The Trump administration’s purge of federal employees has hit Pittsburgh, leaving some federal workers without jobs and throwing the unions that represent them into a state of confusion.
“I don't think [the right hand] knows what the left hand is doing,” said Philip Glover, national vice president for the American Federation of Government Employees’ District 3, which covers federal workers in Pennsylvania and Delaware at various agencies, including the departments of Energy, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, and more.
Glover estimated between 60 and 70 of his union’s members had been fired at various agencies across the state, with about 20 of them around Pittsburgh. That’s a tiny portion of the roughly 6,000 workers the union represents in the Pittsburgh area, though the exact scope of the layoffs remains unclear: Glover said leaders have received no communication from agency heads about the terminations, and requests for a list of affected employees have gone unanswered.
Glover said that the affected workers were needed to fill vacant positions left by those who left or retired.
“These weren't people [hired] to make the agencies bigger,” he said. “These are employees being hired to replace employees.”
Glover said the impact of the layoffs was felt well beyond those who’ve lost their jobs. Many employees are asking “When's the next shoe going to drop?” he said. “I think that’s the general picture: ‘Are we next? What’s going to happen tomorrow?’”
Many of the local AFGE members who are out of work appear to have been employed by the Department of Energy. Lilas Soukup, who serves as president of AFGE Local 1916, said members of her local were among the thousands of probationary employees who had not yet gained civil service protection and were fired earlier this month. She expects more reductions in the future.
“It has a lot of stress, obviously, on people,” Soukup said. “You hear the personal side of the stories: ‘We had just bought a house in November.’”
Soukup said the office has been responsible for breakthroughs in oil and gas research, and developed a horizontal drilling technique still used in fracking today. She worries that future research could be in jeopardy.
“It's very frustrating,” she said. “There's no rhyme or reason, really, to it.”
Probationary employees – those who are new to their positions even if they have worked in other government jobs for years – have fewer protections than workers with more tenure, and have been hit especially hard.
They include around 400 people nationwide discharged from the Federal Aviation Administration. The Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union represents 132 of those probationary employees, all of whom were fired two weeks ago. Just two of the affected workers reside in western Pennsylvania, said PASS communications director Liz Doherty.
“These employees were devoted to their jobs and the safety critical mission of the FAA,” PASS president David Spero said in a statement. “This draconian action will increase the workload and place new responsibilities on a workforce that is already stretched thin.”
“The FAA continues to hire and onboard air traffic controllers and safety professionals, including mechanics and others who support them,” a U.S. Department of Transportation spokesperson said in a statement.
‘I’m just trapped’
Some workers described an almost Kafkaesque layoff process.
One former Department of Energy employee, who spoke to WESA on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation and risk to future employment, said they received a termination letter late on Feb. 13. It said their position was “no longer in the interest of the American people.”
By the next morning, they were locked out of their government computer and email account.
“It was a complete shock to everybody,” they said.
One former Department of Health and Human Services worker, who also spoke to WESA on the condition of anonymity, received no official notice of their firing, but lost access to their government computer and email without warning. Emails to supervisors have also gone unreturned, leaving the former employee and their family in “limbo.”
“If you said, ‘Bet a million dollars, do you think you’re still employed?’ I’d say, ‘No, of course not,’” the employee said. “But officially, I haven’t been told, so I can’t do anything. I can’t get ready to apply for unemployment. I don’t know if I’m going to be paid. I don’t know the terms of anything.”
“I feel like I’m just trapped.”
Soukup noted that, although termination letters sent to some employees in Pittsburgh cited poor performance, some affected union members had previously received outstanding performance reviews. Others hadn’t even had a performance review yet. Similar language about performance has reportedly appeared in letters sent nationwide, prompting speculation that the language is merely a boilerplate effort to justify termination.
The precarity of the situation has left many union members and leaders uncertain about how to appeal the terminations, or if there’s any other recourse available.
Federal employees typically challenge firings and other disciplinary actions at the Merit Systems Protection Board. But the agency has been paralyzed by Trump administration attempts to fire one of its members, leaving the body without a quorum.
In the best of times, appeals can take between six months and two years, said AFGE’s Glover, and require legal expenses and the patience to deal with a complicated administrative process. Employees that do appeal rarely win, and even if they do many have by then found other work, or just want to move on with their lives.
“Maybe they get offered their job back and they're like, ‘Well, no, I already got a job and I don't want to go through that again,’” said Glover. “It's a way to eviscerate the federal government workforce.”
Some former federal employees said they’re considering joining a class-action lawsuit to challenge the mass layoffs. Unions, including AFGE, have filed multiple suits asking officials to temporarily block the firings. In one case, a federal judge declined to do so, ruling that the unions must bring their claims under federal employment law rather than filing in district court.
The Trump administration has claimed that as a victory.
“Thanks to this and other legal wins, President Trump and his administration will continue to deliver on the American people’s mandate to eliminate wasteful spending and make federal agencies more efficient,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement.
For Pittsburgh-area employees who find themselves out of work, the future remains uncertain. Soukup said she expects the consequences to cascade: families will lose income, those federal workers who remain will have to do more work for the same amount of pay, the government will lose expertise, and the instability could discourage people from seeking federal jobs.
“We're going backwards,” Soukup said. “And, sometimes it's like, well, are we going to be able to recoup from it at all?”
It’s not clear some of the workers will.
The terminations “by design, soured people on federal careers,” said the former HHS employee. “This was unnecessary, and you’ve done it in the most cruel, demonizing way.”
