- After all the hullabaloo about fired federal workers, many are now back at work — sort of.
- They’re on paid administrative leave after a court ordered the Trump administration reinstate roughly 25,000 of them.
- Ten of them spoke to BI about the whiplash of their careers and financial lives.
The latest twist in the White House’s efficiency push is roughly 25,000 fired federal workers being ordered back on the government’s payroll — but not doing any work.
“I’m sitting at home not doing anything,” said Monte Burns, a 55-year-old Internal Revenue Service worker who was fired in February and then reinstated on administrative leave last week.
Burns feels relieved, but has only temporarily paused his job search because he’s doubtful his IRS paycheck will last.
“I definitely am not wanting to put all my eggs in this basket again,” Burns said. “They kind of put holes in the basket, and I don’t want the eggs to fall out and crack.”
Burns isn’t the only sitting duck on the federal government payroll. Around 25,000 federal probationary workers across 18 agencies were fired under the Trump administration in the last month or so. Now, many of them are back, following a judge’s order. But that doesn’t mean they’re pushing papers; instead, many have been placed directly on paid administrative leave, which OPM has said in a filing is the first step in reinstating workers’ jobs.
“Their version of reinstatement is just adding us back to personnel rolls but not letting us actually do our jobs,” a reinstated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau worker said, adding they expect to be fired again.
Business Insider spoke to 10 workers about what it’s like being fired, unfired, and then bracing for a possible second firing. Many viewed the latest turn of events as as antithetical to DOGE’s mission to reduce what Donald Trump said was the many federal workers who “don’t work at all.”
For the newly re-employed, it’s a frustrating period. Workers say they want to be working, but instead they’re twiddling their thumbs. At least they’re getting paid — for now.
“I get more and more annoyed and angry at the way they’re treating us as this little ball they can just hit around. Just make up your damn mind,” a reinstated National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration worker said. “You’re basically holding everybody in limbo and playing games with their livelihoods.”
Representatives for the White House, CFPB, NOAA, IRS, DOGE, and DOE did not respond to a request for comment.
When a push for efficiency means getting paid to sit around and do nothing
The reinstated workers BI spoke with said they don’t want to be slacking off. It’s a strange twist of fate for people who were fired, obstensibly, for performance issues, which they dispute.
“It’s just been for me, a little bit of a back and forth mentally. Obviously I feel like I was wrongly terminated, but also I didn’t take my oath to uphold the Constitution to sit here and do nothing and get paid. It just feels like I’m stealing from the taxpayers in a way,” one reinstated IRS worker said.
A reinstated IRS worker said that while “it sucked to get swept up in the mass cuts” they originally supported the cost-cutting mission and believe “the country has to do penance for the overspending.”
Now the aim has been distorted. “I find it ironic that ‘they’ were wanting to flush out the people who were earning checks and not actually producing and now, due to the way they fired us, they created the same scenario,” they added.
Even getting in touch with workers to get them back on payrolls brings its own challenges. One reinstated General Services Administration worker said that the letter informing them of their reinstatement went to their spam folder.
A reinstated Veteran Affairs worker said it’s not that simple to bring people back — they’d need new equipment and new IDs. The worker said the plan is to get equipment and IDs next week and get back to work then.
The worker said there’s still “a lot of gray area with unknown direction” given there’s a hiring freeze still, which impacts their work.
Spokespeople from both the VA and GSA told BI that the agencies are complying with the court order.
One pending question is whether workers will actually pick up their pens and paper again. The GSA worker seriously doubts they’ll be tangibly reinstated, but another reinstated IRS worker was more optimistic.
“It’s sounding like they’re going to be bringing us back to official duties soon once they can re-onboard us, so it’ll also be nice to be able to feel productive again,” they said.
For now, though, workers are sitting and waiting for what comes next.
“We want to go back to doing what we did — that’s to help people,” a reinstated NOAA worker said, adding, “You’re now paying us to not work. How is that making things more efficient?”
A few more days of unexpected pay
For some workers, the brief reinstatement has been a boon. The administrative leave means at least a few more days of pay that they hadn’t expected.
“It’s pretty awesome,” said a reinstated IRS worker who’d had a job interview the day before, adding, “Obviously you never know when you’ll get a job offer, so having a paycheck to rely on in the meantime will definitely help.”
Some said they’re using the extra paid time to think about what comes next, or to take some breathing room for the job hunt. But it’s also a time to lament jobs that none are anticipating they’ll actually get back.
“Ideally, I would return to my job. I just do not think that that’s going to happen,” a reinstated IRS worker said.
A reinstated Department of Energy worker said that they loved their job and their team, but they do expect to be let go again. They’re “not at all” counting on actually staying. One reinstated NOAA worker said, emotionally, they’ve moved on. They still “adore” the agency and think highly of it — but it’s too stressful to stay under the current circumstances.
“I have a family to care about,” they said. “I just need to seek something else that is going to be not necessarily stable, because no job is really stable, but at least isn’t going to treat me like dirt.”
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