They were fired in the name of efficiency based on ‘a lie.’ Now the VA is paying them not to work

NORTH CHICAGO, Ill. – The night before Valentine’s Day, Ricky Noschese and his wife Laurie left their jobs at a military and veterans hospital and stopped to pick up a heart-shaped chocolate cake to share with their three kids, a family tradition.

As he waited in the car, Noschese’s phone lit up with one of the alerts he had set up 10 months earlier, when he started supervising a team of technicians in charge of keeping equipment running at Lovell Federal Health Care Center. In less than a year on the job, he had identified more than $10 million in cost savings and had a long list of ideas to improve operations and complete long-delayed projects.

But when Noschese checked his phone, it wasn’t about a problem with the ventilation systems, fire alarms, elevators or emergency generators that he monitored even when he was away from Lovell, which is run jointly by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs, his employer.

“This is to provide notification that the Agency is removing you from federal service,” the email began. “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest. For this reason, the Agency informs you that the Agency is removing you from your position with the Agency and the federal civil service effective February 13, 2025.”

Puzzled by the generic wording of the email, which was sent by the VA’s chief of human resources, Noschese wasn’t sure it was real. But when he and Laurie got to work the next morning – he in the hospital’s HVAC shop, she as chief of its multiple pharmacies – his boss looked defeated and confirmed that what the email said was true.

Noschese is one of more than 24,000 federal workers, including nearly 1,700 at the VA, who were fired in February after President Donald Trump put billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk in charge of cutting spending and shrinking the federal workforce as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. This new entity swiftly commandeered the Office of Personnel Management, which functions as the government’s HR department, and set about terminating “probationary” workers whose relatively short tenures made them easier to fire.

In Washington state, the VA fired 12 people in Spokane, 14 in the Puget Sound area and six in Walla Walla, according to an internal email obtained by The Spokesman-Review.

In North Chicago, 18 people were fired, according to Lovell employees. Many had received exemplary performance reviews, but they all got the same email saying that, “based on your performance,” their work was not “in the public interest.”

On March 13, federal judges in California and Maryland ordered the government to immediately rehire the terminated employees. The Trump administration has filed appeals in both cases, but on Monday the VA began notifying its fired workers that they would be placed on administrative leave for an unspecified time, receiving pay but not allowed to work until further notice.

“It is a sad, sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup said in a hearing in San Francisco in February, after unions sued the government over the mass termination.

In a court filing on Tuesday, the VA said all of its fired probationary employees had been reinstated but acknowledged it didn’t have contact information for all of them. Emails notifying the affected workers that their termination had been rescinded were sent to addresses to which they no longer had access.

When the news reached them, several of the employees said they still felt apprehensive because they could still be subject to a forthcoming “reduction in force” announced by VA Secretary Doug Collins on March 4 that aims to eliminate at least 70,000 positions.

In response to questions from The Spokesman-Review, VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz said only that the department “is complying with the court’s March 13 temporary restraining order” and “cannot comment further due to pending litigation.”

With the support of his boss, Noschese wrote a detailed, four-page document to justify his employment. He described how he had helped save taxpayers more than $10 million by using his nearly two decades of experience as an HVAC technician to identify efficiencies and find a cost-effective way to extend the life of the air handling units that circulate air through the 43-building, 1.5 million-square-foot campus. Lovell serves 90,000 patients each year, including veterans, active-duty service members and their dependents, along with the nearly 50,000 recruits who pass through the Navy’s only boot camp each year at the adjacent Naval Station Great Lakes.

“Removal of this position, especially the supervisor, will leave the facility at a dangerous deficit,” Noschese wrote in the justification memo, noting that half of the positions in his job series already were vacant.

In performance reviews he provided to The Spokesman-Review, Noschese scored “exceptional” in every category, and he received a year-end bonus for “outstanding” performance. Asked about the savings Noschese said he identified, spokespeople at Lovell did not contest his claim and provided the same statement from the VA’s national press secretary.

As the head of a 12-person team responsible for ensuring clean water, fire safety and other essentials required to maintain the hospital’s accreditation, Noschese and his bosses hoped he would be exempted from the mass firing. But after they sent the justification memo up the chain, they got a curt response: The document was too long. He should sum up his position in no more than three sentences.

Noschese was told that a member of hospital leadership did that, but it made no difference. He had to turn in his badge and go home.

“I’d never loved a job this much,” Noschese said in an interview on Monday, before learning that his firing had been put on hold. “Everything that I did, from the moment I stepped into that position to the moment I was forced out.”

Noschese said he was drawn to the VA’s mission after his wife started working there during pharmacy school. The high school sweethearts grew up on the northern edge of Chicago and got married after she graduated from the University of Illinois, while he learned the HVAC trade.

“The fact that the organization that I had dedicated my entire career to, nearly 15 years at this point, was the same organization that hurt the person I love, that was a really hard thing to swallow,” said Laurie Noschese, who had the additional burden of having to reassure the 160 people she supervises that “everything is going to be OK” while they knew her family was one of the first ones affected by the firings.

Ricky Noschese was looking forward to bringing back an apprenticeship program to get veterans into good jobs and replace employees who are nearing retirement. He also thought, he recalled with a rueful laugh, that a government job would be stable.

Having to fill a vacant position is costly and hurts productivity, he said, and firing workers en masse under a false pretense is not only “completely and utterly wrong” but also inefficient.

“You talk about waste,” he said. “That’s where the waste really, truly comes from.”

‘It doesn’t matter how good I am at my job’

Eleven days after Noschese was fired, Future Zhou sat at her desk at the Seattle VA Medical Center. She felt uneasy.

She had just replied to an email sent by the DOGE-controlled Office of Personnel Management that asked federal workers to justify their jobs with the prompt, “What did you do last week?” In a post on X, the social media platform he owns, Musk warned that “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Looking for the camaraderie and “battle buddy mentality” she missed from her 11 years in the Army, Zhou left a job at Boeing and started working at the VA in July 2024 as an inventory management specialist. After VA leaders told employees to respond to the email, Zhou explained how she used her supply-chain expertise from the military to make sure the hospital had all the supplies needed to serve the roughly 160,000 veterans enrolled for VA care across Western Washington.

When a coworker called to tell Zhou that another member of her team had been fired, she checked her email and thought she was in the clear. Then the message appeared in her inbox: Because of supposedly inadequate performance, she had been terminated.

Of the entire logistics team responsible for keeping the Seattle hospital running, Zhou said in an interview, only the warehouse material handlers had been exempted from the mass firings. She had seen clinics cancel procedures because of delays in getting critical supplies and couldn’t believe that VA leaders would make the situation worse by removing relatively low-paid staff in the name of cost savings.

“If we get rid of our supply techs and our logisticians that are ordering these supplies, who’s running the hospital?” she said. “You can have all the doctors in the world, but if your doctor doesn’t have the tools that they need to take care of you, they cannot take care of you.”

Zhou said her team in Seattle already was shorthanded, with half of its eight positions filled, and was authorized to hire two more inventory management specialists before she was fired.

“It’s not like they got rid of my position,” she said. “They just got rid of me, but the position was still in critical need.”

Zhou said that by firing some of the VA’s newest hires while pushing older employees to retire early – partly through the “Fork in the Road” email, in which Musk’s team essentially offered workers a buyout – the department may not effectively train its next generation of workers. The mass termination, she said, also “left a lot of bad blood” among new employees.

“I’m not as confident coming back into my position,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how good I am at my job or how hard I work. There’s no trust there. There’s no loyalty. The federal government doesn’t seem to have our back.”

Russ Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and a lead author of the policy blueprint known as Project 2025, said in a private speech last year that his goal was to put federal employees “in trauma,” as reported by ProPublica and Documented.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Michael Cecil, a professor at Gonzaga University School of Law, said that while Trump himself may not choose to fire an HVAC expert or a supply-chain specialist, their termination is the downstream effect of his administration’s sweeping effort to root out what the president calls a “deep state” of government employees who may get in the way of his agenda.

“The administration is painting with an incredibly broad brush on matters of regulatory policy and federal employees,” Cecil said. “That’s the real-world implication of pursuing a political agenda in a very broad-stroked way. It impacts people in communities all across the country.”

Jessica Riedl, an economic policy expert at the Manhattan Institute, said DOGE is engaged in “spending-cut theater” that will have a negligible effect on the nation’s budget deficit. By cutting staff at the Internal Revenue Service charged with cracking down on tax evasion, she said, DOGE could actually increase deficits by reducing revenue.

“What DOGE has done has been extraordinarily disruptive to the agencies and people affected,” said Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank and former Republican aide in the Senate. “But the savings are essentially budget dust, in terms of our deficits.”

As of Thursday, DOGE claimed to have saved $115 billion, but its “wall of receipts” contains numerous miscalculations and other errors, as reported by the New York Times and other news outlets. Riedl said its actual savings may be as low as $2 billion. By comparison, Musk has lost $122 billion of his personal wealth so far this year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, largely due to the plunging stock price of Tesla, the automaker he leads.

Despite Trump saying in his March 4 address to Congress that the Department of Government Efficiency is “headed by” Musk, the White House has said he doesn’t make decisions for DOGE, which isn’t technically a federal department.

‘Like a family’

After Megan-Richelle Cole gave birth to her son in June, she returned to work at Lovell as an inventory management specialist in the pharmacy department, where she managed the supply of medications and ensured that patients didn’t receive recalled or expired drugs.

The Army veteran moved back home to the northeast corner of Illinois after she had to leave a similar job at the VA hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, when her doctor’s recommendation that she work remotely during her pregnancy conflicted with the hospital’s in-person work policy. Although she began working at Lovell in 2010, Cole was considered a probationary employee after returning to work in September.

When she was fired Feb. 24, Cole was in the final stages of buying a house. She suddenly had no income. To make matters worse, the VA didn’t provide her with a form required to file for unemployment benefits, and she had to withdraw from the home purchase.

“Everything was going smoothly, like it was supposed to,” she said, until the sudden termination left her feeling humiliated and lost. “Nobody knew anything. It was just heartbreaking.”

Cole’s supervisors tried to preserve her job, to no avail. They pointed out that reimbursements that she processed from recalled and expired drugs resulted in more than $775,000 in savings in fiscal year 2024, she said. While her co-workers and bosses in North Chicago were supportive, she said being fired left her feeling “very small” as she walked to her car in disbelief.

Like many VA employees, Cole is a disabled veteran. She sustained a traumatic brain injury, hearing loss and damage to her spine in a car crash when she was stationed in Germany, she said. She wanted to work at the VA both to help her fellow disabled veterans and because she feels more comfortable there, “like a family.”

Another disabled veteran fired in North Chicago, Neal Chapman, was looking forward to spending the rest of his career at the VA after nine years in the Army. He was fired seven months after he started working as a carpenter at Lovell.

When he tried to check his email that morning, he found his access already had been terminated, leaving him unable even to read the notification that he had been fired.

Chapman took a pay cut to work at the VA, he said, but he “just wanted to be more involved” and the chance to be around his fellow veterans was invaluable. Two tours in Afghanistan left him with post-traumatic stress disorder and he appreciated not having to explain himself to his coworkers.

“I looked forward to serving the veterans and getting back into it in any way possible,” he said. “But then they just kind of dropped the ball on me from out of nowhere.”

‘Just let me work’

Adam Mulvey just wants to do his job.

After 20 years in the Army – with deployments in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq – he retired at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in 2019. He started working for Washington state’s Emergency Management Division, serving as chief of logistics during the COVID-19 pandemic and several major wildfires before his family decided to move to Illinois to be closer to his wife’s parents.

Mulvey knew Lovell would be a good place for his family to get their health care, since it serves not only veterans but also the dependents of military retirees, and he was surprised to learn that there was an opening for an emergency manager. After talking with contacts at the American Lake VA near Tacoma, he thought working for the department “sounded like a really good family.”

He started the job in March 2024, 11 months before he learned that emergency management jobs were not exempt from the mass termination. He was fired Feb. 13.

Trump administration officials have suggested that the mass termination of probationary employees targeted people who didn’t want to work. Speaking to reporters at the White House on March 4, Trump adviser Alina Habba pushed back on criticism of firing veterans, who make up about 30% of the federal workforce.

“We care about veterans tremendously,” Habba said. “But at the same time, we have taxpayer dollars – we have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people that actually work. That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans by any means. We are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment, or not willing to come to work.”

Mulvey said he has enjoyed spending more time with his kids, but after a few days he wanted to be back to work.

“It’s painful to not be working and doing that job on a daily basis,” he said, adding that he wants his children to see him standing up for all the VA employees who lost their jobs. “They were far too young. In a few years, they won’t remember that I wore a uniform, but now they’ll see that I’m standing up for a community. I’m standing up for something.”

Raphael Garcia mustered out of the Army in April 2024. Spending more than seven years as a combat engineer had taken a toll on his body, and having to wait for the VA to process his disability claim before he could get the health care he needed inspired him to speed up that process for other veterans.

He took a job at the SeaTac office of the Veterans Benefits Administration, the part of the VA that processes claims. He worked to streamline the determination of disability ratings for soldiers who were going through a physical evaluation board to be medically separated from service.

After he was fired, Garcia said, employees from other divisions had to cover his workload, slowing down claims processing for other veterans. When he heard on Tuesday that he would be placed on administrative leave – paid but not allowed to work – he said, “That makes no sense at all. Just let me work. My division is drowning. Let me work.”

On Thursday, when he finally received the email notifying him that his firing had been rescinded, Garcia said he felt “a bit uneasy still with all of the uncertainty,” and worried that he could be fired again as part of the reduction in force.

“I honestly just want to work again so I can help my division out,” he said. “Co-workers and managers keep asking when I’ll be back.”

‘The federal government does not exist to employ people’

In a court filing on Tuesday in response to a federal judge in Maryland, a VA official suggested that the affected employees would remain on administrative leave until the court cases are resolved, because “reinstatement of removed employees to full duty status would impose substantial burdens on VA, cause significant confusion, and cause turmoil for the terminated employees,” especially if an appeals court reverses a district court ruling.

Lisa Marshall Manheim, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law, said the court orders may prompt the Trump administration to revise its approach to firing federal workers. Similar to the government’s multiple attempts to ban travelers from Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States during Trump’s first term, she said, the administration could rescind its mass termination of probationary employees while looking for a more legally defensible way to accomplish its goal.

While the administration appears to be complying with the court orders, Trump and his allies have escalated attacks against federal judges over the past week. On Tuesday, the president called for a judge who ruled against him to be impeached, drawing a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. Musk, in posts on X, has called judges “evil” and claimed that the judiciary branch’s blocking of a president’s executive orders amounts to “tyranny.”

David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law School, said that although there are legal ways to reduce the federal workforce, the Trump administration so far hasn’t pursued that path.

“There is a planning process required for RIFs,” he said, using shorthand for reductions in force. “If they have, in fact, gone through that and they have found that there are some positions they don’t need, then they are in compliance. But my suspicion, because they keep using very large, very round numbers, is that it’s the numbers that are driving the process rather than what they actually need. And if that’s true, then they’re not complying with the law.”

Super pointed out that Congress has appropriated enough funds for the VA to support its existing workforce through the end of September. If the Trump administration refuses to use those funds to pay VA employees, that could constitute an illegal “impoundment” and draw a separate legal challenge.

“This administration seems very determined not to comply with federal personnel laws,” he said. “And there will likely be further questionable actions and further injunctions before it all gets sorted out.”

Meanwhile, the VA is moving ahead with a plan to fire far more employees than it did in February. In a March 4 video message, Collins said he intends to reduce the workforce to 2019 levels, before Congress passed a major expansion of VA benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits and other sources of toxins.

That would require more than 70,000 layoffs, based on the numbers Collins provided, slashing the workforce by 15% and laying off nearly half of the workers the VA has categorized as nonessential.

“We regret anyone who loses their job,” the secretary said. “But the federal government does not exist to employ people. It exists to serve people.”