‘I feel like cruelty is the point’: For many newly fired federal workers, the way they were let go made things much worse

As federal workers get fired by the thousands, the news has sometimes come in unceremonious, callous ways.

As federal workers get fired by the thousands, the news has sometimes come in unceremonious, callous ways. “Read this immediately,” – went the subject line of a termination email received by one worker. For another, it was the prepaid UPS label that showed up without warning—along with instructions for returning the work computer they were using. These have been some of the impersonal ways workers have discovered their fate. Federal employees who were new to their current job – though not necessarily new to federal work – known as probationary workers, have been a target of the Trump administration’s purge of the federal government, championed by Elon Musk and his DOGE campaign. Now, 72 hours after being purged because they were considered probationary workers, a biting reality has set in for many of them. “I feel like the cruelty is the point, if I am being honest,” a federal worker, terminated on Thursday, told CNN. “There has been so much indication from the new OPM director and Elon Musk and from DOGE that the whole point of this is to scare people away from working in federal government or those who are still there, to want to leave.” CNN spoke to more than a dozen federal workers from numerous federal agencies in the immediate days after the purge.