, its future leaders. And it reveals a whole lot more about the character of Trump, Musk, and the rest of the people in charge of this charade, than it does about any of the people whom they fired.

Maxwell is a former CDC employee and Presidential Management Fellow. He is part of Home of the Brave, a new initiative highlighting the harms of Donald Trump’s second term.