“I tried to ask like, ‘can you tell me why I wasn’t eligible for VSIP?’ she said of the Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment. The response:Ěý “Crickets.”

DeLancey is just one of the 3,500 FDA employees on a rollercoaster ride since April 1, when the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, initiated mass layoffs.

Former federal employees have been plunged headfirst into a sea of unemployment and early retirement, some re-entering the DMV workforce for the first time in years.

As pile up, many employees remain in limbo on their job status. A few have been rehired, but not enough to replace the thousands who have left. Currently, former employees who have not retired early have been placed on administrative leave. Those leaves are set to expire on June 2.Ěý

Former employees described the aftermath of mass layoffs as chaotic, with communication about their next steps being especially strained.Ěý

DeLancey, for example, said she emailed the incentive payment program team seven times, and after weeks of cold emailing, she was officially denied the week of May 4.Ěý

VSIP is a $25,000 payment available to all laid-off employees who meet its criteria, but it is offered as a stack-on to early retirement candidates.Ěý

Applications for early retirement and VSIP were due shortly after the two exit strategies were announced.

That means DeLancey had 11 days to decide if she wanted to retire early from her 21-year career. Otherwise, she would’ve been laid off.Ěý Ultimately, she digitally signed her early retirement slip, and her retirement date was set for April 19.Ěý

For the FDA, DeLancey, of Union Bridge, Maryland, served as the senior advisor for strategic communications in the Center for Veterinary Medicine for the last seven years of her career at the Rockville, Maryland, campus. There, she led a team of health communication specialists who reported on vital health updates to the public.

“ A lot of people think that we’re just like puppies and kittens and happy, feel good stories,” DeLancey said.Ěý“There is a lot more to that that people don’t think about because we regulate what goes into the animals that become your food, and I felt like that perspective was often lost.”Ěý

The work left behind

Before layoffs swept the work off DeLancey’s desk, her team had still been closely monitoring the bird flu —a health threat that she said could potentially be worse than COVID if left unmonitored.

“ We have the potential of another epidemic, another worldwide epidemic at our doorstep, and you’re gonna fire the people who are working on it directly? That is the one that just really kills me,” DeLancey said.

DeLancey outlined more risks attached to FDA firings in her opinion piece to Food Safety News on April 22. She said she’d been thinking about writing this article “a long time before it ran.”

“ I really wanted to write it after the first when my team got laid off but I was afraid that the administration would take revenge. I’ve never felt that way in any other position that I’ve been in,” DeLancey said.

Currently, she is waiting to see if she’ll receive her work performance award for top performers in 2024, which could be a small cash award of around $500 to $800.

“Those awards are usually made around this time [of year] and no one knows if we will actually get them,” she said in a text message.

DMV economy strained; institutional knowledge wiped

While the economic impact of federal layoffs continues to unfold, some experts believe that layoffs, combined with current unemployment, are a double-edged sword. In other words: loss of fundamental work, loss of knowledge.

The public is generally aware of the layoffs. But to others, the situation is more personal. Celeste Davis thinks about its impact on her community.Ěý

“I’m worried about the red dye and food, but I’m also worried about if my neighbors can actually afford food, too,” Davis said in a Zoom interview.Ěý

Davis is an American University health studies professor. Though her work does not directly overlap with the FDA, she thinks about her friends and colleagues who have lost their jobs, and what it means for the future of public health training.Ěý

In terms of how the public can trust the health information being released post-layoffs, Davis said she doesn’t know.

“If we’re changing research data to not have certain words because of political ideologies, that doesn’t sound good. And if that’s going to be the sentiment across all these types of actions, that’s not good,” Davis said.

‘Bread and butter’ let go.

Losing institutional expertise is costly enough, but it also sets off a ripple effect that hits the entire support team.

Under normal circumstances, Sydney Verdine’s department would’ve helped DeLancey with things like early retirement. Verdine’s support to staff went beyond that, and she helped between 300 and 500 departments, she said.

“There’s people who are pending early retirement and they don’t know what date [they end], they don’t know when to take their stuff. You know, they’re just sitting there,” Verdine said in a phone interview.

Verdine, 35, is a Maryland resident who worked as a management analyst in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the White Oak, Maryland, campus. She said her entire team were let go, even her superiors.

She described her department as the backbone of the work that is done at the FDA.

“We were the operating staff, the bread and butter, you know, just to help everything run smoothly, and I have been told that without us being there … it’s chaotic without us there,”

Verdine was asked to help with timekeeping and credit entry while she’s on administrative leave, but said there wasn’t much help she could offer since she didn’t have access to everyone’s timesheets.Ěý

“Every ecosystem needs every single part to thrive. And when you pull something from the ecosystem, it messes with it. It’s no longer the same,” Verdine said.

A chainsaw vs. a scalpelĚý

ĚýAn FDA instructional systems specialist requested that their name not be used after seeing an article about investigations targeting laid-off workers who had spokenĚýto the press.

The former FDA employee trained physicians to be clinical reviewers, creating master classes, e-learning materials and instructional recordings to ensure physicians are up to speed. They described their role as “no other training in the world.”

Clinical reviewers at the FDA oversee the testing of new medications during clinical trials, where they assess side effects and determine whether the medication is safe for release to the public. Clinical reviewers have a year to review all data to make a final determination.Ěý

The former FDA employee worked remotely from the Midwest, where their work was shared across all FDA campuses.Ěý

With a gut to almost all of the former FDA employee’s team, only the physicians, who are also training clinical reviewers, remain standing. The former employee stated that it’s not safe for them to perform their job alone.

“ To me, I feel like it’s just dangerous to not have people who are fully trained to do their job, and there’s nothing available and there’s not going to be anything available for who knows how long,” they said.

“​​ I knew that the Republican agenda was to cut the workforce. What I didn’t realize is how they were going to do it. I didn’t realize they were gonna take a chainsaw versus a scalpel,” the former FDA employee said.

Termination letter errors

The former employee said they were one of many other former federal workers that reported mistakes in their termination letter.

91ÇŃ×Ó issued to highlight the sections the former FDA employee identified as incorrect. These edits do not reflect all potential errors, as the former employee is still consulting with their superiors to better understand the letter’s contents. Certain areas of the letter have been blacked out to protect the individuals’ identities.

On April 29, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Public Affairs office received a request to comment on why employees had errors on their RIF letters and whether official corrections would be issued.Ěý

This was the explanation for why errors occurred.

“All of the data in the RIF notices was populated from HHS’s human resources system of record. To the extent there are errors, it is because the data collected by HHS’s multiple, siloed HR divisions is inaccurate. This is exactly why HHS is reorganizing its administrative functions to streamline operations and fix the broken systems left to us by the Biden Administration. Streamlining this into one operation will allow for enhanced data integrity and coordination,” said an HHS spokesperson.

When asked if the errors would be corrected, the spokesperson did not respond.

Living in Limbo as Gen Z

The FDA was Menna Ibrahim’s first big career move as a 25-year-old graduate student, and her work has already crumbled before her.

This month, Ibrahim is set to graduate from the Merrill College of Journalism MA program. She also worked full-time as an FDA recruitment and outreach management analyst since July 2022.

Ěý“ It’s already hard to navigate your first job as is. And it seems to be significantly more difficult when the government and the people that are supposed to protect you, quote unquote, are making it significantly harder to navigate,” Ibrahim said.

After being unable to return to the FDA communications department since the April 1 layoff, Ibrahim still has yet to receive a RIF letter.ĚýĚý

Ibrahim resides in the Trinidad neighborhood of Northeast D.C., about an hour’s commute from her Rockville FDA campus.Ěý

She had the day off on April 1, but woke up to the news of her colleagues and supervisor being terminated. Her supervisor told her to log in to her work email to see if she had received the RIF sent out at 6:05 that morning.

Ibrahim logged in at 8 a.m. – nothing. She texted her colleagues to see what was going on.

“ They had all received theirs. And so I was really confused. I was like, ‘Do I still have a job? Do I not? What’s the vibe?” Ibrahim said in a phone interview.

Her supervisor said that the letter may arrive in her inbox around noon, and to keep an eye on her laptop.

By mid-May, the message had still not arrived.

Click on the image above to begin slideshow

A part of Ibrahim hoped she survived the swinging axe of unemployment. The next day, she drove the hour-long commute to the Rockville office. She swiped into the garage, and her card worked. But she still had to swipe into the building. Her building swipe didn’t work, and at that moment, she’d realized her job was gone.

Ibrahim had a feeling she wouldn’t survive staffing cuts anyway being the youngest on her team.

Ěý“I knew if they were going to keep one person on my team, the likelihood that it would be me is super low because I have way less experience than the people that I worked with,” she said.

Ibrahim’s work as a recruitment and outreach management analyst supported student interns and post-graduates. She also managed the FDA’s LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter) page and wrote for the agency’s bimonthly newsletter.

She planned to stay at the FDA until she found her dream job to be in a newsroom after graduation, but the security net fell beneath her.

“Because I’ve been let go, things feel a lot more urgent and I feel like I’m a lot more desperate to take on any role that will pay me,” Ibrahim said.

Being a journalist and a former FDA employee hasn’t been easy for Ibrahim, but she said being a reporter makes her “have so much more empathy for federal workers.”

Frustrations continue after layoffs

Corrilisha Telford couldn’t attend Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s on April 11 because she was let go, but said her colleagues who could attend told her they were “very upset” by his remarks.

In Kennedy’s speech at the White Oak campus, he referred to the FDA as a “sock puppet for the industry it was supposed to regulate,” which were one of the many statements that did not sit well with the crowd.

There are “people [who] are still working there, and you’re telling them that their work doesn’t matter basically,” Telford said.

Kennedy has that his plans to slash health agency staff will lead to significant cost savings, and projected the layoffs to save taxpayers $1.8 billion annually.

Telford said that cuts to her department would not save taxpayers any money, as it’s funded by user fees – charges paid by individuals or businesses to government agencies for access to services and resources.Ěý

Telford, 28, of Silver Spring, Maryland, worked for the FDA for three and a half years, and in the last nine months of her role, she worked in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). Her office handled regulatory policy.Ěý

For her colleagues who remain, she is worried about how they will be able to function with a minimized staff.

“I’m concerned for my colleagues, because it’s not working.”

Telford said she’s unsure how she fits into the world now. Within her first two weeks of unemployment, Telford applied for 20 to 30 positions, but the required skill sets don’t fully mirror her FDA expertise.

Like Verdine, Telford was also asked if she could return to work after the layoff to help with the transition of work.

Telford did not take up the offer.Ěý

“ Why would I do that? Y’all laid me off. Why would I help you?” she said. “And that goes to show you, they just don’t have enough people.”

The post Mass layoffs plunge DMV federal workers into sudden hardship first appeared on 91ÇŃ×Ó.

“The way that the restaurant suffered because of this one employee was wild. I mean, we had to hire three people to replace this one person while he was gone,” Terone said. “So, think about if these deportations do start.” 

According to restaurateurs around the country, dining establishments are heavily reliant on immigrant labor, and with Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation, such measures of labor loss could severely cripple the restaurant industry. 

Terone’s employee, who she requested to remain anonymous to protect his identity since she spoke on his behalf, wound up being deported back to Mexico, but she knew she could not leave him there. So, her family hired an immigration attorney and spoke in his case as character witnesses.  

With the legal assistance of Terone and her family, the employee returned to the states, but told Terone he considered going back to Mexico, as it “wasn’t worth living in fear.” 

Deportation fear is a common experience amongst foreign-born citizens, and in a Pew Research Center conducted in 2022, four out of 10 Latinos reported being worried that they or someone they know could be deported.

During Trump’s first term, Terone told her employees to keep a low profile. 

“We would just tell them, ‘Put your head down, don’t attract attention to yourself,’ because it was scary. It was [an] unknown,’” she said. 

Terone grew up in the restaurant industry and regularly worked alongside immigrant employees and has never taken their contributions to the business for granted. 

 â€œThese immigrants would come in, they’d work, they didn’t complain, they’d do the dirty work, they’d do the dishes, they’d take the trash out. If the toilet overflowed, they were the first ones to go help clean up a mess,” she said. 

Although Terone’s family restaurant is no longer in business, she said that her work with migrants helped her understand them on a more personal level. 

“People just don’t get it unless they know these people, and they’re hard workers and they’re so kind,” she said. “I think if you’re just watching the news and hearing about it, you don’t understand that these are just people that want a good life.” 

Dan Hunter of Queens, New York has been a chef in dozens of restaurants and owned eight of his own, and he said immigrant communities have always been interwoven in aspects of his culinary career. 

“I mean, they’re integral,” Hunter said. “I’ve been working in restaurants in New York, New Jersey, California [and] Vermont and I don’t know a restaurant that doesn’t have immigrant help [and] labor.” 

According to a by the National Restaurant Association, 21% of restaurant employees are immigrants, but that figure does not account for the number of undocumented employees.  

Restaurateurs are constantly in need of consistent labor, and a survey by restaurant software provider Toast found the industry to have close to . Because of this, Hunter said most owners will take any help they can get to keep their business afloat, citizen or not. 

“If you have a restaurant and you’re open every day, and you need to be open the next day and your chef quit, or two of your servers quit, or your dishwasher quit…you need to find someone, and the first 10 people that walk into your restaurant are undocumented and you know it,” Hunter said.

While Hunter no longer works in the day-to-day operations of a restaurant, he knows that the industry cannot survive without immigrants in the labor pool and predicts the cost of the dining experience to skyrocket if Trump’s plan is implemented. 

“If labor costs, in general, [are] about 20 percent of a business and all of a sudden you have to go out and only hire non-immigrant labor, whether it’s legal or illegal, your labor costs will go up and your prices will go up,” he said. “I mean, no owner of a business, I don’t care if you have one unit or a thousand units. If your costs go up, you will pass those on to the consumer.”  

Hunter is still connected with restaurant owners he’s met throughout his career, and he said there are conversations about the concerns of labor loss amongst them.  

Hunter said his colleagues are a very nervous group of owners that fear the possibility of going out of business and tend to move quickly when conflicts arise as a method of self-preservation. 

Kwaku Nuamah is a peace, human rights and cultural relations professor at American University in Washington, D.C. He said that, while he does not believe Trump will be able to realistically move forward with his plans, people “always have to be concerned when there is a potential to disrupt the labor force.” 

Nuamah said that he can’t imagine deportation on a large scale to be accomplished humanely and that it would be difficult to do so without disrupting businesses. 

“This is still a country of laws, and so you can’t just deport somebody. You have to first of all establish that they are here illegally and that requires processing,” Nuamah said. “What you’re probably going to end up with is a lot of people going underground and working in the sector anyway, which would then afford them even less protection.” 

Nuamah said that even if deportations were to take place at the scale Donald Trump wants it to, it would be extremely expensive to do so. 

“That’s a cost to the employers in the restaurant sector… because they have to now do investigations to verify people’s documents and all that stuff,” he said. “Small restaurants don’t have that extra capacity, and they don’t have the extra resources to hire investigators.” 

Aside from the amount of work required to follow through with mass deportation, Nuamah said that there are other ways to better handle the issue of immigration. 

“If you really, really want to solve the problem of illegal immigration, you look at the root causes. Those root causes include these broken countries, where people cannot make a living,” he said. “You cannot solve one problem by episodic, performative actions that excite your base but create a bigger problem. And a lot of those people who are cheering this policy on will actually suffer.” 

When 91ÇŃ×Ó posed the question of how mass deportation could affect the restaurant industry on Reddit, an owner of a Thai restaurant from Houston, Texas came forward.  

The owner requested anonymity to protect themselves and their employees, and said their establishment has been targeted in the past due to being a majority immigrant staff. The owner said many people they know in the industry are “supremely nervous” about deportation. 

“From a business perspective, all of our progress stops. We can’t finish any projects anymore because our employees are now distracted. You know, the focus is no longer within the restaurant,” the Thai restaurant owner said. 

Behind California, Texas is the second most popular destination spot for migrant populations, with reported in 2024, according to World Population Review. 

Even though Houston is 670 miles away from the Mexico-United States border, the Thai restaurant owner is still concerned about being approached by border patrol. 

“We’re in Houston. We’re not as close to the border, but the border patrol has come up even further than they were before,” the Thai restaurant owner said. “But they’re coming up to, like, San Antonio, which is several hundred miles away from the border.” 

The owner said they have tried their best to reassure their employees that they are safe, but that it is hard to shake the fear of the unknown. 

“They’re worried about their families now, they’re worried about their livelihood, they’re worried about the light being shown on them in any kind of way,” the owner said. 

The Thai restaurant owner said that concerns of safety amongst the staff are also heightened by Texas’ leadership and described Gov. Greg Abbott as being “pretty anti-immigrant.” 

“This is the first time that I think [Texas leaders are] taking very, very public steps to do something about [immigration]. And so, our staff are concerned,” the owner said. 

In terms of how the Thai restaurant owner plans to navigate through the possibility of labor loss, they said they don’t have a clear answer on it right now. 

“I had more answers during [Trump’s] first term. I don’t have any answers [to] this one,” the owner said. “I’m mostly just telling them right now that there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing has been passed. You know, it’s a simple bluster. We’ve heard it before.” 

Ashton owns a Mediterranean restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts and asked 91ÇŃ×Ó to be identified on a first-name basis for safety reasons. 

Migrant workers are a cornerstone 

Ashton said he was concerned and upset by the thought of losing employees due to mass deportation and described migrant workers as a “cornerstone” to his establishment. 

“A lot of our employees are not here legally, and there’s a real issue if we lose all of them. Like, we just won’t be a business,” Ashton said.  

While Ashton said he can’t speak for every city, he said that without foreign-born workers, the industry would not function in the same regard. 

“I mean, it’s everyone from dishwashers, prep cooks, to line cooks, to chef de cuisines, like, without them… I can only restate it so many times. Without them, we just would not be an industry.” he said. 

Ashton could not put words to how he feels about the proposed deportation policy and is worried about how it could affect members of his family. 

“I’m having a hard time, and I can’t imagine how difficult it is for people that do not have agency in the same way that I do,” he said. “I’m also just navigating the immigration system with my wife, who is not legal. So not just for my employees, but in my personal life. It’s a whole thing.”  

Robert Smalls is a Jacksonville, Florida native who often dines at ethnic restaurants and said mass deportation would first increase his dining costs, but that its impact on him would be trivial compared to migrant workers. Smalls called the deportation policy “selfish.” 

“I understand that mass deportation [and] what these individuals are going through is very rough and kind of unimaginable for them because they’re just trying to find a better life. I say selfish because I have the awareness to understand that I only have to deal with a price increase. I don’t have to deal with my whole life being imploded,” he said. 

Smalls said that if mass deportation were to take effect, how often he dines out and which restaurants he could visit would be circumstantial, but that he would still support the establishments he could. 

“It depends on the individual situations of the people affected because there’s some spots that I go to that are primarily immigrant owned and ran,” Smalls said. “So, if they are able to, [and if they] and their families are able to stay and be stable, I’d probably frequent those areas more because the other areas will either be a little more expensive or closed down.” 

Jayesh Rathod is a professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law in D.C. and said that migrant workers are not held to the praise they once were during the pandemic. 

“Many immigrant workers were seen as heroes and their role in society and in the workplace was reframed to being essential workers, right? And somehow, in the context of the most recent presidential election and all the political rhetoric surrounding it, we’ve lost sight of the important role that these folks play in society.” Rathod said. 

It is not clear how or when Trump plans to move forward with his immigration policy, yet Rathod said that deportation would be felt disproportionately around the country, and some states may not be as forceful with pushing immigrant populations out.  

“New York City and Washington, D. C. have major restaurant industries that rely heavily on foreign workers, but those are also areas where the local police are likely to be least cooperative with ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and perhaps in terms of the social climate, the immigrants are going to feel safe,” Rathod said.  

Immigrant workers are often viewed solely as employees. But Rathod said it is important to humanize them and acknowledge them as members of society. 

“We need to also consider that these are not just workers, but people who are part of our society and have relationships and connections,” he said. “By stripping them away, we’re not just having an economic impact on our wallet industries, but also real-life human impact on a whole network of loved ones, many of whom are likely to be U. S. citizens. That’s something we need to think carefully and seriously about as we work with different policy decisions.” 

The post Restaurant owners worry mass deportation of immigrants could devastate the industry first appeared on 91ÇŃ×Ó.

“I don’t think that things will be permanently unavailable, but it is true that there could be a lot of disruptions in the early part of 2025 if he really puts on tariffs of the magnitude that he’s talking about,” said Robert A. Blecker, a professor of economics at American University.

President-elect Donald Trump has proposed a on imported goods from China, prompting some consumers to stock up and upgrade to newer models of products as they anticipate inflation being passed on to them. 

“If the tariffs are much higher, and they’re on many more countries, the firms, the intermediary firms, the wholesalers and the retailers and the importers and the distributors are not going to be able to absorb this and they will have to pass the cost on to consumers,” Blecker said.

Though the tariffs are just proposals, some consumers are not waiting to see if they are implemented.

Matt C., who did not wish to disclose his last name, said he anticipates Trump’s tariffs to hike the cost of many of his everyday-use items and has considered upgrading his car and the original water heater of his 25-year-old coastal Maine home.

“If we have increased tariffs on everything, and we have nobody to do the jobs that Americans won’t do, I see a real double whammy,” he said. “I expect that if we keep taxing imports, car prices are going to go up and they’re already pretty ridiculous.”

As a landscaper, Matt said tool components like trimmer string and chainsaw chains are typically made in China and are going to get more expensive to some extent and maybe to a much greater extent.

To get an idea of other items he may need to purchase before prices go up, Matt said he has been referring to , which the National Retail Federation produced, and said it has been helping him navigate through his larger purchasing decisions.

While Matt is doing what he can to stay updated on which industries could be slammed the hardest by tariffs, he expressed his frustration around Trump’s proposal.

“It’s basically just an enormous tax on the American consumer. It really irritates me,” he said.

Content creator Cynthia Buhler recently asked ChatGPT to give her a list of foods to stock up on before January, and shared the chatbot platform’s suggestions to her TikTok followers in the style of a food haul.

Even though she said she “didn’t really want to jump into AI” as a tool for guidance, she said it helped her understand which imported goods to consider stocking up on, such as wine and vodka.

ľţłÜłóąôąđ°ů’s is captioned: “Grocery haul based on ChatGPT list to buy before tariff price increases” and features a table stacked with non-perishables, produce and frozen foods. The video received 13.8k views, though engagement numbers are the least of her concern. 

Grocery haul to fill the freezer Many items on sale at Amazon Fresh. Nows the time to stock up on holiday deals.

“Even if I only get 200 views, if one person benefits from it somehow or they enjoy it, it’s useful to them and helps them, then I don’t need to be viral,” she said. “I figure if people are saving it, that means more to me than if they comment.”

In her home in Washington state, she has always sought after deals on groceries and said she would never pay full price, and she offers advice to consumers who may not have the means to stock up on items before prices increase.

“Between now and January, you know, if you can only afford one can of beans, buy two or three cans of beans when they’re on special and then you have that little bit of savings and security, a little bit more food security,” she said.

D.C. resident Fatima Toure said she thinks there are ways to mitigate the cost of food if tariffs are enacted, but admits she originally had not realized how taxed imports could affect her until it came up in conversation with her peers.

“That’s when I realized the severity of the issue…but now that I realize I am going to be affected, I am really worried about the price of things and how that’s going to affect me as a graduate student working part time, and also making minimum wage,” she said.

Toure said she wants to prioritize self-care products and buy beauty supplies in bulk, as the ones she often purchases are imported from Asian countries.

“Press on nails, hair bundles, certain clothing items and things like that…because of the tariffs they’re gonna start [to be] more expensive, especially through websites such as Aliexpress that are Chinese-based, which tend to offer a lot of discounts and price reductions,” Toure said.

Toure said she is worried about how tariffs are going to affect other aspects of her income, and has created a personal deadline for herself to buy the self-care items she needs.

“It’s definitely affecting how I go about purchasing items. I currently have a cart of things that I want to order prior to January,” she said. “Certain items I kind of have already, or I’m just working toward purchasing because I know that once the tariffs come, things are going to be a bit more expensive.”

While it is common for some consumers to stockpile items before prices inflate, American University economics professor Kara Reynolds is not sure if Trump will be successful in imposing such high taxes on imported goods.

“I think the big question is to what degree President Trump will be successful in what he has planned? There are many tools that he can use to impose tariffs on a specific country or on a specific product,” she said. “He’s been very successful in targeting China. It’s less clear how he would legally.”

Reynolds said that there are not many legal ways to do a broad increase on tariffs without going through Congress, adding that it’s not clear how Congress would “support that effort.”

Reynolds said she feels that Trump has the “right idea in mind” to develop more industries in the United States to increase manufacturing employment in the long-run but Blecker adds that it would “take a while to build up [to] that capacity.”

“It would be hard to find workers,” Blecker said. “We would have labor shortages that would probably push up wages and labor costs, and that would make inflation worse and not better.”

Both Reynolds and Blecker expressed their uncertainty in how the weight of tariffs would play out for both the economy and consumers, and Blecker advised consumers to try not to be too reactionary in their pursuit of bulk-buying.

“Trump loves to make these [tariff] deals. So it is all very unpredictable, but that does create a lot more uncertainty for consumers. And I think it’s a bad thing for the economy overall,” Blecker said. “I really hope people don’t panic and hoard goods, because that’s going to make it harder for everyone else like it did during COVID.”

The post As tariffs loom, economists and consumers brace for impact first appeared on 91ÇŃ×Ó.

Election results that do not align with the hopes of a voter are what health studies professor and registered dietician Dara Ford describes as an example of acute stress. Though acute stress is typically short-term, it has the ability to suppress appetite hormones in the body, Ford said.

Several Harris supporters tell 91ÇŃ×Ó they are experiencing exactly that following Harris’ defeat in the presidential race.Ěý

“It’s almost like a fight or flight response and because of that, the body’s not focused on getting food and digestion. It’s really almost a survival mode at that point,” Ford said.Ěý

Ciara Taylor was a first-time voter in this election and tried to maintain an optimistic outlook but couldn’t shake the feeling that things could go drastically south.Ěý

When Taylor realized the voting numbers were in favor of Donald Trump, she didn’t eat anything and said she “felt a heavy cloud” over her.

She turned on the news to keep up with the election updates, but not too much later, she had to shut the television off. “It was starting to make my stomach hurt… [and] I tend to carry my anxiety in my stomach,” she said.Ěý

Taylor spent the night mostly awake and had to turn off her phone from fear of seeing more states turn red.Ěý

“I started to get a little bit hopeful and then I heard about something called a … but it started to look a little bit more than a red mirage, so I decided I was going to not look at the results, but I couldn’t help myself,” she said.Ěý

Donald Trump was announced as the 47th president in the early hours of Nov. 6, and Taylor could not stomach the thought of what the next four years will look like for her.Ěý

“It was weird because I was forgetting about an appetite like there were so many things running through my head that I was just forgetting that an appetite even existed,” she said.Ěý

Taylor had to remind herself to eat in the days that followed, but even when she did, she could only tolerate bland foods.Ěý

“I would be nauseous before I ate, but also nauseous because I didn’t eat and then just be more nauseous after I ate and it just wasn’t really going too well with me,” she said.Ěý

Nina Thomas realized she lost her appetite a week before the election, and once the results were called, her prioritization to eat dwindled.Ěý

“The night of the election, I did not eat,” she said. “The day after the election, I did not eat again just out of sadness and reflections of the outcome of the election and feeling like that sense of hopelessness.”ĚýĚý

Thomas didn’t eat her first full meal until two days after the results at 10 p.m., and as someone who typically enjoys cooking, she said it still felt like a chore.Ěý

“I feel like I’m not finding enjoyment in a lot of things post-election and anxiety just kind of takes the fun out of a lot of things,” she said.Ěý

Kelsey Espada went to bed at 11 p.m. on the night of the election and said she woke up at six in the morning because she “had the jitters.” She woke up in disbelief.Ěý

“Once I looked, I actually told myself I was like, no, this has to be a dream. Let me go back to sleep. 
And once I actually got up, I looked at the results again, and I noticed, okay, this is real life.”Ěý

Espada said she and her family had all felt queasy after seeing the results, and that she didn’t feel like herself.Ěý

“I actually felt sick to my stomach, and I didn’t want to eat. I really didn’t,” Espada said.Ěý

Espada said she had high hopes for the election and believed that Harris was fit for the role of being the next president. But the road to 270 had just been too steep.Ěý

Espada ate her first full meal three days after the election, and even though she was working to gain her strength back, she said “the fight continues on.”Ěý

“I think right now things might look a little blurry and I think we’re all in this state of uncertainty, but I think as long as we are continuing to build community, advocate for one another and really just coming together, especially for those who are people of color, I really think that is what will be the best bet,” Espada said. Ěý

According to the American Psychological Association, skip a meal due to stress.Ěý

Ford said that within the “first 12 hours” of not eating enough, people can begin noticing the shifts in their body after skipping a meal.Ěý

“You can have headaches, fatigue, irritability. 
That’s all very short term when it comes to not eating enough,” she said.Ěý

But Ford warns against allowing the short-term effects of undereating to turn into long-term effects, as it can be more harmful to the body.Ěý

“Longer term would be concerns like nutrient deficiencies,” Ford said. “Short-term stress can become long-term, and then typically long-term stress.”Ěý

While it may be difficult to hold food down in moments of appetite loss, Ford advises those who are having a hard time to try to take care of themselves in the small ways they can.Ěý

“Try to eat your regular meals in a day. Maybe they’re smaller, maybe it’s different foods, but making sure you’re eating at regular intervals, eating foods that feel good to you at that time. Getting a vegetable and getting a fruit in is great,” Ford said.Ěý

When 91ÇŃ×Ó presented the question of appetite loss due to the election results through an Instagram story, only women came forward. While men can have a shared experience, registered dietician Elsa Chu believes the topics discussed during campaigns may have made this election “more personal” to women.Ěý

“I think a lot of men feel frustrated and angry and scared on a political level, but they aren’t afraid that some of their fundamental rights are being violated,” Chu said.Ěý

Chu specializes in sports nutrition and eating disorders at , and said it is “pretty normal to lose an appetite” during times of emotional instability.Ěý

“That part of us that when we feel deeply unsafe, when we feel scared, when we feel panicked or anxious, a lot of people’s appetite will turn off because that’s kind of a safety sense that we need to feel,” Chu said.ĚýĚý

Chu described the nervous system as categorized into two functions: fight or flight, rest, and digest. When someone is in fight or flight mode due to high stress levels, they have trouble accessing their rest and digest function, leading to sleep and appetite loss.Ěý

Chu said that even though “self–care becomes much more prescriptive” during times of high stress, getting back to self-care habits requires “a lot of gentleness with ourselves.”Ěý

“Even if the world is crashing around you, your body deserves and needs care and needs nutrients and needs rest,” Chu said.ĚýĚý

For those who are having trouble gaining their appetite, Chu said, “try to find someone else or find community or find bonding. For a lot of people that helps ease anxiety not around eating, but with eating. If you want to share a meal with somebody else, that tends to help us de-block.”Ěý

If you or someone you know is having trouble with their eating habits due to stress, please refer to Ěý

The post After Kamala Harris lost the election, some voters lost their appetite first appeared on 91ÇŃ×Ó.

Gen-Z voters in the district are voting in one of the most politically charged cities of the nation, and have been challenged with the pressure of staying politically informed while also shaping the future of democracy.Ěý

Eggimann, 19, is one of the many Gen-Z voters that has newly gained eligibility to vote, but he is also living in the nation’s capital during a weighty election season.

“When it comes to democracy and voting… [it’s] one of the fundamental rights that you get as a US citizen,” Eggimann said.Ěý

Eggimann said that being in D.C. during election time is “a little scary,” but he’s more enthusiastic to have his first voting experience in the city.

“It’s really exciting to finally make my voice heard instead of having to go protest and go advocate for what I think is right and not being able to put votes behind it,” he said.Ěý

The excitement around elections isn’t experienced similarly across all of Gen-Z, and as a 25-year-old, Jared Rutherford said the elections have always felt “very contentious.”

“On one hand, the elections matter even more now… but there’s also the threat of ‘does our vote actually matter when people can just go and try to steal and overturn the election?’” Rutherford said.Ěý

The 2024 election will be Rutherford’s second time voting, though this will be his first time voting in D.C.

“Part of the reason why I moved to D.C. was to be more involved in what’s going on and kind of be at the epicenter of it,” he said. “I went to the Harris rally speech on Tuesday, and so it was really cool just to be in the middle of everything.”Ěý

While Rutherford has been heavily invested in this election season, he said he doesn’t know how this election will go with so much on the line.Ěý

“I want to believe in the democratic process, but… I mean, countries rise and fall, unfortunately,” he said.Ěý

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson is an international studies professor at American University and said that D.C. is “absolutely a unique place to be” during this election season.Ěý

Jackson said he has lived in the district for the past two decades, and while he is not a new voter, he encourages Gen-Z to step into the new power that they have gained as citizens.

“I think that’s important to recognize that Gen-Z has power because you are this new group that everybody is sort of competing for,” Jackson said.Ěý

Candidates in the 2024 election have taken the initiative to gain the attention of young voters in ways they haven’t previously, such as the rise of celebrity endorsements and the use of ads and campaigns that are Gen-Z coded.Ěý

But he warned against the attention grabs of social media , and advises young voters to be “healthily skeptical” of the information seen on social platforms.Ěý

“There are a lot of concerns competing for your attention and a lot of them are not particularly principled and so they’re not interested in being factual,” he said. “One of the dangers of social media is precisely that it rewards like spontaneous instant reaction, as opposed to reflection.”Ěý

Anthony Ahrens is a professor of psychology at American University who also recognizes how impressionable social media can be for Gen-Z, and how it can invoke stress while making critical decisions like voting.

“Social media will give us a feed that will meet what our demand is. We’re demanding to find out what we’re afraid about, and they’ll give it to us,” Ahrens said.Ěý

While Ahrens could not speak much on the psychological impact of being a Gen-Z voter in D.C., he understands why young adults are experiencing fears around making the right decision.Ěý

“The election is so fraught. There are a lot of issues that people feel very deeply about, and I think for a very good reason, and so there’s going to be the challenge of navigating that,” Ahrens said.

Ahrens acknowledges that there are “good reasons” why young voters are feeling uncertainty during this election and offers advice to young voters of both parties.Ěý

“If your side loses, that will have things for which you’re going to be legitimately not happy. And that’s true.” he said. “That will be one point in time at which there can at least be a hope that the things that you care about could perhaps win subsequently.”Ěý

The post Gen-Z voters are feeling the pressure of the election, especially ones living in D.C. first appeared on 91ÇŃ×Ó.

“Sometimes it’s things like art and music that get kids to come to school, when they know that they’re going to have art class or they know they’re going to have music class,” she said this past Saturday at a panel discussion sponsored by the Smithsonian’s .

“We want people to see themselves… sometimes people just don’t recognize their rich history in their own community because they’re so used to it,” Adams said.

Adams is the director of the museum, which is showcasing an exhibition titled, A Bold and Beautiful Vision: A Century of Black Arts Education in Washington, DC, 1900-2000. The museum hosted the discussion panel in an exhibit led by art educators, where community members joined in conversation about how art became integrated in the Black education system and how much it’s still needed today.

Adams said she hopes the exhibit will serve as a call to action, to reignite the value of Black art education, with features of 20th century art educators, original artwork and artifacts of Washington.

Panelist Dr. Pamela Harris Lawton comes from a long line of educators in her family, starting with her great-great grandmother who was part of the first 50 Black teachers hired in D.C.

A lineage of educators

Lawton’s mother and grandmother continued the lineage of educators, though Lawton didn’t immediately follow in their footsteps.

“I will be completely transparent and say the last thing I wanted to be was a teacher,” she said. But it wasn’t until she was 36 that she realized her desire was to be an art educator.

As the first art educator in her family, she taught in several college classrooms and currently serves as the chair in art education at Maryland Institute College of Art.

But the trajectory of her career shifted when a friend of hers asked if she knew anything about art education for Black students during segregation in D.C.

“I did not know, because none of my family were art teachers,” Lawton said.

But Lawton said she could still piece together some answers through her family, beginning with a painting of her great-great grandmother that hung above the organ in her grandma’s house.

Lawton discovered the portrait of her foremother was painted by an artist named , who she found out to be her great-great grandmother’s art teacher.

“He created the art education system here,” Lawton said. “He taught elementary school teachers how to draw so they could teach drawing to their students… they weren’t art teachers, but they included drawing in the curriculum.”

Hunster, for whom researchers have no images but only a description of being “blond haired and blue eyed,” taught art to Black teachers in the 1890s when segregation was the norm in the district.

According to Lawton’s panel presentation, an increasing number of African Americans became art educators in the 20^thcentury, and it became evident that students of color were highly engaged in the art learning process. But that zeal for art doesn’t hold up quite the same in present-day classrooms.

“I think one of the things that I’m pushing for is for more Black folks to go into teaching, that’s one thing,” Lawton said. “Where is the color in our education? Because you don’t see us. And so, what happens is when you don’t see yourself in the teacher, you don’t think about being the teacher.”

African American art professors are not given a fair chance

Dr. Debra Ambush, another panelist, said that “African American art education professors are not really given a fair chance” in the landscape of teaching.

Ambush is an independent scholar who has taught art for decades and has developed a theory around the development of Black aesthetics in art education.

“The first art education occurs on our bodies,” Ambush said. “We must be interpreted in colonial America, we are classified by our dress, our status as enslaved and free, and so it made sense to me to talk about this formulating art education as foundational mechanisms for cultural intervision.”

Ambush grew up in the 60s during the “slow thaw of segregated Washington” and was part of the integration process of Montgomery County Public Schools when she was in the 4th grade.

The educators who preceded Ambush fought against countless obstacles just to teach art in their classroom, and Ambush identified curriculum accreditation as a “major block way” a tactic used for “testing and all the impediments that we have,” she said.

Curriculum accreditation is a method used to ensure the material being taught to students are skills they need to learn. But this system is bound to be subjective, and Ambush said it can “deny us full sovereignty in our art education endeavors.”

Broadening how art is shown

The teaching of art in schools often reflects a Eurocentric perspective, and Ambush said that art has to be shown in more ways than one.

“We must consider in the discussion of African American art and [its] educators [what] their motivations [are] for seeking out a profession that puts the discussion of beauty in their hands,” Ambush said.

Pearl Eni sat in the front row at the panel discussion, and as an educator herself, said she aims to use spaces like museums to “turn the world into a living classroom” for her students. While Eni doesn’t teach in a formal school, she seeks opportunities to teach children different subjects and said many of their core principles weave in together one way or another.

“When I’m teaching lessons on physics, for example… the children love to make paper planes. That’s a physics lesson, but that’s also art,” she said.

Eni described the panel discussion as “an honor” to sit in on and said she finds educators to be “just really beautiful people [and] very generous spirits.”

To revive the passion for art in younger generations, Ambush said more barriers need to be dismantled to get Black art educators back in the school system.

“It’s a spiritual fight. I think it’s a fight of resistance,” Ambush said. “I think that requires honest dialogues among each other, first, the commitment to get together.”

The post D.C needs Black art educators, and its history proves it: Panelists first appeared on 91ÇŃ×Ó.