'The federal workforce feels tormented': Federal employees on the consequences of losing their jobs
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President Donald Trump's administration and billionaire Elon Musk have worked steadily for weeks to drastically reduce the size and scope of the United States federal government.

Federal workers have been fired, placed on leave, or left their jobs by the tens of thousands. This includes the employees charged with issuing Medicare payments, protecting national parks, protecting nuclear security, and providing relief following floods, hurricanes, or wildfires. And soon, the numbers will likely include employees of the Department of Labor and federal workers responsible for doing things like ensuring food safety across the country.

As The New York Times reported last week, the workforce cuts could affect at least 12 percent of the nation's 2.4 million civilian federal workers. And that number could grow in coming weeks.

So today we are joined by three federal employees who lost their jobs, were forced out or placed on administrative leave by the current administration. And we want to get their view on the impacts the cuts have had, of course, on their own lives and the impact they could have on the nation at large. And I'm joined today by Emily Spilker, a former facilities engineer with the Department of Defense. Emily, welcome to On Point. Hi, Meghna. It's great to be with you today. Thank you.

Also with us is Arielle Kane, a former health policy analyst at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Arielle, welcome to you. Thank you so much for having me. Laura Golding is with us as well, Deputy Director at the Office of Communications for the Office of Personnel Management. LG, welcome to On Point. Thank you for having me.

So I'd like to just hear briefly from all three of you sort of what your experience was that brought you to your current state of employment, whatever that might be. So, Emily, let me let me start with you. Did you have any sort of upheavals in the last two months in your in your job life?

Yeah, that'd be an understatement, I would say. Yeah. So I moved from Dayton, Ohio. I worked at Wright-Patt Air Force Base during COVID when my husband started a PhD candidacy program at Purdue University. And I as well started a master's program there.

funded by the DOD. So I had been working remotely since COVID era for the last five years. And when Trump signed the return to office executive order, although I am working remotely, I'm not an official remote employee. So I was not sure how I would be affected by

And what I did not expect was an email on Monday morning just a few weeks later saying that I was expected to show up in the office that Thursday, three days later with no exceptions. So I had about three days to uproot my life, move back to Dayton, and work in an office I had never worked for.

Okay. So help us explain the geography for a second because I'm not sure I caught that. Because you were allowed to work remotely as a federal employee because of COVID, where were you physically? I was in Lafayette, Indiana, which is about 200 miles from Wright-Patt. It's about a three or four hour drive. Okay. Because your husband was at Purdue, you said. Yes. And then I did a master's degree funded by the DOD. So I was technically, you'd say, a special project graduate.

remote employee for the government. Okay. And you were doing work for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base? Yes. Since that time, yes. Okay. So then what happened? So yeah, like I said, Monday morning, I get an email that says, be here on Thursday, like the rest of every other employee. Although, you know, everyone else in my office, it's just a mere drive to work for me, et cetera. Are you still doing that?

I am no longer doing that. No, I did that for about two months before taking the federal buyout. I just decided, you know, this is just not practical for my life. Okay, you took the buyout. Understood. And then when you said you're employed, you have a new job now.

I'm actually in the middle of an interview today. Not for the federal government, I presume? Not for the federal government, no. Aria, let me turn to you. I understand that what I should be saying is that you are a former health policy analyst for CMS. Is that right? Yeah, I'm in a bit of a gray zone in that I was terminated. I was a part of the waves of probationary employees getting laid off because we have fewer protections.

And I had served in the federal government for less than a year. However, there are some legal challenges to those firings because they were done illegally.

And currently I have been allegedly reinstated, but I'm sitting at home talking to you. I have nothing in writing that says I'm reinstated. I did receive a paycheck last week. So again, I'm in the grayest of gray zones. And the judge that is ruling on this issue is actually making a decision, I believe today.

the same day that thousands of HHS employees are being laid off as a result of the reduction in force. So I truly have no idea what my employment status will be after today. Wow. Now, how did you find out about, again, I'm glad you mentioned your provisional status, right? Because you had been an employee for what, less than a year?

And Doge and the Trump administration had particularly targeted provisional employees with the assumption that they hadn't had enough experience to justify remaining in their jobs. Although, to be clear, many provisional employees were actually people who had been promoted into new positions and may have had a lot of experience. But how did you find out about when you got cut?

It was very chaotic. So what happened was that, again, I was watching the news and I had seen that probationary employees were getting fired across HHS. I worked at CMS, which is the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid, which is a sub-agency of HHS.

And so I'm seeing in the news that CDC probationary workers are being fired and NIH probationary workers are being fired and FDA probationary workers are being fired. And so I'm waiting for news for me. However, I was able to talk to our division leadership and she assured me that the office I was in was aligned with the mission of DOGE and that we were not going to be cut and my job was as safe as she could promise.

That was on a Friday afternoon. And then Friday evening rolls around. I receive no news. So I assume like I'm safe until Monday, you know, then the next morning I get a panicked text from my boss that says everything we learned yesterday was a lie. They are firing people. We have no idea who they're firing. Please like call me when you can.

saw that and I went on a run and I came back from a run and I had a message from my colleague saying that she had gotten fired. She was also probationary. And then as I was calling people and reacting to this news, I got an email that said that I too had been fired. And then as soon as you opened the email, you lost access to your computer and your PIP card was canceled and then you could no longer communicate with anyone.

I should note that even though you were a probationary employee for the federal government, you had, what, a decade and a half of experience in this field beforehand? Yeah, yeah.

Yes, I am a mid-career professional, and I started working at CMS last year. I was hired as a part of a new project that launched January 1st, and we were working to improve maternal health outcomes in Medicaid. So the reason that, again, I was new was because it was a new line of work, and

It's not that poor performance or anything puts you in this probationary category. It's like any time you take a new role. So for example, one of my colleagues was also fired, and he was a nine-year – I'm going to use the word veteran twice – but veteran of the agency, and then he was also a veteran of the Army and an active reservist, and he was fired. I'm very grateful to say that he has been reinstated, but it took a full 30 days, and it was really chaotic on his life. Wow. Okay. Okay.

Well, LG, I really appreciate you patiently listening along. But speaking of veterans, you're a veteran as well. Is that right? That's correct. I served in the Navy for a little over five years as a public affairs specialist and a journalist. Are you still in your job as deputy director in the communications office at OPM?

Effectively, no. I am on admin leave right now for a couple of more weeks, but we found out, well, I found out that both my entire team and I were all being let go on the same day.

And we were all put on administrative leave immediately. So, you know, a similar experience. We got a notice via email and very quickly lost access to the network and, you know, couldn't access anything. It was the end of the workday. And so those folks who were in the office had to pack up their things and get out of there. And there were people who were not in the office that day or were on leave. And, you know, we're not able to get the notification. We're not able to get anything out of the office. So it was a very sudden change.

I had about an hour heads up and I was told it was imminent. And then when it seemed apparent that it was not imminent, I just went ahead and told my team, hey, we're about to all get riffed. You know, if you need to save phone numbers of your colleagues, if you, you know, make sure that you send that riff notice to your personal email. I don't know how long we'll have before we're, you know, shut off from the network. So it was a very sudden and jarring experience.

RIFT, is that a government acronym? Yes, RIFT stands for reduction in force. So there was nothing from my team. In my team, I had long tenured folks and I had probationary folks. And so for us, it wasn't anything about poor performance. It simply said your position is being abolished. So everyone's position in the Office of Communications at my agency, our positions were abolished. So everything that you can think of that a communications team would do was

That capacity just simply went away on that day. Abolished? Is that the actual word that was used? That is correct. And so in the RIF notice, you get a lot of information, you know, kind of very technical information, very official speak. But the phrase was that your position is being abolished. Is the word abolish a normal phrase that you'd see in a RIF or was this sort of a new doge touch to this?

I will be honest, I have 16 years of both military and civil service and have not gone through a RIF before, but I've never seen that word before. I don't know if it's the usual word, but it sure feels a little alarming when you see it.

Well, LG and Emily Spilker and Ariel Kane, hang on for just a second. There's a lot more that I want to hear from you about the work that you did do for the federal government. And then, of course, the big question is what impact do you think this is having on the people that you once served? So we'll talk about that in a moment. This is On Point.

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Follow wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of the episode. I just want to play a little bit for all of you of one of the many things that President Trump has said about the massive reduction in the federal workforce. It's part of a push, he says, towards improved government efficiency. We have to make our government smaller, more efficient, more effective and a lot less expensive.

This is the constant line that the president, that Elon Musk, that everyone associated with this really large reduction in force is giving that the federal government is bloated. The size of the workforce is too large. You can get the same work done faster, more efficiently with fewer people. I mean, Emily, do you have a retort to that? Oh, yes. I would say this.

All of these ways of attacks of firing civilians and federal employees are not going to make the government cheaper in the long run, I would say. Why? One aspect of the DRP is that position really ceases to exist. But what doesn't change is the size of our mission and the work that we need to accomplish every day. So I wouldn't be surprised if they could possibly need to hire an outside contractor, which would be a lot easier.

more expensive than what we could have done as an in-house civilian. Okay. Arielle, same question for you. I mean, CMS is huge, right? Aside from the Department of Defense, Health and Human Services is the largest expense, essentially, other than, you know, Social Security, but that the federal government has. Arguably, there's room for squeezing some efficiencies out. What do you think? Medicare and Medicaid are already very efficient programs.

Overhead in the private insurance market is 15 to 20 percent of administrative costs for running a health care program. In the public sector, it's around 2 percent. So you can already see that we are much more efficient than the private sector. There are ways to make things more efficient, but it's not through blanket, untargeted firings.

First of all, I have now been paid for six weeks that I haven't done any work because of how they fired me. So that's not efficient. Secondly, they didn't give us time to do any sort of handoff. So I was working and I had no opportunity to pass off the work that I was doing or the emails that were, you know, threads that were in my inbox to anyone else before I lost access to my computer. So that's not efficient. Yeah.

When I was working on a program that was intended to improve efficiency in Medicaid and improve outcomes,

I know that Donald Trump and Elon Musk don't like to hear this, but to change public policy and to make it work better takes time and evidence. You don't want to just do across the board changes that you think might work. You want to make sure that a policy idea does have the results it's intended to have. And so that takes time and expertise. And then once you know whether or not it's effective, you scale it or you end it if it's not effective.

And in these large, um, unconsidered cuts, um, we aren't doing things in a way to make them more efficient. Passing legislation to reform the government, to maybe get rid of some onerous, outdated reporting requirements or, you know, whatever that takes time. You have to change the law to do that. And they aren't doing the hard work that that requires. So I just don't think that what they're doing will make anything work.

I want to lean on your experience in the private sector before you came to work for the federal government, because a lot of people look at what the three of you described about the sudden notice, the immediately getting cut off from IT systems, etc.,

And they say, I've been through that a bunch of times working for corporate America. That's just how it works. You get walked into a room, you know, if you're lucky and someone says, nope, you are surplus to requirements. Now you were being downsized and they just walk you straight out of the building. So I think folks may, you know, come to this conversation with

Perhaps not that much sympathy on that front, just saying, well, federal employees have been sort of insulated from the realities of the private sector for a long time and, you know, welcome to our world. Yeah, I get that maybe that's the expectation. I do think that I have two responses to that. You know, I was working in public service.

And the idea is that you're not working on behalf of a company's bottom line, but instead you're working on behalf of the American people to serve them. There's sort of like this social contract that's in place is that in exchange for less money and less flexibility, you have stability. People make that trade-off every day because they value serving the American people. But when you erode that

contract or that social understanding that we've long had between the trade-offs of working for the federal government and the trade-offs of working in the private sector. Why would anyone want to go work for the federal government? Because we already know that the opportunities are more lucrative. Yes, maybe more risky, but more lucrative in the private sector. And I just worry that in the way that they're handling this, no one in their right mind would go work for the federal government. And that is a loss to the American people, not to me. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, point well taken, right? Because, I mean, one of the things that has long been thought about is that you want the best people to be able to do the kind of complex, enacting the kind of complex policy that the federal government is charged with doing. Now, LG, let me just be blunt here, because, again, I'm trying to reflect on what listeners may be thinking. Why would the Office of Personnel and Management even need an Office of Communications? I mean, like, what does that actually have to do with serving the American people?

Yeah, I can understand on one hand where that may be coming from, but the Office of Communications does a lot to make sure that the American people, the press, other agencies, other stakeholders know what our agency is doing. Our agency dealt with workforce policy for the federal workforce, and that can be hard to understand. OPM is essentially the HR arm of the federal government, so we

you know, worked with concepts and products like healthcare, retirement, and anyone who has worked in healthcare or retirement or employment and performance management, that can be complex. So we did a lot of work to translate that really complex policy and those complex actions to people so they understood what their government was doing for them.

In addition, when we would have questions from press, public, anyone who wanted to reach out to our agency to get more information, it was our responsibility to respond or make sure that we were working with the various subject matter experts to get that information and be able to translate that for folks so they know what's going on. In addition, we had folks who worked remotely.

to make things accessible. So folks with disabilities who may not be able to just, you know, listen to a radio show, go online to read the latest memo or the latest policy, my team worked to make those accessible so that people with disabilities would be able to have the same access to this really incredible and important information.

Well, Emily, can I just ask you a quick question as well? Because you had mentioned this earlier in the show that did the federal government actually pay for your graduate education? Did I hear that right? Yes, that's true. They paid for it in full. And I was also paid full salary on top of that. So it was really a big investment in me as a future leader for the Air Force. And was there sort of an agreement that you would work for the federal government for a certain number of years in return?

There was. And part of the terms of accepting the deferred resignation program was that any monetary or time service commitment that anyone held was totally waived if they accepted the program. So you essentially got student loan forgiveness from the Trump administration. One hundred percent. Yeah. I wouldn't call that efficiency. Yeah.

The irony of that is quite biting. Can you tell me a little bit about what you did as a facilities engineer for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base?

Yes. Our Air Force plants are scattered across the country. They are each a plane flight away, but we sit at right pat and work with our on-site lease contractors. They pay the Air Force lease, and in turn, those funds are turned around to maintain these facilities since a lot of them are World War II era, and they have a lot of aging infrastructure. I was mentoring under a senior engineer within our office who had almost 40 years of experience in

a really specialty skill set of engineering in the fire protection industry. Um,

So we did design reviews together and ensured that new systems were installed correctly and maintained up to snuff and kept the employees as well as the production lines for these really critical defense weapon systems intact and prepared for any emergency. It was the intent of our office that I would be our senior engineer's successor. I would take over his position as the authority having jurisdiction as the engineer.

lingo there just to say that I would be the lead fire protection engineer over all those sites. And that is obviously no longer the case. And unfortunately, he also took the deferred resignation program as well. I was just going to ask about that. So who is leading fire protection then?

At this moment, it's going to be an all-hands-on-deck effort, I would assume, with the folks that are still in the office. I mean, everyone is cross-trained to some extent, so other engineers will have some awareness of that, but I think that they need to reach back to us.

higher up in the Air Force at this time. Okay, again, just arguing on behalf of what I think some listeners might be thinking, Emily, you know, I hear you when you say not just you, but your supervisor who had four decades worth of experience on these highly specialized types of equipment that were both sent out the door here. But you said that there's sort of cross specialties or there's some knowledge still in the building. I mean, is that enough? Is it the same level of

expertise you think that's still in the building so therefore and forgive me if this sounds just crude but it's not a great loss that both you and your supervisor are no longer working there I mean it's going to have to be enough because they really don't have any other option but no I would argue it's absolutely a great loss and it's not the same these systems are not going to get the same attention to detail by such an industry expert as they were receiving before okay

Let me just ask this question and I'll throw it open to any of you. What's really been interesting to me so far in talking with you is that even though some of you are not working anymore for the federal government, all of you still talk. You're using the terms we, like we do this, we do that. It feels like you still have a very strong and active connection to the work you did for the federal government.

I mean, does the feeling run that deep?

I'll take a stab at that. Go ahead, Arielle. I am someone who doesn't normally sort of drink the Kool-Aid of where I work. I recognize that I work for an employer and I am doing policy work on behalf of them, not necessarily on behalf of myself. However, I was really excited about joining the federal government. I come from a family of public servants. My dad was a school teacher. My sister actually still works for the federal government.

An uncle of mine also works for the federal government. And I really wanted to work in public service. I moved to D.C. like 12 years ago, and I've bopped around the private sector. But I felt like I couldn't leave D.C. without doing public service. Like, why would you get a master's in public policy and not work on, in some capacity, on behalf of the American people?

And then when I landed this job, I ended up doing work that was really meaningful to me, which was, you know, on maternal health policy. And I also had a good boss and a team that I really got along with. And so, um,

I was just really happy. And so, yeah, I'm still like speaking in terms of we, because I still believe in the work that's going. I also like maybe still I'm holding out hope, you know, there is a chance that I get news today that I'm reinstated for real. So I guess I'm still speaking in the present tense. But I do believe that.

There are a lot of people like me who want to work on behalf of the American people who believe that the way to make the biggest impact is to design policies that work for the most people as possible. You know, and that is very much like wrapped up in my identity. So I'm not aware that I'm still using the term we, but it doesn't surprise me that I am. Emily or LG, you want to take a stab at it too?

Yeah, I'd love to add something there. I think when you choose to serve, I think you're answering a calling. And I think anyone who is religious may identify with that. Folks who have served in the military may identify with that. And I know civil servants identify with that.

One thing that people may not know is when you join the military and the civil service, you swear an oath. So you raise your hand and you swear an oath promising to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So when I joined the civil service, federal employment, it was a perfect fit for me because I took the oath that first day of work the same way I did when I enlisted in the Navy.

And so when you think about the values, about commitment to the team and the teamwork, integrity, an acute sense of duty and sacrifice to accomplish the mission, I think you will find that in spades in public servants everywhere. Emily and Ariel, just a yes or no. Did both of you take that similar oath? Yes. We'll be back. This is On Point.

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Before I move forward, LG, Emily and Ariel, I try not to be emotional about the work that I do because, you know, we try to get our facts right. We do a ton of research. We try to be as prepared as possible for these conversations. But I have to say I was caught off a little off guard there.

Because I did not know that, what, America's 2 million plus federal workers all take this very specific oath of office. I actually just now during our break, LG, I went to the OPM website and I pulled it up. And here it is. I'm just about to read the full oath of office. It says, I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. Now, all federal employees take this oath. I did not know that. I mean, LG, can you talk a little bit more about what

Taking that oath implies regarding the meaning of the work that federal employees undertake. Well, you reading that oath, you can't see me, but I have goosebumps because it hits the same every time. This is a serious job. That phrase, to well and faithfully discharge the duties of my office, is a serious job.

It doesn't matter who you are in the federal government, if you are early career talent who's just starting out in your career or maybe this is your first job out of college or if you are a 20-year, you know, long-term veteran of the government,

You walk into that job every day knowing you serve the American people and you swear an oath to that. That is your mission. The civil service, you know, we were talking about this a little bit before the break, but it is a mission oriented and mission based organization. I believe Ariel was saying it. We're not intended to work like a corporation. We're not here to serve, you know, stakeholders. We're not here for profit margins. We are here to serve a mission for the American people, no matter what the mission of each agency might be.

And taking that oath to me just really solidifies how important that is. And that's where you talk about the dedication and we're all saying we still as civil servants.

It's because you swear an oath into a group to take care of your neighbors and the people down the street who maybe don't agree with you, but you're here to make sure that they get their services anyway. And I think that's a really important and sacred calling. Yeah. And it's distinctly different from private sector service, right? No one asks you to swear an oath. Well, I guess I can't speak for all private sector companies, but it's definitely not common. Right.

I've never sworn an oath at any of the private sector companies. I worked out that's probably a good thing. But yeah, because the job that we do is difficult. We are often underfunded. We are often understaffed. But everybody still comes in each day just determined to accomplish that mission no matter what. And I think the oath is the basis of that.

Well, getting back to some facts and figures here, back in January, we actually did a full hour on the history of the United States Civil Service. And even though two

Two million plus federal workers seems like a really big number. I think, Ariel, as you'd mentioned before, it's basically less than 2% of the entire civilian workforce in this country. But even more interestingly, we spoke with a professor named Donald Moynihan at the University of Michigan, and he did an analysis where he said that in the United States, A, our federal workforce is, in fact, the same if not smaller than peer nations, and

And on top of that, the federal government already privatizes a lot of services. And he did analysis and found out that the U.S. has something like three to four private contractors for every single federal employee that we have.

So, you know, for Ariel, the work that you were doing, there's three to four private contractors that are also getting paid for that same work. I wanted to lay that out. And Emily, let me turn to you because your work was so specialized at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I guess the Trump administration, Elon Musk, et cetera, would say, well, if we're already doing that, why not further contract out the work that you were doing? And that may be a way to get more efficiencies.

for the federal government. What do you think? Oh, I would argue that I wouldn't say that would be a very cost-saving measure. In addition, I mean, should we have private companies that are seeking a bottom line doing such important work for our American people? I would argue not. And we are talking to a lot of folks today and organizations that I would say should remain public. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. Tell me more, though.

I think

We're all aware of how expensive the Department of Defense is. It's such a huge chunk of our expenditures. And if we used more contractors, I would not expect that number to go down. Yeah. Now you've all been sufficiently warned when you just stop in the middle of an answer and say, I'll leave it at that. I'm going to pick a little more. But Emily, I'll let you off the hook here for just a second. Because as you all know, there's obviously legal action against the reduction in force that's going on.

across the federal workforce. And in January, Maristonic was at home in South Portland, Maine, when they received an unexpected call from a Washington, D.C. number. It was the Office of Personnel Management, HR rep. And they said, I have some bad news. And I started shaking at that point because I just had no idea what was coming. And

And they said, effective immediately, you are being placed on administrative leave while OPM, quote, investigates your diversity, equity and inclusion work. Mari found this surprising. At that point...

I said, wait a minute, I used to be deputy director of the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility. But right now, I am the director of the Talent Innovation Group, which is not a diversity, equity, and inclusion job.

It has no part of diversity, equity and inclusion. And the HR rep said, it doesn't matter. You will be cut out of your work email and your work computer altogether. Effective immediately. Mari broke down in tears. My wife is disabled and is not able to work.

So I'm the sole breadwinner right now. My wife and my child are both, were both on my health insurance. I also happen to be a first-time homeowner in the past year. So how are we going to pay our mortgage? Less than 48 hours later, those fears were realized. Mari's employment with the federal government was formally terminated through another phone call.

Mari worked for the federal government for more than 16 years, first at the EPA doing work with municipal wastewater treatment systems to limit the overflow of millions of gallons of untreated sewage into local waterways. Then at the Office of Personnel Management, where they most recently worked to improve pay equity, ensure skills-based hiring, and develop best practices in recruiting and retaining top quality talent.

Mari is now the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit filed by the ACLU in Washington, D.C. And the claim asserts that it is illegal to terminate an individual's employment simply because they once worked on a project their employer currently disapproves of. In this case, diversity, equity and inclusion work.

The suit claims the termination is in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act because the recent cuts in federal workers disproportionately has affected workers of color, women, and non-binary employees. And Mari says their larger concern is for the American public.

The Trump administration is actually hurting the people who live in this country because the services we provide, whether it's making sure that folks have safe drinking water or

FEMA employees who respond in the wake of natural disasters to make sure that people have shelter and the resources they need to rebuild. The people who are being hurt by this are the public, because now these totally dedicated, passionate federal employees are not able to do our jobs. Ultimately, Mari hopes for just one thing.

I want for all of us to get our jobs back so that we can continue to serve the people who live in this country. That's Mari Stonick, former director of the Talent Innovation Group at the Office of Personnel Management and now lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit challenging the termination of many federal employees. LG, can I quickly ask you this?

What impact has this had on your family more broadly? It's tough. I'm in a similar situation where I'm the primary benefits holder and breadwinner for my family. And so this throws a lot of things into chaos. There's sort of a micro, and Mari addressed this, but there's sort of a micro to macro aspect

element of this that I think about, of course, it's devastating to lose pay and benefits, you know, for us and for our dependents. But then, you know, job loss creates a burden. It creates a burden on the community. It creates a burden when we can't contribute to our local economies and ecosystems. And so this really ladders up to

What this does to our community is to have feds who are unemployed, looking for work, and also not able to do the work that they were doing for the American people. So it's a pretty large range. I could say we've had some stressful conversations in my house and also having conversations with friends and family who may not really understand what's going on. To the point that you were making earlier about, you know, well, this happens to people all the time and

It's the personal devastation that you lose access to this calling and this service that you've agreed to. And then it's a devastation also when you see what's happening across the government. Each person who has been fired or intimidated into resigning early could tell you the impact that their work or their advocacy has had on communities and the struggles that we are going to face as a country without certain programs and funding. And that's demoralizing on that big picture level as well.

I think you're hitting an important point here. And Arielle, I'd love to hear what you have to say about this because it seems to me that a lot of people have no problem with the reduction in the federal workforce because

they believe that the work that the three of you are doing or were doing, for example, had no direct impact on them. And there seems to be quite a gap in understanding of what a lot of federal workers actually do or even what a lot of federal programs do and whether or not they are influential in the lives of individual Americans. So, I mean, Ariel, can you just take a

quick second to describe like the work you were doing on maternal health policy. Like how could you, what would you say to someone who is supportive of these cuts, whether that has had an impact on them? Yeah, I hope I can connect a few of the dots here, which is going back to the idea about privatizing some of these services because it would be more efficient to the federal government.

When the federal government does something, it does try to do it in the most efficient way possible, you know, sometimes to more success than others.

But the private sector would have a profit motive. So when I think about the work that I was doing on maternal health, we have a massive problem in this country with rural hospitals closing and people in rural areas having lackluster access to health care overall, but in particular, maternal health services, because it is typically a net loser for hospitals.

And that means we have huge disparities between urban and rural areas. And again, equity doesn't necessarily have anything to do with race or ideology, but often there's geographic disparities that I have been working on trying to close.

And when you privatize services, there's no reason to go into those areas that are net losers. And so I would argue that there is a role for the government there to try and solve these problems.

Additionally, you know, when we're telling federal workers who work on clean air and clean water to go into the private sector, there are no private sector counterparts. For me, I can go work, you know, on behalf of an insurance company and do very similar work to what I was already doing. But of course, I would be doing it to a different end.

I would be serving, you know, the shareholders of these large, um, national insurance companies. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I'm saying it's a different mission, um, to serve, you know, the bottom line of a national insurance company than it is to serve the American people and try and solve these problems for the American people. And so, um,

That's what I worry about us losing is that this is the role for the federal government is to try and solve these complex problems that may hit certain communities harder than others. And there isn't a role for the private sector or the private sector won't solve this on its own. And so that's what I'm thinking about. Well, with that...

Ariel Kane, Emily Spilker, and Laura Golding, a.k.a. LG, thank you all so much for joining us today. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. This is On Point.

Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from BU Questrom School of Business. When the same big investors buy stakes in multiple competing companies, are those firms still competitors? That phenomenon is known as common ownership. And a recent episode of Is Business Broken? dives into how common ownership affects prices, innovation and more. Here's a preview of that episode.

You've uncovered a number of interesting effects in companies and industries that have common owners, how it can affect competition, prices of products in the market, innovation, executive compensation, managerial incentives. What have you seen that happens when this power is consolidated like this?

Yeah, I think it's a fascinating question. Of course, I think it's a fascinating question because much of my work in the last couple of years has been in this space. But just to clearly state the hypothesis of common ownership again, it's a situation really where you have these common owners that hold large stakes in companies that are competing against each other.

But now, because the companies are held by these common investors and common owners, perhaps they have less of an incentive to engage in such intense competition with each other. Now, that has positive effects for the profits. And that's something that the investors actually quite like. And that benefits companies.

potentially all of us who are invested in these companies, but that has potentially negative effects for consumers of the products that these companies make. So just as an example here, if you represent a lot of shareholders in Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, then you basically aren't going to pressure one of them to lower their prices and really go after the market share of the other.

because you get more profits in one company, you get less in the other, and it's all kind of a wash. You would rather see both companies keep their prices higher and make more money across the market because you own that market. Exactly. It's a very, very simple logic. And when I talk to people about common ownership,

that are not in economics, they immediately say, "Yeah, but isn't that totally obvious that this is something that would happen?" And I said, "Well, you know, it's something that is obvious once I've explained it to you." And this wasn't a situation that was so predominant 40 years ago, but it is very much a dominant paradigm right now.

Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Mehrotra Institute for Business, Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.