Nadine Bùi was a tuberculosis program analyst for the United States Agency for International Development. She worked there for four years. Then, in January 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency began laying off federal employees.
Bùi said she felt numb when she was laid off from USAID. She broke down for the first time when she was physically back in the office, turning in her badge and laptop. The photographs, research and work USAID workers had done around the globe had been removed, and if they couldn’t be taken off the wall, they were painted over, she said.
“It was heartbreaking to see them, well, fire us, but then also trying to erase us, and I think that’s what it felt like,” Bùi said.
Bùi’s was one of around 5,200 USAID contracts terminated, NPR reported in March 2025. President Donald Trump’s changes began with USAID on his first day in office, with a freeze on certain funding, according to Executive Order 14169. Additional changes placed some federal employees across multiple agencies into over a year of unemployment.
Over a year after the round of layoffs that affected Bùi, four former federal employees said their federal offices experienced confusion and shock during the cuts. The former employees now work in academia, are working on personal projects or are still searching for their next job. Some said they hope to return to the federal government, while others are moving on to different work. An internal USAID document shows how those layoffs unfolded in one department, changes that Bùi said caused uncertainty for the people she worked with.
Bùi compared the layoffs to Thanos snapping his fingers in “Avengers: Infinity War.”
“Thanos just snaps his fingers, and then half the team’s gone,” Bùi said.
USAID employees navigated confusing layoffs
Within USAID’s Bureau for Global Health, which implemented most of USAID’s programs, 711 people lost their jobs, according to a Feb. 28, 2025, USAID memorandum that POLITICO published last year. The memo, called “Documentation of Bureau for Global Health Workforce Reductions,” shows that the Global Health workforce shrank from 783 to 72 staff members in 36 days. Around 260 employees were, at the time of the memo, on administrative leave. The changes resulted in confusion, uncertainty and not enough staff members to run Global Health, according to the memo.
Bùi said that during the changes to the USAID workforce and operations, many employees still held on to hope that the cuts were temporary because of the notices’ language. She said she remembers the word “freeze” in her employment status email and thought that meant the changes wouldn’t last.
“There was still that possibility that things could come back,” she said.
Bùi said there was an air of fear in the office. Those who continued to work for USAID during the changes described the environment to her as complete chaos, with operations changing daily as system access and employment status shifted, she said.
Bùi said the leadership in her office told them they were safe, and that much of the office’s funding, including her salary, was approved for a year.
“I think, in hindsight, it probably was a mix of leadership not knowing themselves what was going on,” she said.
Like Bùi, Alex Durena worked at USAID. He was a tuberculosis diagnostics technical advisor for four years. Durena said the mass layoffs created a cascade of former federal employees looking for jobs. He said many are still unemployed now, over a year later.
The majority of Global Health staff received administrative leave notices on Feb. 4, 2025, according to the memo. Administrative leave is a paid absence from work, according to an Office of Personnel Management fact sheet.
Durena said directly-hired USAID employees weren’t the only ones who lost their jobs when funding was cut. He said the cuts also impacted indirect hires, who were contracted through a third party to work for USAID, and locally-employed workers in the countries where USAID operated.
Four-hundred-and-five people employed through a third-party contractor as indirect-hires lost their jobs when the Global Health Training, Advisory, and Support Contract instated a stop-work order clause following Executive Order 14169, according to the memo. The contract provided support personnel to Global Health, according to a Devex web page about a team that manages the contract.
Of those contractors, 374 worked at Global Health, including Bùi and Durena.
Durena, who was an indirect hire, said he received a termination letter and no severance when USAID was shut down.
Webert José, a health science specialist, began working for USAID in 2011 as a local employee in Haiti. He moved to Washington in 2018 and went back to USAID in 2019, where he worked for three-and-a-half years.
José said he had been offered other opportunities in the past and turned them down because of the stability of federal jobs at the time. Local employees in Haiti moved to Washington to take on direct-hire USAID foreign service officer positions, acting as a pipeline to direct USAID employment, José said.
Some of the remaining USAID employees are now absorbed into the Department of State to wrap up ongoing projects that were under USAID, Bùi said. According to a Congressional Research Service overview of USAID’s management, the State Department was set to hire 308 direct-hire staff, 370 locally-employed staff and 40 personal services contractors as of March 28, 2025. Terminated USAID employees would be open to those positions, according to the overview. It’s unclear how many of those positions the State Department has filled.
The Global Health department was unable to verify the exact number of personnel who received termination letters because of account inactivations, according to the memo.
Bùi said her work at USAID was more than a job, which made the layoffs far more painful.
“It was our passion, it was our calling, it was our purpose,” Bùi said.
Employees’ questions went unanswered in the Department of Health and Human Services
Natalia Vargas, a former public health advisor for the Department of Health and Human Services, received a letter of separation in March 2025 along with the rest of her office. At the time of her termination, Vargas had just given birth to her son.
“I was just a new mom, supposed to, you know, return back to the office,” Vargas said. “So, that not knowing whether I would get paid and the outcome of that was very stressful.”
Vargas said she and her colleagues didn’t know who would receive severance, if that was a possibility or how much they would receive. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers aren’t required to give employees severance pay when they terminate them, but they often do, according to the Department of Labor’s web page for severance pay. Severance pay is usually based on the amount of time that the employee was eligible to work when the office terminated them, according to the web page.
Vargas went to her bosses and the human resources office, but no one had answers for her. In the end, some of the employees received payments after their layoffs, but many who were new or retiring soon did not, Vargas said.
“There wasn’t any clarity on who we could even talk to,” she said.
Susan Jenkins worked for the Department of Health and Human Services for 14-and-a-half years before the people in her office were laid off in April 2025. At the time of her departure from the federal government, Jenkins was a senior data, evaluation and evidence-building executive. She said she provided standards for government data collection on race and ethnicity and shaped data evaluation policy for the department.
Jenkins said her office has multiple legislatively-mandated duties, many of which were not being carried out as of April. The duties include tracking evidence collection and building collection frameworks across the department and monitoring agency reports and activity.
Many former federal employees who carried out these duties sued the federal government for being wrongfully dismissed because their jobs were legislatively mandated, Jenkins said.
Now, she is concerned about the lack of data collection and evaluation within the department, with 2026 being the second year without a survey of community needs and program performance. She said communities won’t be served in the ways they need to be when their conditions change because the government won’t know about it.
“Certain data that aren’t being collected, they can’t be collected later,” Jenkins said.
She said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, said the federal government fired all of them because they were the wrong people, and that they have now hired better people.
Now, she said, several people who were laid off in her office are now reemployed in the same office.
“They’re literally the same people,” Jenkins said.
She has received seven or eight position notices prompting her to reapply through the reemployment list but has decided not to.
Jenkins said people will stop wanting to work for the federal government if the jobs, which have historically been known for stability, become unstable.
“The government is going to lose,” Jenkins said.
Where are they now?
Now, Jenkins remains an adjunct professor at American University as she was during her time at HHS, and has started multiple new career opportunities since she was laid off. She works as a senior fellow for the Data Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit that uses data to influence policy, where she said she has a platform to discuss and comment on the data and evaluation quality that she previously worked on at HHS.
She also signed on to be an instructor for Illuminate, a professional and organizational development company, where she will be teaching classes on evaluation policy, organizational evaluation and making evidence more accessible to policy-makers.
Jenkins is also opening her own consulting website to work with organizations, universities and states, helping them with performance evaluation and measurement.
“I’m in a really good spot now,” Jenkins said.
Durena is unemployed, but has completed professional certifications, including adjusting claims and selling car and home insurance, and is working on opening a business with some friends. He said he hopes that in four-to-five years, he and his colleagues will have the opportunity to return to the federal government.
Vargas said she ended up getting severance payments, which have allowed her to focus on spending time with her family.
Vargas started an online initiative in September 2025 to help people heal from trauma using her poetry, writing and personal abuse and recovery experience. She continues to apply for jobs in the private sector, shortening her resumé to be more palatable for corporate employers. Vargas said it took a lot of time and effort to figure out what corporate employers want to see because of how niche her federal job was.
“It does put you at a disadvantage that people may not fully understand,” Vargas said.
José is also still job hunting. He’s still in the Washington area and has applied to 500 positions, he said. He has had to change his past job titles when applying for positions in the private sector and break down his past work in a way that makes sense for the corporate context, he said.
Bùi is working with a friend on a part-time venture to open a restaurant and bar. She said she is in a time in her life where she may benefit from more flexibility. That, she said, is something worth risking.
“The layoff allowed us, I think, to just take a step back and reevaluate priorities in life,” Bùi said.
Edited by Ava Ramsdale, Syd Patak, Lucas Powers, Will Sytsma and Caleb Ogilvie.
