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The Trump administration is on a firing spree, announcing deep cuts across the government. Some of the very first federal employees Trump fired are not just speaking out, they're fighting back. NPR's Andrea Hsu reports.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: Mahri Stainnak remembers the call well. It came a day after President Trump returned to the White House.
MAHRI STAINNAK: I was having dinner with my family.
HSU: It was someone at the Office of Personnel Management, where Stainnak worked, calling to say bad news.
STAINNAK: At that point, I started, like, physically shaking because I thought, what the heck could this be?
HSU: Earlier that day, the Trump administration had directed agencies to shut down their offices focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, citing two of Trump's executive orders. On that call, Stainnak was told, you're being put on leave immediately.
STAINNAK: I was incredibly shocked. And the first thing I said was, I'm not in a diversity, equity and inclusion role.
HSU: A week earlier, Stainnak had started a new job as director of OPM's talent innovation group, focused on bringing people with technical skills into the government...
STAINNAK: Whether it's engineers or technologists or scientists.
HSU: It was a role Stainnak was excited about, having worked as an environmental scientist at the EPA for more than a dozen years. But the administration made clear that people who were in DEI roles on Election Day would also be targeted. Stainnak, who uses they/them pronouns, had been deputy director of OPM's DEIA office under President Biden. For a time, they worked on issues affecting LGBTQ workers throughout the government. Still, Stainnak can't believe they were forced out over a job they were no longer doing.
STAINNAK: It's not right that myself and others have been targeted and illegally fired based on who the Trump administration thinks we are or the assumptions they make about our values.
HSU: At the Department of Homeland Security, Sherrell Pyatt was, likewise, not in a DEI role when she was put on leave on January 30. Under Biden, she had worked at FEMA, making sure there was equity in how communities got information and resources from the government. For a while, her work was focused on the COVID vaccine.
SHERRELL PYATT: I am located in the Southeast, and there were a lot of pockets of populations that were not getting the vaccine.
HSU: As the sole Spanish speaker on her team, she also helped Latino communities understand how to get help after a hurricane. Now, before that, during Trump's first term, she worked to carry out his policies, including taking members of Congress to the border.
PYATT: While it was very controversial and it was a controversial time, it was important work so that Congress knew what laws needed to be changed, how we could change them so that we could have the desired outcomes, and that the public could understand what was going on at the border.
HSU: Altogether, Pyatt has been with the government for about a decade. Four generations of her family have been civil servants. She says the jobs are nonpartisan.
PYATT: We don't pick a side. We don't get to pick who our boss is.
HSU: Her focus has been on protecting the homeland, she says. By getting rid of her and others, the government is losing people with institutional knowledge and expertise.
PYATT: I think the community at large suffers.
HSU: Now, federal workers cannot challenge their firings in court. They must first go through an agency set up to hear personnel disputes within the government. It's called the Merit Systems Protection Board. The problem is that board itself is in limbo. Trump fired one of its members, leaving it without a quorum.
KELLY DERMODY: We're very, very concerned about that.
HSU: That's Kelly Dermody, an attorney involved in a class complaint filed with the board over the DEI-related firings.
DERMODY: We basically believe that we're hitting a tipping point where it's become futile for federal workers to have to go through this process.
HSU: Dermody believes hundreds, if not thousands, of federal employees are being fired under the DEI orders - among them, she says, the government's best and brightest. Meantime, the White House says Trump has the authority to manage personnel within his executive branch and to end what he calls unlawful DEI. Andrea Hsu, NPR News.
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