Fired by Email: What It Felt Like To Be Targeted by DOGE’s Federal Purge

Eleven federal workers reveal what it felt like to be fired by Musk’s DOGE — the emails, the trauma, and the institutional destruction we’ve never heard about.

On this recentWhoWhatWhy podcast I talked with journalist Sasha Abramsky, the author of American Carnage: How Trump, Musk and DOGE Butchered the US Government.

Abramsky spent six months embedded with 11 fired federal workers from eight different agencies, documenting their lives as they unraveled in real time.They were fired with an afternoon email. Denied their pensions. Told their health care ended immediately. One worker got the termination notice an hour outside her new duty station after driving cross-country for five days. Another was ordered to stay home with full pay — psychological warfare designed to inflict maximum humiliation.

This is what it felt like from the inside when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency took a chainsaw to the federal workforce. And we’ve never heard these stories — until now.

Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe