20 hours Ago
In his self-evaluation, Greg House tried to nitpick the work he’d done over his first several months at the Salt Lake City regional office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
His boss waved him off. “He said, ‘No, you’re exceptional in every category,’” House recalled, noting he’d even received a bonus for the caliber of his September review. “.
.. So when I got that termination notice that said my performance was the reason I was being let go, it was just adding insult to injury.
” On Friday, the email that crushed House’s career dreams was still up on his computer screen as he cleared out his desk. He gathered the dog tags and rank insignia that had belonged to his grandfather — a Navy veteran who served in World War II and the Korean War. Then, he collected the challenge coins he’d earned during his own five years of Naval service, including ones from patrols in Japan and Guam.
House, a public affairs specialist, was one of the 1,000 workers fired by the VA — and part of the thousands dismissed across all government agencies — last week. The firings are the first major step in the efforts of President Donald Trump’s administration and its Department of Government Efficiency to purge what it considers a bloated bureaucracy. Utah-based workers like House fell victim to the cuts, as did those working on programs to better life in the Beehive State, like San Francisco-based researcher Allison Stegner.
However, the total scope of federal firings in Utah is unclear. At least 17 National Park Service employees have been fired , Bill Wade, executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers told The Salt Lake Tribune. A spokesperson for Hill Air Force Base said Wednesday it had not lost any personnel to layoffs, though an undisclosed number of employees have accepted the administration’s deferred resignation offer and are now negotiating to leave.
In addition, around 100 Internal Revenue Service workers are being fired in Ogden this week, Robert Lawrence, president of Chapter 67 of the National Treasury Employees Union, told KSL. Lawrence said he expects as many as a thousand to lose their jobs by May. Staff at several national parks and federal agencies in the state, including the Bureau of Land Management, deferred questions about staffing to national offices in Washington, D.
C. or said they were “awaiting guidance” from those offices. A spokesperson for the U.
S. Department of Agriculture reported that it “released about 2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees” from the Forest Service across the country. “It’s unfortunate that the Biden administration hired thousands of people with no plan in place to pay them long term,” the USDA spokesperson said in a statement.
Utah has more than 33,000 federal employees, according to Office of Personnel Management figures from December. Many of the fired federal employees, including House and Stegner, who works for the U.S.
Geological Survey , held probationary status. In most cases, that means they had served less than one year with their agency. Some 220,000 probationary employees were on the government payroll as of March 2024, according to OPM data.
On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported agencies had been ordered to lay off nearly all of them . “I know people are really worried that they’re next, and I hate to be grim, but they are,” said Stegner, who was fired from her USGS job last week, just 10 days before her probationary period was set to end. “This is just the beginning, and more people are going to lose their jobs.
” “People should be mad,” she added, “and they should be fighting against it.” 11 months of work, ‘wasted’ (Courtesy of Allison Stegner) Allison Stegner is pictured working in southeastern Utah as an intern for the Bureau of Land Management in 2016. Stegner, 36, is the granddaughter of famed writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner.
She traveled to Moab regularly while working mostly remotely for the USGS from San Francisco. She was finalizing months of research on vegetation, grazing and recreation in southeastern Utah when she found out she was let go. “To think that, through no fault of my own, what I’ve spent the last 11 months working on is just wasted.
..” she said, “like, I could have just been reading a book that whole time.
That’s very jarring.” Given what she’d been reading in the news, Stegner said her firing “wasn’t a total surprise.” She’d heard that the Trump administration wanted to reduce the federal workforce, citing inefficiencies.
Then, federal employees, like those at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) , started getting fired.
Stegner received emails asking her to report colleagues who enforced diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, and she heard coworkers in the digital space had been asked to take down websites related to social justice or women’s rights. “Everyone started getting really edgy,” she said. “Everyone just started to feel kind of sick about, what the hell is going on?” Stegner said the research she was hired to do at the U.
S. Geological Survey, which would have advised land management in southeastern Utah, “felt like it was addressing a need. So I kind of upended my career a little bit to do this, but in a good way.
And, like, I loved it.” “I hope I can” finish it, Stegner said, “at some point.” ‘How long before this bleeds out further?’ (Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Greg House holds his ID lanyard outside of the Veterans Affairs campus in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Feb.
20, 2025. House doesn’t understand how the dismissals are expected to help. “If you’re just taking this list of probationary employees and firing them, you’re not trimming the fat,” the 34-year-old said.
“You’re cutting an arm off and forcing other people to do more work, which is only going to make the agencies less efficient.” “We’re getting rid of so much incredible talent,” House added. “How long before this bleeds out further?” House said he has wanted a job in the Salt Lake City VA’s office dating back to when he was working toward his communications degree from the University of Utah in the years following his five-year military tour.
He even wrote about it in his biography for a class project. It took getting his master’s degree to make it happen. “As a veteran, so much of my identity is in this veteran community,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m talking to someone who just got out after four years or I’m talking to one of our Vietnam-era veterans, there’s a sibling relationship there. It crosses eras. It crosses branches.
It’s all of us. And I wanted to use the skills that I learned in school and when I was in the military to help with that.” What comes next worries House.
He pointed out that he wasn’t given until the end of the month or even the end of the week to prepare for the loss of income. His termination was effective immediately. Since he was fired rather than laid off, he isn’t sure if he qualifies for unemployment.
And though he does get a stipend from the VA, which classifies him as 80% disabled because of injuries he suffered during his military tour, he said it’s not enough to live on. He has to find employment, but it won’t be his dream job. He doesn’t know if that exists anymore.
“It’s limbo. I love having that job. I love the day to day.
I love working with veterans. I love working for veterans. I am incredibly lucky to have even held that position for the time.
And there is a part of me that wants to go back, that wants them to say, like, ‘Oopsie daisy,’ and then wave a wand,” House said. “But there’s another part of me that would never fully feel safe, because now, you know, we have this discourse in the country that federal workers are lazy — and we’re not.”.
