A panel of former and current federal employees painted a picture of chaos, waste and inefficiency in the wake of widespread firings at federal agencies initiated by the Department of Governmental Efficiency effort led by billionaire Elon Musk.
The panel, put together by U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, the four-term Democrat whose district covers Johnson County, discussed how workers were abruptly fired with as little as 15 minutes’ notice.
The turnover has led to wasted onboarding costs for recent hires, potential late or unpaid bills to contractors, personal stress and an atmosphere of fear at the offices, the panelists said.
And the ultimate consequence, some indicated, could be Americans’ eventual loss of services provided by federal agencies.
“It’s not too hard to connect the dots from closing field offices to a lack of services,” said Garth Stocking, a technical expert at the Social Security Administration who has so far weathered the mass firings.
He called the DOGE team’s firings “absurd, reckless and thoughtless,” saying a time will come when constituents are going to be unable to get services such as disability or retirement claims.
Thousands of federal workers have been fired or have accepted early retirement offers in the early weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, a sweeping and quick-moving remaking of the federal government led by Musk’s DOGE office.
Though the effort has been cheered on by many conservatives, the pushback to mass firings has started to put some Republican lawmakers in a bind.
At a recent town hall in western Kansas, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall expressed support for shrinking the size of the federal workforce, but he walked out of the event early after attendees booed and questioned him about funding cuts and firings, as well as the Trump administration’s position on Ukraine and support for veterans.
Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican who chairs the Senate’s VA Committee, recently said efforts to increase governmental efficiency need to be done in a “more responsible manner.”
The Johnson County Post reached out to the Johnson County Republican Party for comments in response to the Davids-organized panel on Friday but had yet to receive a response at the time of publication of this article.
‘That’s where my heart was’
In a metropolitan area where the federal government is the largest employer, Stocking and the panel’s four fired workers said they were taken aback by the quick and haphazard way the staff reductions have taken place.
Donny Newsom of Leawood, a U.S. Navy veteran, was let go from his job as a senior project manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“When I retired from the Navy, my goal was to continue public service,” he said. “That’s where my heart was, and that’s the most disturbing thing to me.”
Newsom said he was aware of a push to privatize weather data from reading Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for remaking the federal government written by allies of President Trump and former officials of his first administration.
“I can’t imagine the weather being a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. That’s just disgusting to me,” Newsom said.
The ripple from the firings has the potential to cost taxpayers in the long run, he said. For example, Newsom said part of his job was making sure government contractors got paid on time. Being abruptly fired meant that some contracts he was responsible for would have to be overseen by other workers. He now finds himself working to get that done, even though, as a former employee, he isn’t getting paid.
“If we don’t pay those contractors on time, we as Americans pay interest every day it is paid late,” he said. Newsom chose to try and smooth the way for those contracts, but it involved a choice.
“The [Trump] administration wants chaos,” he said. “Do I give them chaos and let the chips fall where they may?”
Receiving the ‘fork in the road’ letter
Scott Curtis of Overland Park spent 32 years in the military and public service but was nevertheless new to the Federal Emergency Management Agency when he received the much-discussed “fork in the road” letter offering federal employees the option of quitting and being paid for a transition period in which they would not be required to work.
He decided to take the deferred resignation.
Since then, he was first told he would not be approved for that program, but then was notified he’d be reinstated after he was interviewed by The Bulwark, a conservative anti-Trump online news outlet. He said he hasn’t yet received the promised pay nor instructions for getting back into his old job.
Curtis said he expects to come out all right personally, but that the process is harder on new hires who are young, have small children and bought a house to move to Kansas City.
“I get that this happens in the private sector, but it doesn’t make it right,” he said.
By firing new employees, he said, the government is turning away sharp, young talent.
“The government is losing out,” he said.
Newly hired, then fired
Jasper Hudgins-Bradley of Overland Park was at the Internal Revenue Service for less than a month and was in training when he was fired.
Hudgins-Bradley, a writer who was a massage therapist before being hired to help people with questions about small business collection issues, did not receive a letter, he said.
His firing came when an IRS official told him and other people undergoing training to pack up the technology they’d been given. They were then walked off the property, he said.
That type of dismissal can be costly to taxpayers, he said. The cost of bringing in new employees begins with background checks and credentials issued even before training begins and, by some estimates, costs $10,000, he said.
‘I care about the mission’
Selina Bur of Kansas City, Missouri, a former transportation specialist with the federal Department of Transportation, echoed concerns about the way the firings happened. She said her dismissal came with only 15 minutes’ notice before her email was cut off and that the initial termination letter was reissued because of numerous typos and missing links.
“That tells the attention to detail they’re giving,” she said.
Bur and Stocking, also from Kansas City, also spoke of the atmosphere of fear that has made it hard to get things done at work.
Stocking, whose wife also works at the Social Security Administration, said the knowledge that both their jobs could go away leaves them with the worry that they might not be paid for “weeks and weeks.”
“I’m a nervous wreck. I don’t sleep because I care about the mission, about the people I work with and the beneficiaries,” he said. “These are real things that matter to real people.”
‘We need Congress’
As the meeting ended, Stocking asked Davids for action.
“We need Congress. We need you to act right now, in this moment,” he said. Democrats and Republicans need to work together “to make some sense of this,” he said.
Davids said she is working to convince Republicans, who have the majority of both houses of Congress.
“We are supposed to be providing oversight on this administration and things they are doing that are not OK,” she said.
She said she supports making the federal government more effective and efficient.
“These terminations are not the way to get there,” she said.
