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Posted
On 4/29/2025 at 3:32 PM, Brisketexan said:

Yeah....but I've always found Kaley Cuoco to be just damned adorable.

cosmo-april-16-kaley-cuoco-today-160303-

 

On 4/29/2025 at 3:33 PM, Underdog said:

#TeamMelissaRausch 

 

img-0-h7h05xSrq8szRLcb.ca045df1.png

 

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Posted

Perspective. Great website putting our budget, deficit, and DOGE cuts in perspective. I tried copying and pasting but the pasting formatting fucked up the content. It's much better viewed in the website.

https://www.debtinperspective.com/

 

A Scaled Down Look at Spending, Revenue, and What's Being Cut

The national debt is being used to justify spending cuts - but do these cuts actually reduce it?

Current US National Debt

$36,214,714,517,960

Source: U.S. Treasury Debt to the Penny (updated daily)

 

 

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Posted
On 4/29/2025 at 3:32 PM, Brisketexan said:

Yeah....but I've always found Kaley Cuoco to be just damned adorable.

cosmo-april-16-kaley-cuoco-today-160303-

 

She's alright.  7/10

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Posted

So it begins.

 

https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/united-airlines-cancels-newark-flights-after-faa-staff-walks-out-e794b071?mod=hp_lead_pos1

 

Quote

United Airlines is canceling 35 daily round-trip flights from Newark, N.J., starting this weekend after a group of air-traffic controllers took leave following equipment outages.

Chief Executive Scott Kirby said Friday the decision came after Federal Aviation Administration controllers who oversee airspace surrounding Newark Liberty International Airport left their posts Monday after problems with their radar and radios. Several controllers took trauma-related leave after a similar outage last fall.

 

Quote

“Newark airport cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there in the weeks and months ahead,” Kirby said in a message posted on United’s website. 

Technology that controllers rely on to manage traffic has failed several times in the past few days. That resulted in dozens of diverted flights, hundreds of delays and cancellations, and thousands of customers with disrupted travel plans.

The FAA said it would continue to be transparent about the status of Newark and other airports on its website. 

 

Quote

On Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he visited the FAA facility in Philadelphia that oversees Newark airspace to “talk with our hard working air traffic controllers” as officials work to fix equipment outages.

“It’s unacceptable,” Duffy said on X. “We are working to harden the system. But this is why it’s critical that we build an all-new air traffic control system.”

The FAA has, at times, slowed traffic to Newark as a result of controller-staffing issues. 

A representative from the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union that represents controllers, declined to comment.

 

Spoiler

United’s cuts announced Friday amount to just over 10% of its daily schedule at Newark, which had already been reduced to accommodate runway construction. The airline operates 328 daily round-trip flights on average at the airport.

Newark last year was the nation’s 14th-busiest airport by departing flight seats, according to OAG, an aviation-data provider.

United has been urging the government to limit the number of flights to what an airport can realistically manage based on staffing, Kirby said. The airline is asking the government to designate Newark as a slot-controlled Level 3 airport, which would add a coordinator to the staff to manage traffic flow.

The FAA previously doled out takeoff and landing rights at Newark as it does at LaGuardia Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport. That changed in 2016.

United accounts for about 75% of the New Jersey airport’s air traffic, and has plans to launch five new nonstop international flights from the hub this year. United’s Newark facilities connect travelers to 76 U.S. cities and 81 international locations.

The cancellations come after some airlines reported demand for air travel was falling toward the end of the first quarter. United offered two financial outlooks for the year, one that was the same as its prior guidance, and a lower one that accounted for a possible recession.

 

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Posted (edited)
On 4/29/2025 at 3:33 PM, Underdog said:

#TeamMelissaRausch 

Dammit. Francisco beat me to it. 
 

Edited by DDD Dad
Posted
On 5/1/2025 at 11:15 AM, crash_davis said:

Perspective. Great website putting our budget, deficit, and DOGE cuts in perspective. I tried copying and pasting but the pasting formatting fucked up the content. It's much better viewed in the website.

https://www.debtinperspective.com/

 

A Scaled Down Look at Spending, Revenue, and What's Being Cut

The national debt is being used to justify spending cuts - but do these cuts actually reduce it?

Current US National Debt

$36,214,714,517,960

Source: U.S. Treasury Debt to the Penny (updated daily)

 

 

This is really good

Posted

A startup founder told a Palantir alumni Slack group that AI agents could do the work of tens of thousands of government employees. He was met with emojis of clowns and a man licking a boot.

Quote

The post was not well received. Eight people reacted with clown face emojis, three reacted with a custom emoji of a man licking a boot, two reacted with custom emoji of Joaquin Phoenix giving a thumbs down in the movie Gladiator, and three reacted with a custom emoji with the word “Fascist.” Three responded with a heart emoji.

“DOGE does not seem interested in finding ‘higher impact work’ for federal employees,” one person said in a comment that received 11 heart reactions. “You’re complicit in firing 70k federal employees and replacing them with shitty autocorrect.”

“Tbf we’re all going to be replaced with shitty autocorrect (written by chatgpt),” another person commented, which received one “+1” reaction.

“How ‘DOGE orthogonal’ is it? Like, does it still require Kremlin oversight?” another person said in a comment that received five reactions with a fire emoji. “Or do they just use your credentials to log in later?”

When even people who worked for Palantir think you suck.

Posted
United Airlines is canceling 35 daily round-trip flights from Newark, N.J., starting this weekend after a group of air-traffic controllers took leave following equipment outages
 

Take 2 flights instead of 20. Why do you need to fly? Suck it up libtard and get back to pouring concrete and digging ditches.
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Posted

https://unherd.com/2025/05/doge-has-devoured-musk/

 

Quote

When I flew into Washington DC at the start of March, I didn’t expect much in the way of excitement. Yet by coincidence, my arrival to give a talk for the Elliott School of International Affairs, at the George Washington University, would coincide with the start of a DOGE purge of one of the government bureaucracies: the General Services Administration (GSA). As I went to bed in my hotel near the mall, the “DOGE boys” were moving in just across the street.

 

 

Quote

The world of federal employment in America is almost a separate society. It has its own culture, its own acronyms, rules and concepts that appear foreign and opaque to those outside it. At a time of massive demographic shifts, of illegal immigration and the importation of guest workers — which have conspired to radically alter the workplace for both American blue- and white-collar workers — the federal workforce appears almost as an anachronism. Outside this walled garden, to be a worker or an employee in the year 2025 is to be an economic unit, a cog in a machine, one that can be replaced or fired at will. When a company in the private sector lays off its workforce and replaces it with foreigners, that is simply shrewd business management: it is replacing one human widget with a cheaper one in Bangalore. But even as these crass economic forces ravaged much of America, the federal workforce has managed to (mostly) stand apart.

 

 

Quote

Partly, the good fortune of federal workers comes down to the sheer inertia of the system and all the rules that protect them. But another factor is a matter of a widely held and genuine belief: a worker in the private sector may only be measured in terms of economic value, but in the public service things are different. To work in public service is to be a civil servant: it is to maintain and fulfil the grand republican experiment America started some 250 years ago.

 

Spoiler

Replacing an American coder with one from Bangalore is one thing; replacing an American civil servant with a foreigner or a computer is quite another. Once you reduce a society to numbers and cents, you no longer have a society. Among federal workers, this is the common refrain: you might not get paid nearly as much as somebody in the private sector, but you will be a part of something else, something you can’t really put a dollar value on. Until, that is, DOGE entered the picture.

When DOGE fires people, it deploys at least two distinct methods. The first is by its nature both wide and sweeping, with very little distinction made between useful workers and the “dead weight”. Essentially, it is the mass firing of those on probationary status, meaning that the usual job protections do not apply to them. In theory, these workers seem like a pretty natural place to start if one wants to “cut the fat”, but in practice it’s both awkward and destructive. It’s not just new workers who are on probation, but others too for various reasons — those who have been recently promoted, for example.

It is these untargeted mass firings — done simply because of a quirk of the legal system that regulates federal employment — that have led to the many cases where DOGE has had to apologise and walk back their decisions. Air traffic controllers weren’t fired by DOGE because they were all “woke”, or because they were all “unproductive” or surplus to requirements. They were fired, rather, because someone on the other side of the country hit a few buttons on a keyboard. No human judgement is applied: the useless woke DEI hire is arguably much more likely to be spared from DOGE than the Trump-voting hard working conservative, simply because the latter might have recently been promoted.

There is, however, another kind of DOGE activity, one that does have the personal touch. This I witnessed first-hand during my stay in Washington, over at the GSA, when the DOGE boys moved into the top floor of the building and did the cull in person. The entrance was covered up in police tape, and employees had to pass through a security checkpoint manned by a dozen armed guards, emptying out their coffee cups and putting their coats in trays for the x-ray machine, all ostensibly to prove they weren’t carrying bombs or other weapons. This was billed as a measure to protect DOGE as they went about their work, clearing out a fairly obscure agency staffed by accountants and legal clerks.

To grasp what makes DOGE’s “on-site” activities so peculiar, it’s useful to understand the basic laws and norms regulating mass layoffs inside the federal government. These layoffs fall under what is called a “RIF”: short for “Reduction In Force”. Under normal circumstances, agencies that are hit by an order to reduce their headcount by a certain number — say 30% — are supposed to list all their employees in a spreadsheet, where each employee is “scored” according to veteran status, length of employment and performance reviews. Once personnel has been listed, the agency heads then work up from the bottom until they reach the so-called “cut line”. If that’s our hypothetical 30%, that means that the worst-performing third of all employees must go. There are some quirks and exceptions — in some cases employees might be able to accept a reduction in salary rank in exchange for staying on — and departments will always try to make sure that institutional experience is still retained, avoiding situations where everyone with a certain function gets fired all at once.

In theory, RIF can accommodate even extremely large government cuts: it is designed to preserve talent and make it easy for the show to go on. But what DOGE has done at the GSA, the OPM (Office of Personnel Management) and other specific agencies where Elon Musk has taken a personal interest is quite different. Instead of caring too much about the total force reduction, DOGE has been firing all workers within particular areas of different departments. This can be done pretty easily by arbitrarily redefining people doing a certain job as being part of a discrete “competitive area”, and then setting the cut line at 100%.

This assault has almost nothing to do with the story that was sold about DOGE: getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse, and fighting the woke deep state. Indeed, the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management both stand a decent shot of being the least woke agencies in Washington. They are both fairly obscure and concerned with boring, practical work; they also enjoy markedly low social status within the federal hierarc

So why pick the GSA rather than somewhere more “woke”, somewhere more traditionally associated with the so-called deep state? Well, because this is where one goes if one wants to asset-strip the federal government. Shortly after DOGE moved into the GSA, and started firing pretty much everyone, the GSA posted an extraordinary list of buildings they had supposedly identified as “non-critical”. This list (which was later revised, and then taken down entirely) actually included close to half of all properties owned by the federal government, including buildings like the FBI headquarters and the Department of Justice building. The GSA added that it was now open to “creative solutions” to go along with these sales, including the idea of leasing back these properties once they had been sold.

Of course, when DOGE itself wants to talk about its big accomplishments, this clumsy attempt at Yeltsin-style looting of public property is not even mentioned. Instead, its social media posts are filled with claims that it’s rationalising procurement.

The other departments that Musk has taken a personal interest in follow a similar pattern. Rather than homing in on targets that look “woke”, Musk and DOGE have been concerned with the most boring and least prestigious areas of the federal government, those that have to do with things like Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request processing and federal contracting. Musk’s interest in the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and his targeted firings of employees there coincided with a public attempt to try to get the Authority to assign a $2.7 billion contract — previously awarded to the telecom giant Verizon — to his own Starlink company. Similar controversies were reported involving federal contracts for Tesla-made cars, most bizarrely an attempt to get the State Department to spend some $400 million on bulletproof cybertrucks as consular vehicles. Given that the kinds of countries where bullet-proof consular cars are in demand tend to be located in the developing world, the idea of splurging on armoured electric vehicles is quite odd: Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo are not known for having many charging stations.

In most cases where DOGE has arrived in person to try to cajole or strong-arm people into looking the other way, the end result has ultimately been failure. The GSA had to dump its initial attempt to sell off good federal property at fire-sale prices; the FAA couldn’t just give a preexisting contract to Starlink; and the cybertruck deal was abandoned when journalists started getting hold of the story. And therein lies the problem: while it might be relatively easy to cut federal benefits for the elderly or the disabled, messing with federal contracts is a whole different ball game. The armed guards at the GSA building weren’t there to protect the DOGE employees, so much as to prevent fired people from returning to the building in order to transmit any sort of institutional knowledge to those that were still left. It looks like, in these instances, DOGE has waged a coordinated and surgical campaign against the accountants and white-collar janitors employed at the various agencies who control who gets the money and the contracts.

Elon Musk, though the world’s richest man, presides over a commercial empire that is sick and ailing. In this sense, he is just like so many others in the tech oligarchy that has become so central to Trump’s second term in office. Had the fire sale of federal property at GSA gone through, these are the people who would have bought all those federal buildings for cents on the dollar, lending them back to the government for a reliable permanent source of revenue. Tesla, Musk’s flagship company, is now in very serious trouble, and it’s an open question whether it even has a future if subjected to the pressures of the market. Tesla sales inside the EU are collapsing: a result of the rapid geopolitical polarisation that the Trump administration has leaned into with its various attacks on traditional US allies. At the same time, competitors in China are eager to gobble up its market share. Musk’s other companies — Starlink, the Boring Company, SpaceX — either have relatively low revenues or are structurally dependent on money from the US government.

With DOGE, Musk had a tool that could potentially not just save America from the “woke mind virus” and the “deep state”, but also leverage his position in government to help his own companies. Alas, things haven’t worked out quite how he might have hoped.

What became obvious as I talked to federal employees was the genuine reason they felt bewildered, angry or depressed — and it wasn’t really to do with people being fired. Bill Clinton fired people, Obama fired people; many of those I talked to even admitted to having been cautiously optimistic or even welcoming of DOGE. The federal government had problems, there was waste and fraud; anyone who lifted a finger to address these issues was welcome in their book. What people expected, even hoped for, was a painful but necessary spring cleaning of the federal government, firing the unnecessary and getting rid of the dead wood. But what people actually got was something akin to China’s cultural revolution.

The advent of DOGE kicked off a period of chaos and uncertainty, the wilful destruction of old rules and norms. Emails would land in certain workplaces saying that everyone was fired; only to then say that nobody was fired; only for another email to arrive two hours later saying that everyone was fired after all. These emails usually wouldn’t even be signed; bosses would be just as ignorant as their workers. Orders would come, be countermanded, then counter-countermanded.

I interviewed one person who had, in his own words, “gotten out” — that is he had accepted the offer to quit in exchange for severance pay made in Musk’s “fork in the road email” sent to every federal employee. Working at the US Patent and Trademark Office, this person should have been the last person on the list to feel the wrath of DOGE: not only do USPTO workers in his position not get paid unless they do work (USPTO is funded entirely through user fees), the Office itself is often a net contributor to the federal budget. In other words, these people make money for the US government, so any “efficiency” initiative or “reducing the deficit” attempt shouldn’t have anything to do with them. Yet the mood among this person’s coworkers was the same as everyone else: fear and uncertainty, and a constant barrage of ominous, often anonymous messages, presumably from Washington, about how they were next on the chopping block and would possibly get fired in the near future as scroungers and traitors to the republic.

What this particular ex-employee found most galling, however, had very little to do with DOGE itself. Rather, it was the feeling that, on a dime, people who he thought were his friends and ideological compatriots on the American Right could just instantly turn on them as yet another “enemy”. Stories like this are now fairly common, with many posted daily to the r/fednews subreddit, a place that’s become an impromptu gathering place for bewildered civil servants. At first, the subreddit’s rhetoric involved people hoping that “fraud, waste and abuse” would be targeted. But as time went on, the radical project of slashing the government has escaped all such boundaries.

But if DOGE was once the focal point of these radical cuts to the federal government, today that is arguably no longer the case. More and more departments are now falling victim to “traditional” mass layoffs, handled by their department heads and supervisors rather than by the young men from DOGE. The US Department of Agriculture; the Department of Health and Human Services; the Department of Veterans Affairs — even the Internal Revenue Service is now threatened with mass layoffs. At the same time, the Republican Party is trying to fire the people who bring in tax revenue to the government, while also promoting massive tax cuts. All this is happening amid rising spending on the military. While destroying its own fiscal position at home, in other words, the Trump administration has also set out to destroy the entire postwar system abroad.

Like so many other revolutions before it, the one that is now happening in America is beginning to devour its own favourite children. Elon Musk may have thought he was saving both his country and his own business empire by throwing himself into these purges and mass firings. But these days, he too is on the way out. The revolution inside the federal bureaucracy that he helped to spark has been followed up with a total revolution in trade. Trump’s tariff war is likely to have huge consequences for the US economy. For Musk in particular, it might just spell doom for Tesla. Unsurprisingly, the billionaire has been out in public picking fights with members of the administration — especially Peter Navarro, the most hardline pro-tariff member of Trump’s team — and advocating for a tariff-free zone between the US and the EU. Trump, in turn, has gone from doing Tesla advertisements on the White House lawn to saying that he only keeps Musk around because he likes him; he certainly doesn’t need him. Navarro, for his part, has fired back at Musk, accusing him of being not a manufacturer of cars but a mere assembler. Tesla, because it still needs to import some components from outside America, is in danger of failing the purity test.

When I started interviewing federal workers back in March, my first impression was that Musk was a cynical thief, trying to loot the American state in order to shore up his own companies. But far from being some sort of mastermind, he increasingly looks like a naive, even tragic, victim of a social upheaval far bigger than anyone could have foreseen just six months ago. While Musk was useful for selling the idea of making the government more efficient, it’s increasingly clear that the firings inside the government have now abandoned that pretence. The amount of money DOGE hopes to save is now down to some $150 billion a year: barely enough to counter the announced boost to the Pentagon’s budget. At any rate, the fact that even the world’s richest man is not capable of shielding himself from the fallout of breakdown of the political order should be a warning to the rest of America.

 

 

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Posted

Yeah bootlickers in the private sector (including me) are fine with layoffs because it is part of the game, Musk the idiot went into government thinking the same and the pushback has been severe.

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Posted

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/05/16/weather-service-offices-overnight-cuts-map/

 

Screenshot2025-05-17at6_46_44AM.thumb.png.dcba6a002841260275ca63a63a159ed2.png

 

Quote

For at least half a century, the National Weather Service has been an around-the-clock operation. But after the U.S. DOGE Service led efforts to shrink the federal government, that is no longer possible in some parts of the country.

In four of the agency’s 122 weather forecasting offices around the country, there aren’t enough meteorologists to staff an overnight shift, according to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union representing agency workers. And at least several more forecast offices are expected to stop staffing an overnight shift as early as Sunday.

 

Quote

Each of the offices has local knowledge about weather hazards and geographic features that helps improve the accuracy of weather forecasts and warnings and inform local officials’ decisions to close schools for wintry weather or evacuate residents ahead of hurricanes. Without a meteorologist working overnight, those offices’ duties to monitor conditions and issue forecasts and warnings will temporarily pass to neighboring offices each night, said Tom Fahy, the union’s legislative director.

At an agency whose staff have a strong commitment to their lifesaving work, he said, the circumstances have stretched employees’ resilience “to the breaking point” and “hobbled the agency’s esprit de corps.”

 

 

Quote

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the Weather Service, “remains adequately staffed to ensure that critical research continues and that actionable data continues to be released to the public as regularly scheduled,” spokeswoman Kim Doster said in an email. “NOAA anticipates no loss of critical information to the American people.”

 

 

Spoiler

The agency is meanwhile seeking to transfer employees to the most critically understaffed offices to fill gaps. Doster said it is also seeking hiring authority — NOAA and the Weather Service remain subject to a hiring freeze imposed in January — while also pursuing “a reevaluation of resource allocation and priorities across all line offices within the bureau.”

Weather Service staffing numbered more than 4,200 employees before President Donald Trump took office for his second term. But so far this year, the workforce has contracted by nearly 600 people — the same number of departures the agency saw across the past decade and a half, Fahy said.

Here is where those departures are hitting hardest.

California and the West

Weather Service forecast offices in Hanford, California, and Sacramento, in the state’s agricultural and mostly rural Central Valley, are no longer able to operate an overnight shift, leaving coastal offices that oversee the Bay Area and greater Los Angeles to cover for them.

The cutback in operating hours comes just as the traditional wildfire season begins in California. The Weather Service plays a key role in forecasting when dry air and strong winds elevate risks of fires sparking and spreading rapidly.

It is also expected that a Weather Service office in Pendleton, Oregon, which oversees a wide swath of southern Washington and northwestern Oregon, will soon be unable to operate overnight, though it was not yet clear when that might happen, Fahy said.

The overnight closure of the forecast office in Fairbanks, Alaska, affects most of that state’s land area — all of northern Alaska, including towns all along its Arctic coastline and the Bering Strait.

The Plains

A forecast office in sparsely populated northwestern Kansas has been one of the hardest hit by retirements and firings and is no longer operating overnight, Fahy said.

It is one of the facilities Weather Service officials are asking employees to voluntarily transfer to, offering paid moving expenses. Positions for three senior meteorologists at the Kansas office are among 155 critical vacancies at Weather Service offices that the agency is seeking to fill by the end of the month, according to an email sent to agency employees that was obtained by The Washington Post.

A forecasting office that oversees conditions across southwestern Wyoming and eastern Nebraska is scheduled to stop staffing an overnight shift Sunday, Fahy said.

These offices lie in what is called “Tornado Alley,” and as peak tornado season continues, this area is at the heart of a swath that has faced relentless thunderstorms, twisters and flooding rains for weeks this year.

The Eastern U.S.

There are some critical vacancies at offices along the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast — including offices in Texas and Louisiana that are facing the threat of tropical cyclones when hurricane season starts June 1. But so far, the densely populated eastern part of the country is not affected by overnight Weather Service closures.

Still, one office in eastern Kentucky — a region hit repeatedly by deadly and damaging floods in recent years — is already closing for the overnight hours. And a facility on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is expected to begin overnight closures Sunday.

 

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Posted
On 4/23/2025 at 12:21 AM, bolverk said:

Hey @Ag with kids, I know you've seen this response to your stupid fucking question last night, because of the screenshot below. I'll also note you haven't posted in any of the subs since.

image.thumb.png.6ceaa385d6c5ce3b521077b32f0ace26.png

 

 

 

What gives? Are you too much of a pussy to say, "Yeah, man, I was wrong." Are you just another troll?

 

I don't come on Cloak Room often.  (I used to on Shaggy and whatever it was called on HornFans, though)

I was probably on the Food & Travel forum.

Why would anyone that isn't far left spend a lot of time visiting this forum?  It's an echo chamber that attacks anyone that has any type of conservative views.

I drop by every once in awhile to see what the latest outrage is.  Sometimes I make a comment.

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Posted
25 minutes ago, Ag with kids said:

I don't come on Cloak Room often.  (I used to on Shaggy and whatever it was called on HornFans, though)

I was probably on the Food & Travel forum.

Why would anyone that isn't far left spend a lot of time visiting this forum?  It's an echo chamber that attacks anyone that has any type of conservative views.

I drop by every once in awhile to see what the latest outrage is.  Sometimes I make a comment.

Please share a conservative viewpoint.  If it has merit and truth to it I'll happily have an open conversation on the subject.

However if you're parroting the latest fox news talking points you will get eviscerated.

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Posted (edited)
On 5/10/2025 at 10:09 AM, linux said:

Yeah bootlickers in the private sector (including me) are fine with layoffs because it is part of the game, Musk the idiot went into government thinking the same and the pushback has been severe.

I am a public sector employee and people get fired usually just for this kind of nonsense. It never has anything to do with anything beyond just political bullshit and purges. People rarely get fired because they are bad at their job. But people get fired all the time for literally anything besides that.

I think the Feds upset about how it is going are largely morons who actually believed the propaganda about DOGE as something interested in the function of government instead of just being a political purge machine on an unusually large and stupid scale. Also people who thought their work was really important and care about it which is sweet.

Edited by Valmy77
Posted (edited)
On 5/17/2025 at 7:48 AM, Francisco 2.0 said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/05/16/weather-service-offices-overnight-cuts-map/

 

Screenshot2025-05-17at6_46_44AM.thumb.png.dcba6a002841260275ca63a63a159ed2.png

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

The agency is meanwhile seeking to transfer employees to the most critically understaffed offices to fill gaps. Doster said it is also seeking hiring authority — NOAA and the Weather Service remain subject to a hiring freeze imposed in January — while also pursuing “a reevaluation of resource allocation and priorities across all line offices within the bureau.”

Weather Service staffing numbered more than 4,200 employees before President Donald Trump took office for his second term. But so far this year, the workforce has contracted by nearly 600 people — the same number of departures the agency saw across the past decade and a half, Fahy said.

Here is where those departures are hitting hardest.

California and the West

Weather Service forecast offices in Hanford, California, and Sacramento, in the state’s agricultural and mostly rural Central Valley, are no longer able to operate an overnight shift, leaving coastal offices that oversee the Bay Area and greater Los Angeles to cover for them.

The cutback in operating hours comes just as the traditional wildfire season begins in California. The Weather Service plays a key role in forecasting when dry air and strong winds elevate risks of fires sparking and spreading rapidly.

It is also expected that a Weather Service office in Pendleton, Oregon, which oversees a wide swath of southern Washington and northwestern Oregon, will soon be unable to operate overnight, though it was not yet clear when that might happen, Fahy said.

The overnight closure of the forecast office in Fairbanks, Alaska, affects most of that state’s land area — all of northern Alaska, including towns all along its Arctic coastline and the Bering Strait.

The Plains

A forecast office in sparsely populated northwestern Kansas has been one of the hardest hit by retirements and firings and is no longer operating overnight, Fahy said.

It is one of the facilities Weather Service officials are asking employees to voluntarily transfer to, offering paid moving expenses. Positions for three senior meteorologists at the Kansas office are among 155 critical vacancies at Weather Service offices that the agency is seeking to fill by the end of the month, according to an email sent to agency employees that was obtained by The Washington Post.

A forecasting office that oversees conditions across southwestern Wyoming and eastern Nebraska is scheduled to stop staffing an overnight shift Sunday, Fahy said.

These offices lie in what is called “Tornado Alley,” and as peak tornado season continues, this area is at the heart of a swath that has faced relentless thunderstorms, twisters and flooding rains for weeks this year.

The Eastern U.S.

There are some critical vacancies at offices along the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast — including offices in Texas and Louisiana that are facing the threat of tropical cyclones when hurricane season starts June 1. But so far, the densely populated eastern part of the country is not affected by overnight Weather Service closures.

Still, one office in eastern Kentucky — a region hit repeatedly by deadly and damaging floods in recent years — is already closing for the overnight hours. And a facility on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is expected to begin overnight closures Sunday.

 

Closing an overnight office that tracks severe weather in Kanas and Kentucky?  Smart!  Think of the two or three million a year that will save.  Probably about what it costs Trump to play one hole of golf.

Also:

 

Edited by Bullneck
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Posted

Think of public sector workers as a foundation. In my current position i have a mentor and a protégé. The three of us cover the span of three generations: boomer, genx, millennial.  This is to ensure the transfer of knowledge which in turn creates stability over decades. Say doge cunts were to remove one or two of us. That would create a crack within the foundation causing far reaching effects destabilizing not just our department but the departments which depend on us to function. The destabilizing effect is exponential and it's impossible to reverse. 

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Posted
1 hour ago, MissingInAction said:

Think of public sector workers as a foundation. In my current position i have a mentor and a protégé. The three of us cover the span of three generations: boomer, genx, millennial.  This is to ensure the transfer of knowledge which in turn creates stability over decades. Say doge cunts were to remove one or two of us. That would create a crack within the foundation causing far reaching effects destabilizing not just our department but the departments which depend on us to function. The destabilizing effect is exponential and it's impossible to reverse. 

Last year somehow I got a LinkedIn notification from some woman promoting a political candidate for some office in a nearby county. There was a video, and I watched as she proclaimed the candidate to be a "disruptor."  

Just what we need.  More chaos.

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Posted
15 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

Last year somehow I got a LinkedIn notification from some woman promoting a political candidate for some office in a nearby county. There was a video, and I watched as she proclaimed the candidate to be a "disruptor."  

Just what we need.  More chaos.

I hope you reported it as hate speech or at least spam.

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Posted
Closing an overnight office that tracks severe weather in Kanas and Kentucky?  Smart!  Think of the two or three million a year that will save.  Probably about what it costs Trump to play one hole of golf.
Also:
 

Save who? Taxes are going up if you aren’t rich.
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Posted

Isn't this the organization where the new Trump-appointed head just gave their building away to the administration because Trump liked it?

 

Quote

    Amb. Moose therefore remains president of USIP and may be removed only by a duly constituted Board of Directors, under 22 U.S.C. § 4606 ….

    [A]ll actions taken or authorized by Kenneth Jackson or Nate Cavanaugh as acting presidents of USIP were invalid and therefore null, void, and without legal effect ….

    [G]iven the illegitimate appointment of Nate Cavanaugh to the position as USIP president, the actions and documents by which he purportedly transferred USIP's headquarters, located at 2301 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20037, to the General Services Administration were invalid and therefore null, void, and without legal effect ….

    [T]the transfer of USIP's other financial or physical assets to the General Services Administration was likewise invalid, null void, and without legal effect ….

    [T]he resolution adopted by two ex officio Directors of USIP's Board purportedly appointing Adam Amar as president of the Endowment of the USIP Fund and authorizing and instructing him to transfer any and all of the Endowment's assets to USIP was invalid, null, void, and without any legal effect ….

 

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Posted (edited)
6 minutes ago, fuggled said:

Isn't this the organization where the new Trump-appointed head just gave their building away to the administration because Trump liked it?

 

 

What's the penalty for illegally seizing a building? Like, what would happen to me if I took over my neighbor's house and said it was mine?

Edited by bolverk
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Posted
13 minutes ago, bolverk said:

What's the penalty for illegally seizing a building? Like, what would happen to me if I took over my neighbor's house and said it was mine?

That depends.   Are you POTUS and this is an "official" act?

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Posted

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/05/20/federal-workers-trump-mental-health/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzQ3NzEzNjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzQ5MDk1OTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3NDc3MTM2MDAsImp0aSI6ImY5YTBlOGRjLTNmNzAtNGI1MC05NTE0LWEwNjc3MTU0YmViYiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9pbnZlc3RpZ2F0aW9ucy8yMDI1LzA1LzIwL2ZlZGVyYWwtd29ya2Vycy10cnVtcC1tZW50YWwtaGVhbHRoLyJ9.5dPDUnjoqW7dmqguC75L3noMKzK_b14jsPQNvnvlmjs

 

Quote

The president had called federal employees “crooked” and “dishonest,” and his deputies had vowed to purge them from government and make them suffer. And now, on the sixth day of Trump’s second term, a federal health researcher was missing.

Her husband searched every room of their Baltimore townhouse, calling her name. “Caitlin?”

Caitlin Cross-Barnet had struggled with depression, and now her husband, Mike, found her on their narrow, third-floor fire escape. As he tried to coax her back in, she replied: “It’s not high enough to jump.”

 

Quote

On the 26th day of Trump’s term, Richard Midgette, 28, was fired from his IT job at Yellowstone National Park. He drove to the only bridge in his town, stopping just past its edge. From the car, he listened to the rushing of the water and, for the first time, contemplated whether to end his life.

On the 30th day of Trump’s term, Monique Lockett, 53, tried to block out the stress. The U.S. DOGE Service was demanding access to sensitive databases she worked on at the Social Security Administration. Her top boss had just been forced to resign, and rumors of layoffs were brewing. Monique settled into her cubicle just before 8 a.m., then slumped to the floor.

 

Quote

When Trump took office in January, 2.4 million people worked for the federal government, making it America’s largest employer. In four months, Trump and a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk have hacked off chunks of government in the name of efficiency, with tactics rarely seen in public or private industry. The cuts so far represent just 6 percent of the federal workforce, but they have effectively wiped out entire departments and agencies, such as AmeriCorps and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was slashed 85 percent; the Education Department was cut in half.
 

 

Spoiler

Some have found themselves fired, rehired, then let go again. Many have been ridiculed as “lazy” and “corrupt.” They’ve been locked out of offices by police, fired for political “disloyalty,” and told to check their email to see if they still draw a paycheck.

In interviews, more than 30 former and current federal workers told The Washington Post that the chaos and mass firings had left them feeling devalued, demoralized and scared for themselves and the country. Many described problems they’d never experienced before: insomnia, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts. Others with a history of mental struggles said they’d found themselves pushed into terrifying territory.

In response, White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said, “President Trump wants all Americans to thrive under his administration, and he has done more than any president to end the chronic disease crisis in our country.” She added, “It is an honor, not a right, to serve your country in a taxpayer-funded position, and workers unaligned with the American people’s agenda can take part in the growing private sector.”

Trump has blamed federal workers for “destroying this country.” He and his officials have vowed to eliminate employees promoting diversity, to force those who “aren’t doing their job” back to offices five days a week, and to slash $1 trillion from the federal budget — a still-distant goal, even with the layoffs. And more hits may be coming: Republicans in Congress are proposing to save $50 billion by forcing government workers to pay more into retirement benefits while shrinking the value of those benefits.

Many workers said they believe cruelty is part of the plan.

In a 2023 recording surfaced by ProPublica, Trump budget director Russell Vought said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Vought, who was giving a private speech for a pro-Trump think tank, concluded: “We want to put them in trauma.”

‘Suddenly it felt like it was unraveling’

Before her husband found her on the fire escape that chilly morning, Caitlin, 55, had spent 12 years working for the federal government.

She studied creative writing in college and graduate school and took a job in 1994 teaching at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles — an elite private school attended by children of Hollywood executives. But the work felt like a betrayal of her values. Instead of fighting inequality, she told friends, she was perpetuating it.

So, at 35, Caitlin quit and moved with her husband and children to Baltimore to study sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She drove around with bags of new socks in her trunk for people on her commute who were homeless.

She was hired in 2012 by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in Baltimore. Her job was wonky, even by government standards — testing tiny changes to Medicaid to yield better patient outcomes and save taxpayer money. But Caitlin told her friends that those tiny adjustments, especially in maternal health, could save lives.

Caitlin used data to show that birth centers could lower costs and yield higher birth weights and fewer ER visits for pregnant women on Medicaid, including minorities. She oversaw a government-funded program to help pregnant mothers addicted to opioids.

Within days of Trump’s second inauguration, the government was removing gender and minority health data from its websites. “All the progress she worked for, suddenly it felt like it was unraveling,” said one co-worker, who, like many federal employees in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

The cuts were not the only reason for her despair. Caitlin was recovering from a difficult hysterectomy. Family problems had recently taken a toll. She had struggled with depression on and off for years, but had never attempted suicide. As the threats to her job increased, however, so did her distress.

Along with more than 2 million other federal workers, she received the Jan. 28 “Fork in the Road” email, encouraging her to quit and warning that she could be fired. It worried her, but she decided against the buyout. She and other workers were warned they’d be disciplined if they didn’t turn in colleagues who continued work on diversity and equity programs despite a presidential order to stop.

“That one hit her especially hard because it was trying to turn her co-workers against her,” said Emily Cross, one of Caitlin and Mike’s three children.

To reach Caitlin that day on the fire escape, Mike folded his body out the bathroom window. He squeezed down next to her on the black metal grating and told her, “We can get you help.”

He guided her back inside, and soon after, he and Emily convened an emergency meeting with Caitlin’s psychiatrist. They persuaded her to check into a residential mental health facility in Virginia.

Before she entered the facility, Caitlin applied for several jobs outside government. The exhaustion and worry had become too much, she told her family. She wanted a way out.

 

‘A man-made disaster’
By sheer numbers, America has rarely seen sudden job losses on this scale. In 1993, IBM fired 60,000 people, setting the all-time record for largest layoff. Since Trump took office, the government has pushed at least 130,000 people out of jobs — with more than 50,000 fired and 76,000 accepting buyouts, according to media reports. Additional reductions planned in coming weeks could double that total.

Roughly a third of the 30 workers who talked to The Post had been fired. The rest feared being laid off or reassigned — having to move to offices hundreds of miles from family or leave behind the people and missions to which they’d devoted their careers.

Some interviewed by The Post said they had joined the federal workforce for the stability and security of a government job. Many noted that they could earn more in the private sector. Almost all mentioned the chance to help others and make a difference.

They worked at 12 federal agencies and in more than a dozen states. One had spent more than 30 years in government; another only two weeks.

A manager in the Midwest for the Department of Veterans Affairs, forced in February to lay off probationary employees, said she kept scheduling emergency meetings with her psychiatrist, who increased her antidepression meds from 25 milligrams to 50 to 100.

“You spend every day worrying about those under you,” said the VA manager. “The depression now is worse than during my divorce, worse than when my mom died of cancer.”

Phone operators for the Veterans Crisis Line said they’d seen a rise in calls from federal employees and others worried about cuts to the VA.

With so many federal workers seeking help, Rosalyn Beroza, a therapist in the D.C. suburbs, convened a network of more than 60 counselors to provide free and low-cost therapy.
“To so many people, it feels targeted to injure and break them,” Beroza said. “With natural disasters, we have mental health workers helping people on scene. This one’s a man-made disaster, but it’s no less traumatizing.”

A National Institutes of Health employee in the South, worried for weeks that she’ll lose her job, said she’s checked her government benefits to calculate how much money her family would receive if she killed herself. She took the job several years ago because the stable hours and job security helped her manage bipolar disorder, a family affliction she inherited. But in recent weeks, suicidal thoughts have come back so strongly that she’s depended on a safety plan with her husband — limited medication in their house, no guns, and emergency contacts on speed dial.

“Federal workers aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet,” she said. “We’re real people with families who are hurting and, in the worst cases, dying. Why don’t people out there see that? Why doesn’t anyone care?”


‘I just don’t know what I’m going to do’

On Feb. 14, Richard Midgette cleared out his desk at Yellowstone National Park headquarters. On the way home, he blasted indie rock music to drown out the sound of his own sobbing. The route home took him across the only bridge in Gardiner, Montana.

He had never suffered from depression or other mental problems, he said. But as he sat, newly unemployed, in his idling car just past the bridge, he was overwhelmed by dark thoughts.

He wondered how he would pay for a new apartment lease, his student loans and medicine for his Crohn’s disease. He’d worked at the park for only two months. He recalled the foolish pride he’d felt when he first put on a National Park Service uniform after besting 200 others for an IT job he had worked years to attain.

“I thought I was finally getting somewhere,” he said, “building a career and a life.”

He pulled into a gas station next to the bridge and considered calling his parents. His dad had voted for Trump, and for weeks had been cheering the president’s promises to purge the government.

Instead, he dialed Kat Brekken, 69, his boss from a previous job in park concessions. She immediately drove to the bridge and gave him a hug.

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told her.

They kept talking in her old Chevy Suburban until the sky grew dark and their faces were illuminated by the light of the gas station mini-mart.

Gradually, the suicidal impulse faded, replaced by fear, sadness and anger at the casual way he had been tossed out.

“I decided there’d be no greater failure than me throwing away my life,” he said. “It’s exactly what they want. I’m not going to give them that satisfaction.”

Last month, he was rehired only to be fired a second time — after courts ruled some of Trump’s layoffs illegal, then legal again.

“It’s like whiplash,” Midgette said. “I’ve given up on ever working for the federal government again, at least under this administration.”

‘Through the window or the door’

For decades, researchers have studied the mental effects of such layoffs in the private sector.

In one oft-cited study, people ranked unemployment as more traumatic than being cheated on or going through a divorce. Even more than abruptly becoming blind or deaf.

Sudden job loss increases risk of suicide, depression and anxiety, studies show. Mass layoffs magnify that impact.

In 2011, economists examined a decade of data and found that mass layoffs resulted in an additional suicide for every 4,200 men and for every 7,100 women losing their jobs. Mass layoffs can devastate entire communities, they noted, fracturing social networks and creating pools of applicants fighting over limited jobs.

“We’re seeing it in the federal workforce,” said Sally Spencer-Thomas, a psychologist who has consulted on workplace suicide for Fortune 500 companies, first responders and health-care systems. “If you boil suicide down to its most common factors — a thwarted sense of belonging, feeling like a burden to others, having the mindset and means — that’s happening across government.”

One Trump administration tactic, made clear by Trump and Musk’s statements as well as their policies, is trying to make some workers so miserable that they quit. Experts on workplace mental health say it echoes a case in France two decades ago.

In 2004, leaders of a company then known as France Télécom wanted to cut 22,000 jobs but couldn’t outright fire many who had civil servant protections. Over several years, employees were demoted, reassigned to ill-suited jobs and forced to work far from families. “I’ll get people to leave one way or another,” the CEO reportedly told managers, “either through the window or the door.”

At least 35 employees killed themselves. Years later, the CEO and two executives were criminally convicted of “institutional moral harassment” in the deaths. Courts in France — which has some of the world’s strongest labor laws, including many that don’t exist in the U.S. — cited “a conscious scheme to worsen the work conditions.”

Suicide is a complex phenomenon, experts note, and teasing out the causes in any case is difficult. But research points to clear contributing factors: feelings of worthlessness, stress, lack of access to health care and insurance, and unemployment.

Some advocates are particularly concerned for veterans, who make up 30 percent of the federal workforce. Almost a third of all veterans already suffer from a service-connected physical or mental disability. Roughly 11 to 20 percent of those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. Many have training and access to firearms, which increases suicide risk.

“We are shattering people’s sense of mission, identity and value as human beings,” Spencer-Thomas said. “Those left behind by the layoffs are struggling with survivor’s guilt and this sense that their world is collapsing.”

‘She didn’t need to die’

The day he was inaugurated, Trump signed an order requiring federal workers to return to the office five days a week. Casting government employees as lazy, he predicted “a very substantial number of people will not show up to work.”

Social Security worker Monique Lockett, 53, rarely missed a day of work and didn’t intend to start. So she bought a new briefcase that rolled on wheels.

Into it went a keyboard and mouse, because Social Security’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland, lacked equipment for the droves of returning workers. She packed a heater, because the aging building was often cold. And a water bottle, because last year, inspectors found Legionella bacteria in the building’s pipes.

The job increasingly weighed on Monique, said her sister Neiksha Lockett, who shared a house with her.

With no basis, Trump and his lieutenants accused her agency of widespread fraud. They announced plans to cut thousands of workers from Social Security, already staffed at a 50-year low.

As many retired and took buyouts, Monique picked up the extra work, co-workers said. After long days at the office, she would collapse into her favorite armchair.

“I’ve hit my limit,” her sister recalled her saying, referring to demands from Trump appointees and members of the Department of Government Efficiency. “These people don’t know what they are doing.”

She worked with her agency’s most sensitive databases, containing the financial information of every taxpaying American. In recent days, DOGE engineers had demanded access to those databases. Acting commissioner Michelle King resisted; then on Feb. 16, King resigned.

On the morning of Feb. 18, Monique and others returned from the Presidents’ Day weekend to an office tense with news of King’s departure and rumors of more cuts.

Monique was at her cubicle on the third floor of headquarters when she collapsed, co-workers said. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as “hypertensive, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.” Monique’s family and many close co-workers blamed her heart attack on stress at work.

Monique had risk factors for heart disease, including obesity, high blood sugar and high cholesterol, according to her medical records. Two experts who reviewed her records at The Post’s request said in cases like hers, stress, uncertainty and tension at work can contribute to cardiac arrest.

“There is very good evidence that emotional upset can trigger acute and potentially even lethal heart problems,” said Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Duke University researchers in 2012 studied the work histories of more than 13,000 people and found that a single job loss raised a person’s risk of heart attack by 35 percent.

Her death in the middle of the office at a traumatic, pivotal moment left her family and co-workers shaken and angry.

“I’m angry because this didn’t need to happen,” one co-worker said. “She didn’t need to die.”

‘A humane, rational way to do this’

The last time the federal government massively shrank its workforce, President Bill Clinton was in office. Musk has likened his cuts to those reductions: “What @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s. The current Dem party has just gone so crazy far left that it isn’t recognizable anymore!”

But former officials say the 1990s “Reinventing Government” initiative was undertaken slowly and carefully, with bipartisan authorization from Congress. Over the span of seven years, the program eliminated roughly 400,000 federal jobs — a 17 percent cut — mostly through voluntary buyouts and attrition. Back then, the White House pushed back on painting federal workers as lazy.

“Most federal workers believe in service and could be making a lot more in the private sector,” Robert Reich, who was Clinton’s secretary of labor, said in a recent phone interview.

“There’s a humane, rational way to do this. You don’t need to parade around a stage with a chainsaw.”

For weeks now, Vought’s quote about deliberately traumatizing workers has played over and over in the mind of one U.S. Forest Service biologist in California.

He first came across it on a sleepless night in January, scrolling on his phone and wondering if he’d lose his job. That night, he said, his heart began juddering, as if it were trying to escape his chest.

He recalled turning to his wife, a nurse, to say: “These people are going to f---ing kill me.”

Asked to comment on Vought’s quote, the White House sent a statement from an unnamed senior administration official: “What about the January 6 defendants and political prisoners who suffered real trauma and committed suicide over the harassment, bullying and imprisonment by bureaucrats who weaponized the government against them?”

For the biologist, the panic attacks soon were coming three times a day. He’d never thought much about mental health in his 15 years of federal service, but now he signed up for therapy and went on meds. He declined calls from his mother, he said, because he didn’t want to hear her praise Trump for streamlining government — and say that if her son didn’t like it, he could find another job.

One day, the biologist’s 9-year-old son came home from school with a question. Schoolmates had been talking about Musk and Trump, the boy said, and how they were going to fire the stupidest workers.

“Dad,” he asked, “why would they want to fire you?”

‘I’m not enough’
Two weeks after her husband talked her off the fire escape, Caitlin checked into a mental health facility in Fairfax County, Virginia. She had no cellphone or laptop, and could talk to family only using the facility’s phone. In daily calls to her husband, she pressed for updates from her work, the latest layoffs and program cuts.

“I tried not to give her too much information that was upsetting,” Mike said.

Two weeks into her stay, on Feb. 27, the facility’s staff set up a computer for her. A nonprofit wanted to interview Caitlin for a job advocating for Medicaid — the program she had worked to improve for 12 years. That same week, House Republicans had voted for an $880 billion budget cut that would require severe reductions to Medicaid — a scenario Caitlin had long feared.

That night, on a call with her husband, Caitlin remained in good spirits. The job interview had gone well. She told Mike she loved him and missed him.

But when she called the next morning, Caitlin was inconsolable.

“I’m having a really bad day,” she told him.

Mike tried to reassure her, but Caitlin kept saying, “I’m not enough. I’m not good enough.”

Over the years, in her darkest moments, Caitlin had often told him she felt she didn’t measure up. She never felt adequate as a daughter, as a wife and mother, or as a researcher.
“Of course you’re enough,” Mike said over the phone. “You do so much. … You’re more than enough.”

Caitlin kept crying.

“You’re enough for me,” he tried to tell her. But soon after, she hung up.

The next call Mike received, 98 minutes later, was from a hospital in Virginia. He later learned that the mental health facility had staff checking on Caitlin every 15 minutes, but she saw an opening between checkups and killed herself.

‘What are we going to do?’

Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services, where Caitlin had worked, laid off more than 10,000 workers. That came in addition to 10,000 lost to buyouts or retirement — a 24 percent total reduction. Caitlin’s unit, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, cut 300 jobs. In recent days, her HHS colleagues in D.C. and Maryland were forced to line up outside their offices to find out if they still had a job by swiping their badges at the entrance.

In a statement, an HHS spokesperson said, “HHS takes any loss of life or distress among our employees seriously, and our focus remains on providing the support and resources necessary to ensure their well-being.”

The week Caitlin died, one of her grieving colleagues at HHS found out that her husband, a federal contractor, was losing his job.

By week’s end, the colleague couldn’t sleep, struggled with suicidal thoughts and felt as if she were drowning in a pool of rising black water. “You have to get up,” she chided herself when the alarm went off at 6:30 a.m.

“You have to take the kids to school,” she said an hour later.

“You have to work,” she said as she sat down at the office, “to keep a roof over their heads.”

Meanwhile, Caitlin’s husband, Mike — who’d spent decades editing for newspapers in Los Angeles and Baltimore — worked hard on her eulogy, but then wondered after her burial if he should have been more emotional.

In their 34 years together, Caitlin had often been the spontaneous idealist. He was the steady one who planned everything.

They’d been planning a trip to Colombia to bird-watch. And India, for their son’s wedding celebration. And Africa for a safari. They had visited 48 states and were missing only North and South Dakota.

After her death, Mike avoided the headlines that had consumed Caitlin in her final weeks.

“What’s happening to our country?” she would often ask him about Trump’s latest orders and the future of American democracy. “What are we going to do about it?”

These days, the questions haunting Mike are smaller in scale. He wonders how to honor his wife’s work, how to grieve for her without getting lost in the same despair.

Sitting at night in their empty rowhouse, he asks, “What am I going to do without her?”

 

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