Axed from jobs not easily found outside government, thousands of federal workers caught in President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting efforts now face a difficult search for work.
“If you’re doing, say, vegetation sampling and prescribed fire as your main work, there aren’t many jobs,” says Eric Anderson, 48, of Chicago, who was fired Feb. 14 from his job as a biological science technician at Indiana Dunes National Park.
A November report from the Federal Salary Council, which advises on government pay, found that federal salaries were one-fourth lower than those in the private sector.
Federal benefits were vastly better than the private sector for the lowest-educated workers, the CBO found, and about even for the highest-educated workers.
The federal job cuts are the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by billionaire Elon Musk, who has been tearing through agencies looking for suspected waste.
