Some federal employees have reported traumatic experiences since President Donald Trump slurred them as “crooked” and “dishonest" and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency slashed their jobs from the payroll, according to a new report.
The federal government employed 2.4 million workers when Trump returned to office Jan. 20, but Trump and his chainsaw-wielding sidekick Musk have chopped off entire chunks of that workforce. More than 30 of those current and former employees told the Washington Post they have experienced insomnia, panic attacks and suicidal thoughts.
And that seems to be the cruel point of the budget cuts, the report stated.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected," said Trump budget director Russell Vought in a 2023 recording. "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 ... We want to put them in trauma.”
That's exactly what has happened to many of the workers culled from the government by Trump and Musk as part of the budget cuts laid out in the Project 2025 blueprint that Vought helped write.
"Caitlin Cross-Barnet had struggled with depression, and now her husband, Mike, found her on their narrow, third-floor fire escape," the Post reported. "As he tried to coax her back in, she replied: 'It’s not high enough to jump.'"
"On the 26th day of Trump’s term, Richard Midgette, 28, was fired from his IT job at Yellowstone National Park," the report continued. "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 Post added. "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."
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About a third of the 30 workers who spoke to the newspaper had been fired, while the rest feared layoffs or reassignments to offices hundreds of miles away, and mental health professionals in the Washington, D.C., area report a spike in federal workers seeking support since Trump entered the White House.
“To so many people, it feels targeted to injure and break them,” Rosalyn Beroza, a therapist in the D.C. suburbs. “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.”
One employee at the National Institutes of Health, who worried for weeks that she'd lose her job, told the Post she had checked her government benefits to determine how much money her family would receive if she killed herself, and she and her husband have taken guns and some medications out of the house to limit those risks.
“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?”