Raphael Garcia, an analyst at the Department of Veterans Affairs who was abruptly fired last month amid President Donald Trump’s sweeping push to shrink the federal workforce, learned this week that he was being reinstated following court orders from two federal judges.
But that news did not end the professional limbo that has defined Garcia’s life for over a month. He is not actually back on the job. Instead, he has been placed on administrative leave while the Trump administration appeals rulings from those two judges.
Garcia has received verbal reassurance that he’ll get back pay while he’s on leave, but the whiplash of Trump’s first 100 days in office has not exactly left him in a trusting state of mind. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Garcia told NBC News in an interview this week, adding that he won’t know whether his salary has restarted until the end of the pay period in late March.
Garcia is one of 24,000 probationary federal workers who have been on a career roller-coaster ride as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency attempts to reshape the federal bureaucracy. These workers have been unceremoniously fired and rehired, but some remain in the dark about what comes next.
In many cases, the rehired probationary workers — meaning people who have held their positions for less than two years — were immediately placed on administrative leave, a temporary suspension with pay intact. Meanwhile, civil servants still face the looming prospect of more rounds of firings in the months and years ahead.
“Honestly, I don’t fully trust this administration and its appointees on whether or not I’ll get to go back to work,” said a Federal Emergency Management Agency employee who was fired, rehired and placed on leave. “I’ve been out of work for a full month.”
In an email notifying him that he had been temporarily reinstated, the FEMA employee was told he would get a call this week from his agency’s human capital department to discuss benefits and paperwork for getting him back on the job. But he said he hasn’t heard from anyone yet.
The employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, said he has had no choice but to start looking for other jobs.
“I’d rather continue my work for FEMA and the American people,” he said. But “if I pass on another opportunity, but then get terminated again in a couple weeks, it could make a bad situation even worse.”
The employee took a skeptical view of Trump’s political appointees. “They have already broken my confidence and trust. It’s hard to know where we go from here. … It’s so confusing and so chaotic.”
In interviews, federal employees said they had found that agencies subject to the judges’ orders were not communicating the latest developments to their workers in a uniform way. In some instances, reinstated probationary workers have received email notifications; in other instances, they’ve gotten phone calls from managers or supervisors.
Sarah Boim, a probationary employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was fired in February, said she had not received a reinstatement notice as of Thursday. She now finds herself in an employment Catch-22, wondering if her reinstatement notice was sent to a CDC email account she lost access to after she was fired.
“We need transparency. We’re being lied to. It’s unacceptable,” she said.
In an interview, an employee at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said she believes the Trump administration intends to “honor this reinstatement” only for as long as its mass firing initiatives are blocked by federal judges.
“It’s all just so clearly in bad faith,” said the CFPB employee, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of professional repercussions.
The federal government has acknowledged that some reinstated employees will confront various hurdles before they’re up and running at work. In court filings accompanying the Justice Department’s appeal of the reinstatement orders, federal officials argued that restoring “removed employees to full duty status would impose substantial burdens” on various agencies, “cause significant confusion, and cause turmoil for the terminated employees.”
“Specifically, all employees offered reinstatement into full duty status would have to be onboarded again, including going through any applicable training, filling out human resources paperwork, obtaining new security badges, re-enrolling in benefits programs and payroll, reinstituting applicable security clearance actions, receiving government furnished equipment, and other requisite administrative actions,” the director of human capital operations at the Environmental Protection Agency said in one such filing.
Garcia, the Veterans Affairs employee, said he does not view any of these administrative tasks as burdens. He is eager to get back to his job and help his agency deal with the mounting workload that he said has been caused by staff cuts.
“It definitely does not cause us turmoil to be reinstated,” Garcia said. “I loved what I did. I’m a disabled veteran and I know the struggles of transitioning out of the military.”
“The real turmoil was being initially terminated” and being unable “to serve my fellow veteran community,” he added.
