Terry Uniter, a U.S. Army veteran, detailed how his plans to start a new federal job were upended on Monday amid drastic cuts made under President Donald Trump.
“So like all my stuff is on a boat right now going to Japan,” said Uniter — a contractor who took a $60,000 pay cut to go to Tokyo to work as an international relations lead for the Fifth Air Force — in an interview with CNN.
Uniter added that he was “fortunate enough” to get his car back as it was about to be loaded onto a boat before CNN’s Pamela Brown noted that he also pulled his son, Johan Arva, out of school.
“I put my home up for … rent, so we’re basically sleeping on the floor right now,” Uniter said.
Uniter, a third-generation U.S. Army veteran and former diplomat, is just one of a number of veterans impacted by the firings of probationary workers, layoffs and a wider hiring freeze in the federal government.
Veterans have fumed over the cuts in recent weeks and said they’ve felt betrayed by Trump. The Department of Veterans Affairs has fired over 1,000 probationary workers with additional plans to cut more than 80,000 jobs at the VA, where veterans make up 25% of the workforce.
Uniter, in an interview with Baltimore’s NBC affiliate WBAL, spoke from his nearly-empty home where a bed and a suitcase were on the floor.
He told WBAL that he took the job in November, one he was told he would get an exemption and was mission-critical. He said the job would’ve seen him going to Japan’s Ministry of Defense, and checked with both U.S. Forces Japan as well as the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on whether he was “good to go.”
But that all changed just one day prior to his family’s plans to fly to Japan, when he got an email notifying him that he didn’t have an exemption.
He told Brown the exemption “just did come through” at the time of the CNN interview but, “in lieu of everything else going on,” he doesn’t expect to accept the job.
Uniter said he’s started to homeschool his son, and he’s thankful that he still has his pension, noting that he’s not at risk of losing his home.
“But there are so many people that have lost their jobs, and they don’t have the safety net that I do,” he pressed.
