Mental health issues ripple through the federal workforce with firings : Shots

Federal workers and contractors who have been fired hastily in recent weeks say among the many personal and financial costs of these terminations is their mental health.

Thousands of workers across the federal government including at the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, USAID and the Environmental Protection Agency have been terminated — in many cases with little explanation or process — since President Trump took office. Elon Musk’s efficiency effort known as DOGE initiated the mass firings.

Nadia Shadravan was working as a contractor evaluating projects for USAID until she received a furlough notice. For the last three years she’s been living and working in Senegal with her husband and two children, ages 14 and 12.

“I can see the worry in their faces,” she says of her children. “I don’t want them to worry about me, but I do think it’s unavoidable and I see that they’re stressed about the idea of what this is going to mean for our family.”

A hit to productivity

Some experts warn that destabilizing the collective mental health of the workforce with these kinds of unprecedented firings will undermine productivity. “I have never seen anything that from the outside looks so random, sloppy — the impact is intimidation and fear,” says Amy Edmondson, who studies organizational psychology at Harvard Business School.

Employees still working in such environments will be less productive, Edmonson’s research shows.

Last week, Musk brandished a chainsaw on stage at the CPAC conference, referencing the job cuts. On Saturday, employees across the government got an email asking them to list five things they got done last week by midnight Monday. On X, Musk said not answering the email would amount to a resignation.

A tsunami across the field

Shadravan says she has no job prospects and no idea where her family will land. Her husband is employed as a teacher, but she worries his job is also in jeopardy given many of his students are the children of Americans posted abroad and also dependent on the funding ecosystem of USAID, which stands for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Shadravan describes the USAID shutdown as a tsunami across the entire field. “Opening up LinkedIn and literally all you see is everyone with the same message,” she says. “Everyone you’ve ever worked with, everyone you’ve ever connected with professionally is in the exact same situation as you and is out of a job.”

The ripple effects of trauma are sweeping across federal agencies. For some, just the fear of being fired has induced mental health crises. One federal employee — Joe, who asked NPR not to use his full name over concerns about retaliation, describes his symptoms as, “spiraling, anxiety driven, heart palpitating, headache, can’t breathe.”

In January, Joe took an approved leave of absence to help a sick family member. “I was told ‘Do what you got to do,'” he recalls, and says he felt grateful to be able to support his family during a difficult time.

But when he opened up his computer after weeks of absence, Joe discovered he had missed the deadline for Elon Musk’s “fork in the road” offer to resign now and be paid through the summer. As a relatively recent hire, he felt he was a likely candidate to be fired and feared that he had missed his chance for any compensation.

“I had such an anxiety panic attack, I called the suicide hotline,” Joe recalls, referring to the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline.

After several debilitating weeks, Joe says he was finally informed that he would be able to take advantage of the offer — assuming the courts affirm its legality. He says staying in this job would be difficult as he was living in fear of getting fired: “Every time I went to open the emails, it was a knot in my stomach.”

Harvard Business School’s Edmondson says making healthy cuts at an organization is possible, but it takes time and “engaging deeply and clearly the question of what must this organization deliver, what will it require to deliver it, and then kind of who’s needed, who isn’t needed.”

Without that process, says Edmondson, organizations jeopardize something she calls team psychological safety. Workers who don’t feel safe aren’t very good at their jobs.

“Put them in trauma”

Administration officials have suggested that making federal workers feel targeted is one of its goals. Just before the election, ProPublica and Documented surfaced a speech from Russell Vought, now Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, in which Vought said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”

Vought’s office did not respond to requests for comments for this story, nor did other federal agencies contacted. “We want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” said Vought in the speech. He went on to say, “We want to put them in trauma.”

For federal workers Nadia Shadravan and Joe, that effort has been successful.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, you can call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Have information you want to share about the ongoing changes across the federal government? Katia Riddle is available through encrypted communications on Signal at Katia.75