Washington — As federal workers continue to face massive layoffs, some are bringing their job search to Capitol Hill.
The newly-formed Fork Off Coalition, composed of recently laid off government employees, held a job fair and staged a sit-in at a Senate building Tuesday. They targeted the offices of Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Tammy Duckworth and Lindsey Graham.
Organizers have been holding informal training sessions with terminated workers over several days on the Hill. Representing an alphabet soup of agencies with various levels of tenure, each worker is paired up and dispatched to a Senator’s office to share their stories.
One worker, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, had been placed on administrative leave from the Administration for Children and Families, which is housed under the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency oversees programs ranging from Head Start to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. She brought her sixth-grade son to walk the halls of Congress with her, calling it a “civics lesson.”
“I have three children and I had to sit them down and tell them that I had been fired illegally from my job,” she explained. “And both my son and my daughter were asking, like, what are we going to do? Will we be able to buy things?”
Wiping away tears, she said they wanted to lend a hand.
“My son offered to sell his, like, card collection to like, make money for our family,” she recalled. “My daughter has a birthday next month and she was like, ‘Mom, you don’t have to buy me any presents, like, if we need to save money.'”
Her last day on the job is approaching next month. She says she was one of nearly 200 probationary employees in her agency that were told they were let go due to their performance, even though she and other colleagues had received “outstanding” reviews.
Another worker, who also did not want to be identified, had recently completed her probationary period at the National Science Foundation. She said she was reclassified into that category.
“They didn’t notify us,” she said. “We found out through no proper channels. It was just an email, come to this meeting at 10 o’clock. You’re back on probation and now you’re fired.”
She said roughly 10% to 12% of the workforce was cut at NSF, which she called the “heart and soul of science, engineering, and R&D” in the United States.
“We are all PhD scientists. We’re all former professors. We’re all experts doing, you know, doing the best we can every single day to make sure our tax dollars are well invested,” she said.
The workers said they have been received “very well” by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
“We’re looking for senators to get a backbone, whether they are Republican or Democrat, to actually do something to protect the rule of law,” said a former worker at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was effectively dismantled last month.
Thousands of government employees have been laid off as the Trump administration seeks to scale back the federal workforce. Last week, a federal judge declined a request from a group of labor unions to block the mass firings. The wide-ranging reductions have been ordered across agencies including the Pentagon, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Education, US Department of Agriculture and the Federal Aviation Administration.
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The Fork Off Coalition has held demonstrations outside of various agencies to protest the cuts by the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is led by billionaire Elon Musk. The coalition hopes to keep the pressure on Congress.
“We want to make visible the actual personal impacts of these illegal firings,” said the former USAID worker. “We want to help senators understand their responsibility and any kind of potential actions they can take to support, not only individuals who are hurting from the illegal firings, but their communities that are going to be reeling from the impact.”
