Washington– Thea Price expected changes under the second Trump administration, but she never expected her life to be in such disarray.
Along with 300 other employees of the United States Institute of Peace, Price was fired, rehired and then fired again as part of President Donald Trump’s crusade to shrink the federal government. A messy effort Resulting in the elimination of tens of thousands of jobs and the downsizing or dismantling of entire agencies.
One year later, many of those affected wonder if their pain was worth it.
“No one was prepared for complete destruction,” said Price, the program’s former director of operations. “Why?”
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was led by Trump’s then-adviser Elon Muskinstigated purges of federal agencies with the clear mission of rooting out their roots Fraud, waste and abuse.
USIP, an independent, non-profit organization funded by Congress, has become a symbol of the unrest. DOGE employees entered the USIP building early last year, Spark a fight About who controls the institute, which Trump later saw Plant his name At its headquarters in Washington.
The blow to its workers came on March 28, 2025, when they were fired, a decision that a judge later overturned and then reinstated — a blow that continues to affect former employees.
A year later, DOGE’s impact on people’s lives is clear – What has already been saved In the process of turning it upside down it is not.
Musk has set a goal of saving $2 trillion. The DOGE website says it has saved about $215 billion through job cuts, contract cancellations, leases and asset sales, as well as eliminating grants.
More than 260,000 workers will leave federal service due to Trump administration initiatives in 2025, according to the Office of Management and Budget, including force cuts, early retirements, deferred resignations and hiring freezes.
“President Trump has been given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse by the federal government,” White House spokesman Davis Engel said when asked about the amount saved. “In just one year, he has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve American taxpayers,” he added.
Organizations that examined elements of the DOGE process, along with the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog that monitors how taxpayer money is spent, were unable to determine how much was saved or lost due to reform efforts. Many challenge the Republican administration’s numbers.
Dominic Litt, a budget analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said there were fundamental errors in the DOGE pages that track savings, which led him to believe the numbers were too high. He said Cato and other organizations have been reluctant to try to come up with a number because of the complexity of the movements.
“Who gets fired is what matters. How will they get fired, will there be lawsuits?” was among the questions Lett asked. Even terminating leases and contracts was not as simple as it seemed.
Ultimately, he said, “We don’t know how much DOGE saved.”
In her analysis of media reports and public sources, Elaine Kamark, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, found that about 25,000 people who were laid off were rehired because they were deemed essential.
“What DOGE did was it went so far, so deep, so haphazardly that when Cabinet secretaries came and Elon Musk went, they realized they had to bring some of these people back,” Kamark said.
With this, Kamarck estimated that the savings could reach between $100 billion and $200 billion, although the final numbers are still highly uncertain.
A Government Accountability Office analysis found that layoffs in the Education Department’s civil rights division could cost $38 million, with employees being paid months after separation.
The effects of DOGE’s action are the subject of ongoing litigation. More than a dozen lawsuits It was brought against the Trump administration over DOGE’s actions over the past year, challenging everything from grant cancellations, mass dismissals, and takeovers, to access to sensitive U.S. Treasury data and payment systems, to the shutdown of massive federally funded programs.
In an interview with conservative influencer Katie Miller last December, Musk said his efforts are leading DOGE It was only “moderately successful.” And he won’t do it again.
USIP, created by Congress during the Reagan administration, was intended to promote peace and prevent global conflict. At the time of its closure, the institute was working in more than two dozen conflict zones, including Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Employees watched as DOGE dismantled another organization, viz USAID. Then DOGE employees It appears several times in USIP He eventually took over the headquarters. Most of the institute’s board members and the acting president were fired.
On the evening of March 28, 2025 AD. Termination notices started appearing In personal emails to employees. Within two hours, most of the more than 300 employees were gone.
USIP leaders and employees sued, arguing that it was independent of executive branch. A federal judge ruled that Trump acted outside the scope of his authority Control regained Institute and returned workers to their jobs with back wages — although a few returned as operations gradually resumed.
In June, A The Court of Appeal halted this decision. For the second time, employees were fired.
The case is now on hold, awaiting a US Supreme Court decision in another personnel case, which could expand the president’s control over federal agencies long considered independent of the executive branch.
While the original version of DOGE has faded from public view, its presence is still felt in parts of the government. High-ranking officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have been appointed as permanent employees of federal agencies, including the Treasury Department.
For people who worked at USIP, the past year has been a whirlwind.
Some found jobs, but many faced headwinds in a market flooded with skilled labor. Some meet regularly and update each other on job searches and pending court cases that they still hope will lead to the revival of their former employer.
Price came off maternity leave one day before she was fired. When she was fired a second time, she and her husband, who lost his job as a museum contractor when funding for his project was cut, lived on their reserves and applied for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which took months to be approved.
She had to use the food pantry when the government shut down last year She stopped her SNAP payments. After submitting dozens of job applications, her family left the D.C. area and moved to the Seattle area.
She now works for a non-profit organization focused on affordable housing. It’s meaningful, but she misses the institute, its mission and its team.
Liz Callihan, who worked in communications at USIP, has applied for 140 jobs since she was fired. She often wonders why her former professional home, with a lofty mission and a relatively small annual budget of $50 million, became a DOGE target.
“I ask myself every day what all of this is about,” she said.
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Associated Press writer Fatima Hussain contributed.