I worked from home, but the VA could see what I was doing. There were programs on my computer tracking my work. If I stopped taking calls for even two minutes, they’d Teams me like, “everything okay?”

Then in January 2025, on his first day back in office, Trump signed an order requiring federal employees working from home to return to their offices. OPM told agencies they had until 5pm EST on Jan. 22 to notify employees. The VA told us we had to be on site in April.

So I needed to be physically sitting in a federal building to do my job now, but they didn’t have room for us. The VA’s own “implementation guidance” said there might not be anywhere to put people. The federal government was ordering all these workers back in before having anywhere to put us.

Meanwhile, Trump’s own administration was terminating office leases. DOGE was bragging on social media about chainsawing a ton of “mostly empty” office space to save money, while all these agencies were being told to come up with desk space for every employee they’d just ordered back in.

So workers ended up getting crammed into wherever there was floor space. Two of my friends from Mental Health were put in a fucking storage closet together. One of my friends from Primary Care got an old pharmacy window. Some MSAs were lucky enough to get a cubicle at the training center. I had a friend who lived in Stockton and the nearest VA that could take her was Palo Alto. So now she’s waking up at 2 in the morning for a 2 hour commute to be at Palo Alto by 6am to work the same job she’s been doing from home. And then commuting back home. That’s so fucked up.

All because a billionaire in Washington who doesn’t even know what we do every day believes federal workers are just lazy and realized he has the power to make our lives miserable. If you seriously believe Donald Trump gives a shit about regular working people and is doing this to make the government more efficient, then he’s utterly incompetent and never gave a thought to how a “return-to-office policy” translates into an actual human life. In no way did this new arrangement make the government more efficient or improve care for a single veteran. All it did was move a bunch of people doing the same job onto different computers. The only thing that changed was that our days got longer and more expensive.

As a healthcare worker, I work with a lot of women. I can’t tell you how many moms had arranged their childcare, transportation, meals and family life around the conditions under which the government hired them. Then Trump comes along and changes one sentence on a piece of paper and their entire lives are turned upside down. Even sadder, a lot of them voted for him.

Then, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who nobody elected and who held no formal authority over the civil service, posted on X saying “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Two hours later, this email came in:

My mom also works for the VA. She’s a nurse. She was out of the country and didn’t have her federal laptop and PIV card with her to sign in and respond. Shows how careless the whole thing was. Scaring a hard-working 70-year-old nurse while she’s on vacation like that. Piece of shit.

OPM eventually said responding was “voluntary” after the threat already hit two million inboxes. Trump later told reporters there was “a lot of genius” in the email, that it was about finding people who might not actually exist.

Of course, they didn’t find a single fake employee who didn’t exist, in any agency, anywhere. But I’m glad we were able to prove, in five bullet points, to a billionaire with no legal standing over our jobs, that we fucking exist.

I keep reminding you these are billionaires because there’s a real class issue here that really pisses me off. The billionaire’s time is treated as precious, while a federal worker’s time is treated as free. The billionaire thinks you’ve got it too good so he orders you back to an office. But what about everything that gets lost in that calculation? There are things that are important to ordinary people who aren’t rich and famous, like gas money, family dinners, the extra hour with your kid, or the three hours spent on a bus or a train going from Stockton to Palo Alto when it’s still dark outside and not getting home until it’s dark again. These things aren’t recognized as costs because it’s your time.

But when it comes to the billionaire’s time, everyone needs to accommodate him. Guy needs an assistant or somebody else to organize his day for him because even that would take too much time away from him.

And then that guy decides someone making $55K a year working 120 calls a day with quotas, metrics, productivity and performance evaluations, with every minute accounted for, has too much control over their time?

Bosses and management have always wanted to own the worker’s time. Working from home gives you a tiny piece of it back. Of course they’d want to take that back. How dare these ordinary workers get an arrangement that makes their little lives a little easier.

So then, they came for the union. In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order ending collective bargaining rights for federal workers. It got tied up in the courts for a while, but by August the administration was able to enforce it at the VA and our union contracts were terminated almost overnight.

Anyone who still thinks this is a “veterans-first” administration should remember that one out of every three federal employees is a veteran. And veterans working at the VA is a thing, the same way a lot of people get sober and end up working in recovery. So when the administration attacks the federal workforce as lazy, overprivileged peasant scum, some of the people caught in that attack are the same veterans it claims to prioritize.

I don’t work for the VA anymore. But AFGE never stopped fighting, and the courts keep ruling in their favor. The VA’s response has been to lose, ignore the ruling, and try again. Three times now. And the fight is still going on as I write this.

As for Trump, he still talks about the “deep state,” and if there’s anything he believes in, it’s revenge. He thinks some parts of the federal government went after him. And maybe some of them did. But I don’t think he sees the entire federal workforce as millions of people who are personally against him. I don’t think he thinks about most of them as individuals at all. When I look at the five-bullet email, people in storage closets, and a new mother being denied parental leave even after a court ordered the union contract restored, what I see is contempt for ordinary people—contempt for us as a class.