When Michelle Huntoon got an email last Monday night reinstating her at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, she laughed.
The email, which overturned her immediate termination just over a month prior, felt like a “long, pointless joke.”
When she was fired Feb. 14 under a wave of mass layoffs ordered by the Trump administration, Huntoon spent the day tapping her network — she was not doing unemployment. She got in touch with the private company that gave her an offer two years ago — which she had turned down to help fund loans for affordable housing projects — and was invited to start the following week.
Now, with that income, as well as the money she’s to receive under her paid administrative leave at HUD, she’s set to make out pretty well, she said. But it’s not what she wanted.
“At the personal level, I’m laughing at how I’m making out like a bandit for something I did not want,” she said. “On the other hand, I’m feeling so despondent about what’s going to happen long term for friends, agencies, services and the country.”
Huntoon, who lives in Burlington, was among the thousands of probationary employees fired by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in an effort led by billionaire Elon Musk to downsize and restructure the federal government. Musk and his team have effectively gutted certain agencies, including the Agency for International Development and the Department of Education, while significantly reducing employment and spending at others, like HUD.
A wave of court orders have attempted to reverse this course. On March 13, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the administration to reinstate fired workers from six federal agencies, just hours before a judge in Maryland ordered reinstatements across 18 agencies. On Tuesday, another Maryland judge said the shuttering of USAID was likely unconstitutional, ordering DOGE to reinstate employee access and prohibiting any more steps to collapse the agency.
The orders have led to nearly 25,000 workers being told they’re reinstated, whether they be invited back to the office or put on paid leave.
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Employees wonder if the moves are too little, too late. They also see irony in them: they were fired to save money but now are being paid not to work.
“This was all done in the name of efficiency, and it feels like truly the opposite of that,” said Maddie Murphy, a reinstated employee in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s SNAP department who lives in Somerville. “They’re paying workers not to work, which I think is a really challenging pill to swallow.”
Murphy received an email March 14 letting her know she was on paid administrative leave, and will receive back pay from the day she was terminated. Other than that, she received little communication after she was let go Feb. 14, other than the shipping labels sent to her house to collect equipment.
Then, on Friday around 5 p.m., she received an email saying that she was scheduled to return to work on Monday, March 24, or could set up a future start date before the 31st. She’s still struggling with whether or not to return.
The USDA was one of the agencies covered by the California lawsuit, which requires “immediate” reinstatement of employees and does not allow paid administrative leave for the six agencies it covers. The agency says it has a phased plan to return probationary employees but has not laid out a timeline; the government said reinstating people on a paid leave status was an “intermediate measure” in the process of full reinstatement.
Murphy said she’s weighing the small picture, of loving her job and the team she worked with, with big picture concerns about what working for the agency will look like under the new administration — and if the same thing won’t happen to her again. Both rulings say the government has the right to reduce its workforce, outlined in a 119-page handbook detailing this restructuring, as long as it adheres to the law while doing so.
“In a lot of ways, it’s a different job from what I took in September,” Murphy said.
Claire Bergstresser, an employee at HUD’s Fair Housing office, feels the same hesitation. The Trump administration plans to terminate 50% of HUD’s workforce. Though she received the same email as Huntoon Monday night, the Maryland court order defines reinstatement as either bringing employees back to work or putting them on paid administrative leave. Both HUD employees have not heard about a start date.
“I’m feeling that the moment they’re able to correctly let us go, they’ll do it again,” said Bergstresser, who lives in Everett.
Like Murphy, Bergstresser said she’s been in the dark since she was first terminated. Every day she flips from her email to her bank account, to message threads with people she knows trying to piece together what’s happening.
“That’s kind of what it’s like to be in this position right now. You’re checking everything, waiting for everything,” she said. “It’s all kind of [a game of] telephone.”
For agencies that have felt the brunt of Trump scrutiny, attacks have been more calculated. Trump signed an executive order Thursday to close the Department of Education, though the department cannot be ended without congressional approval. He’s worked to dismantle USAID, leaving what’s left of it to be folded into the State Department, and says he will appeal the court’s recent decision.
Rainer Assé, who lives in Brockton, has been on paid administrative leave since Feb. 14. In his role of an agricultural adviser, Assé worked with USAID units in 20 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, working to help agriculture-led development and economic growth since 2018.
There’s been no instructions since, but he and his colleagues have all been waiting to get laid off under Trump’s Reduction In Force plans. He’s not sure whether the USAID court order will change anything.
“It’s really hard to get a paycheck when you haven’t done anything,” he said, beginning to cry. “It hurts us so much. I need the money, but it’s such an insult.”
Fired workers must receive 60 days’ notice and a severance package, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management website. Agencies are also being told to consider other options, such as offering early retirement or buyouts. Assé said he attended a meeting about both options last week.
Some employees, like Bergstresser, said they’d return to the office immediately, given the opportunity. Others, like Huntoon, said they would not do so under the current administration.
All are worried about the future of the work they did — from helping people with disabilities get housing accommodations to designing programs that helped women farming in Liberia.
Huntoon is most proud of a closing she did about a year ago for an affordable housing project in Lowell with 400 units. She’s hesitant to take the drive to go and see it.
“I feel like I’ll get kind of emotional seeing it and being like, that’s not something I’m going to be able to do again,” she said.
Reducing workforce in private companies, state and federal government is not uncommon, of course. Paul Craney, executive director of Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for fiscal responsibility in the state government, said it’s not always a clean process.
“Some of the people right now might feel like they’re caught in the crosshairs, but there’s a bigger plan from the Trump administration,” Craney said. “This is all kind of the messy transition when you’re trying to rearrange bureaucracies.”
But the scale and speed of these reductions — and now the uncertainty — has disillusioned federal workers.
“A reduction in force or downsizing — if it’s properly done, people can understand that,” Assé said. “But the way this was done, people are left without life saving medication, food is rotting. The waste of this, of resources and human life … It makes me ashamed.”
This story is part of a partnership between WBUR and the Boston University Department of Journalism.