“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.”

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“Even while I was casting my vote on that particular issue, I was still having doubts. So, I think I’m not the only one,” said the Silver Spring resident.

Rodriguez said that what finally helped in his decision were the experiences of his family members who benefited from medical marijuana.

But he isn’t wholly convinced yet.

“At the same time, there’s the issue of security and increasing crime,” he said. “Sometimes it’s linked to the use of drugs, and marijuana is a drug. So, I have to keep that in mind when I was thinking about how to vote.”

Paul Heithoff agreed. While he acknowledged that marijuana isn’t as “harmful” as other drugs, he said that legalization in the state should also come with better market regulation.

If “they can get it right, that’d be fantastic,” Heithoff said. “But certain states, I feel like they’re going to take it as a cash cow.”

Heithoff, a law enforcement officer, and his partner, Cheryl Chun, who works in the healthcare space, can’t smoke marijuana nevertheless due to professional reasons, they said. Instead, Chun would like to see more cannabis-infused edibles made legal in the state.

Jennifer Manguera, alongside her daughter, Amina Manguera, said legalization in the state “was kind of like closing the barn door after the horse got out.”

But like other residents of Montgomery County, it’s a welcome change for them and their hope for criminal justice and prison reform.

“Do I personally want to walk through clouds of marijuana smoke? No,” said Jennifer Manguera. “But it is there. So, I don’t think that it should be illegal and have the stigma of the arrests.”

Sam Shaffer, who identified herself as an independent who tended to lean Democrat, said that the legalization of marijuana is an inevitable path that not just the state but the country is on.

“I think that it should be legal,” she said. “I don’t think that by making it illegal it necessarily helps anyone.”

Besides Maryland, four others states––Arkansas, Missouri, North Dakota and South Dakota––across the country have the legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes as measures on their ballots. If passed, they would join 19 other states and the District of Columbia with legal recreational cannabis use.

(Reporting done from the polls in Silver Spring, Maryland, for the Washington Post)

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Carol Reeves, a Bethesda resident, said a main concern of the construction is the danger of bicyclists having to be on sidewalks. “They just go too fast for it to be safe. And it’s scary. But, I can’t blame them, I mean, the sign says they should be here, but it just feels dangerous,” she said.

The cycling community echoes her concern. Narrow sidewalks force bikes and walkers to yield to one another while trying not to drop down into the active roadway beside them. Throughout Bethesda, the roadways have a number of bike lanes, but the construction across downtown has significantly disrupted many of those. The construction doesn’t seem to have an end in sight.

The is a light rail project that Maryland hoped would connect Bethesda in Montgomery County to the town of New Carrollton in Prince George’s County. Much of the project is supposed to connect to main transportation options, with local buses, Amtrak and Metro Transit Authority supporting it. In the spring of 2016, the state chose a private-sector partner, Purple Line Transit Partners, to design and build, then operate and maintain the light rail system over the next 35 years. Just this year, PLTP left the project due to delay costs and other issues.

The reality in Bethesda is construction along the Purple Line route causes some significant pedestrian issues. Other construction projects also contribute, but the recent upheaval along the Purple Line corridor gives many Maryland residents cause for concern.

Jeff Lemieux is worried about how these frustrating delays will play out. He’s the husband of Laurie Lemieux, who owns Proteus Bicycles in College Park, Maryland. “We’re huge Purple Line supporters, but we’re concerned that there’s gonna be delays,” he said. “It’s really an exciting public transport project, but I just hope that it gets done right.” Construction delays aren’t just a small concern either, “If there’s a construction impediment for ten years, like, that would be a big problem!”

The current plan for the Purple Line does include a number of pedestrian access options, but most of those options have little to do with current conditions. Riding along Capital Crescent Trail, it abruptly changes from a casual and comfortable trail for cyclists and pedestrians to busy downtown Bethesda, placed out on a roadway that’s currently under construction.

Weaving through open-air restaurants that have taken advantage of the closed road, you soon come to a residential street dissected by stop signs. That relatively calm street then gives way to some of Bethesda’s largest and busiest roadways, with directions for bicycles to use sidewalks to connect to the neighboring trail. The maneuver is interspersed with detours, closed roads, busy intersections, and redirecting one-way streets.

A to connect Capital Crescent Trail below Bethesda’s main heart would alleviate many of those problems. However, that tunnel isn’t scheduled to open until 2026 and delays continue to plague the project.

Every day that work isn’t being done on a contract, a litany of factors lose money. The initial cost estimates for the Purple line were near $2.4 billion. Using that number as a baseline, a conservative estimate for each day of delay since 2016 would cost $1 million. That cost isn’t just shouldered by Marylanders, as Metro Transit Authority asked the federal government for $900 million in funding. However, current project estimates sit at $5.6 billion.

Delays are coming from all different sources. The global pandemic caused delays, as did basic construction changes and concerns. The surprise delay was a lawsuit filed by Friends of Capital Crescent Trail. The organization’s main suit against the state caused a reported 266 days worth of delays and nearly $200 million in delay costs. This appears to be the final number for a legal campaign by Friends of Capital Crescent Trail. Those delay costs resulted in a federal judge ruling that there was nothing wrong with construction permits.

Prince George’s County Council Member Dannielle Glaros has been one of the more outspoken public officials on the project. Nine of the 11 stations for the Purple Line are in her district. Friends of Capital Crescent Trail were trying to “stall and kill the project,” she said in a statement recently.

The future of both the pedestrian trails and walkways and the Purple Line project itself is still up in the air. Council Member Glaros described it as “… more like a rollercoaster ride than the planned 16-mile light rail connecting Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Almost as if the communities I represent and I are stuck upside down at the top of a loop.”

91ÇŃ×Ó contacted the Deputy Project Director for the Purple Line, both by phone and by email. We wanted to know what the current delay costs were across the project, where different costs may have come from, and the status of vehicle and pedestrian traffic detours since the state had taken over the project. We have not received any information.

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He doesn’t have official statistics yet, but he said it’s obvious D.C. residents have responded to the national and local calls for poll workers. A lot of them. And many of them are distinctly younger than the average poll worker during past elections.

D.C. usually needs about 3,000 people to work the polls, plus about 2,000 alternates, he said. This year, the board hit that quota easily. Bennett said there are about 2,000 extra applications he hasn’t even sifted through.

And he estimates about 75% to 80% of those workers are between 20 and 45 years old. In previous years, that age group made up the minority of election volunteers with seniors accounting for the majority.

“Young people have really, really come out in force,” Bennett said. “We haven’t done any stats on the demographics, but it’s obvious.”

Some of those young people, Bennett said, are high schoolers, too young to even vote.

But D.C. area high schoolers aren’t just volunteering to work the polls. They are helping to recruit young people in places like Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. and Polk County, Florida. where young people haven’t turned out in the same numbers.

“People are literally voting for our future”

Anne Moser goes to Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland.

Like other 10th graders, she logs onto her virtual classes at around 9 a.m., but between lessons she sneaks in texts and emails to election officials and teachers in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania.

At 15, she’s too young to be a poll worker herself – something she admits with obvious disappointment – but she’s trying to connect young people in the Allentown area with resources to volunteer themselves.

Moser works with Youth Activism Project, a D.C.-based organization that encourages teenagers to become activists in their communities, even before they are able to vote.

The organization was founded in 2004 by Wendy Schaetzel Lesko with a global campaign for educational equity equity for girls. A recent project focused on registering every eligible high school student in Montgomery County to vote.

That project concluded about a week ago. That’s when the Youth Activism Project turned to its attention to recruiting poll workers.

“It seemed like the biggest needs were filling these gaps in terms of poll workers,” Anika Manzoor, executive director of the Youth Activism Project, said. “Poll workers play an underappreciated role in protecting our democracy and I think people don’t realize that.”

Moser spends about two hours a day making calls and sending emails. So far, she said, she’s helped recruit three or four young people to volunteer.

“People are literally voting for our future, and even if you can’t vote or you’re voting for the first time, it’s still important to get involved,” Moser said.

The long shift

Ilana LeVine, another Youth Activism Project worker, was signed up to be a poll worker herself for the primary election, but the COVID-19 pandemic made her parents wary. Like the others she’s working remotely and nationally; she’s recruiting youth poll workers in Polk County, Florida.

Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards said there are 1,700 people signed up to work at polling locations on Election Day. 91ÇŃ×Ó 1,500 are for polling locations and the rest are support staff, but she could always use more.

Alex Garcia, a 16-year-old Albert Einstein High School student, said, overall, he thinks as many as 60 young people nationwide have signed up to work the polls due to Youth Activism Project’s work.Garcia signed up to be a poll worker in February.

He said he doesn’t know if he is more excited or scared — he’s got more than one long day of work ahead of him. He’ll be working two half shifts during the early voting period and then from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Election Day.

Trending female

LeVine said she was somewhat civically active before the 2020 election cycle. She’d attended a couple protests like March for Our Lives and the Women’s March. But it’s been different since the spring.

“After George Floyd’s death, I guess I realized that it wasn’t right to stay silent,” LeVine said. “So much has happened since then. It definitely encouraged people to act out more.”

Moser said the same. She hadn’t been involved in anything she’d call activism before the death of George Floyd.
LeVine and Moser also have something else in common – they’re both young women.

The 19th*, a nonprofit publication that reports on gender and policy, reported that many of those stepping up to be election workers are women.

The trend, at least in Manzoor’s organization, holds. Of the 15 students working to recruit poll workers, 14 identify as female.

But Garcia said he sees the same trend in other organizations he’s involved with, not just Youth Activism Project. Among his male friends he said he’s the only one who has taken an interest in activism.

“They just brush things off,” he said. “A lot of people think they are activists if they repost something on Instagram, but they don’t actually like know how to make an impact or they don’t feel comfortable joining the environment in doing so.”

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Binsar Siahaan, an undocumented immigrant from Indonesia, was detained by ICE agents at Glenmont United Methodist Church in Silver Spring, where he lives with his wife and two children. His arrest has sparked outrage from several faith-based groups in the D.C. area who argue that ICE violated policy by conducting an arrest on church grounds and for falsely claiming to be there to check his ankle monitor.

“ICE cannot simply proceed with removal while Siahaan has pending a motion to exercise his statutory right to seek reopening of his asylum claim,” Grimm wrote in a . “Removal in this instance, thwarting his ability to realize any benefit from a successful motion, is very likely arbitrary and capricious”

Siahaan, who immigrated to the U.S. on a work visa in 1989 and remained after it expired, was denied asylum when he first filed in 2003. His attorneys said this was due to bad advice from an “ineffective attorney who was later disbarred” and that the devout Christian would face persecution in Muslim-majority Indonesia if forced to return.

Upon his arrest on Sept. 10, Siahaan was swiftly transported to the Lumpkin County Detention Center in Georgia, which has recently due to . Grimm’s decision gives ICE two days to move Siahaan to a detention center in Maryland, where his lawyers hope to make a case for his release.

“ICE has expressed a callous disregard for the well-being of human beings that they are detaining,” said Patrick Taurel, Siahaan’s attorney. “I’m worried about Mr. Siahaan just like I’m worried about everybody else who’s in ICE custody right now.”

Rev. Kara Scroggins, who works at the church where Siahaan lives and works as a caretaker, said she will continue to organize for Siahaan’s release from custody. Scroggins also said she plans to use this momentum to advocate for a law prohibiting ICE arrests in places of worship, schools and other “sanctuary” places.

“Being a safe space, a sacred space, and offering hospitality are pretty basic to the calling, as well as standing with people who are victims of injustice,” Scorggins said.

Following Siahaan’s arrest, Scroggins partnered with organizations like and the to organize calls to Congress members, distribute petitions and organize two protests to advocate for Siahaan’s release.

Rep. Raskin, Sens. Van Hollen and David Trone, D-M.D., have all released statements expressing concern about Siahaan’s arrest. Scroggins said they have also been helpful “behind the scenes,” offering support to Siahaan’s defense team and following up with her via phone.

“They’ve been helping to get information from their inner ICE contacts,” Scroggins said. “They’ve been supportive and we’re keeping pressure on them to put themselves on the line, politically. “

Alexa Klein-Mayer, a fellow at Congressional Action Network, said Siahaan’s case has “national implications” and could set a dangerous precedent of ICE agents disregarding policy to arrest people “in sanctuary.” She said her team is currently on standby to ensure that ICE honors its obligations to return Siahaan.

“Our next step is to see if ICE returns him to Maryland before evaluating what more we can do to get him out of detention,” Klein-Mayer said. “Right now, we’re on standby.”

Taurel and Scroggins both said they are waiting for Siahaan’s return so they can make a case for his release back to his family. Taurel said he hopes that ICE voluntarily releases Siahaan due to “public pressure,” but is prepared to make a case for it in the event that they don’t.

“The whole purpose of detaining somebody like Siahaan is to make sure that they are present at the moment of removal,” Taurel said. “The moment of removal for him is not imminent, because we have a judge’s order saying they can’t remove him until we get a decision and God knows when that will come.”

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