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(WASHINGTON) — Crowds of current and recently fired federal workers gathered at a job fair in Maryland on Saturday to search for new career opportunities as the Trump administration continues its purge of federal workers.
Many were filled with despair and frustration over the cuts, spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Daniel Leckie was a historic preservation specialist for the General Services Administration who got fired in February. He attended the job fair with his wife and 6-month-old baby.
“We’re now just incredibly terrified and scrambling to find new jobs to keep the roof over our head and feed our little one,” he told ABC News.
Leckie said he was fired for being a probationary employee and was just one day away from fully satisfying his probationary period.
Leckie and his wife, Jennifer Hopkins, just bought a new home in Maryland, making their first mortgage payment just a few weeks ago. He was also working toward completing the public service loan forgiveness program.
“I had about maybe two or three months left before I would have satisfied the terms of my student loans. It’s an $80,000 proposition for our family. It’s between this job, the student loan forgiveness that we were counting on and the job that we took included a promotion potential as long as I was performing fully, successfully in my duties, which I was,” he said.
“That’s what we based a lot of our financial future on, including deciding to start a family and taking out a mortgage and becoming homeowners here in the D.C. area,” Leckie added.
William Dixon, a 30-year veteran who has worked in the federal government for 23 years, told ABC News the layoffs are a “stab” against veterans.
“Because after we’ve sat up here and put the sacrifice out, like we don’t even matter, we don’t count,” he said.
Dixon works in logistics for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but he and his wife, who also works for the Pentagon, are bracing for their jobs to be cut any day now as the Defense Department prepares to make sweeping layoffs.
Dixon said both he and his wife received the email from the Office of Personnel Management asking them to list what they accomplished last week, but they’ve refrained from responding based on guidance from their supervisors.
He did, however, have a message for Musk and Trump.
“Stop. You’re hurting families. You’re hurting people,” he said. “Everybody depends on having a paycheck to take care of their family as well as to build for their retirement as well as take care of young ones. You’re doing nothing but hurting, hurting the whole nation and their families. That’s all you’re doing.”
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