CNN
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The Trump administration’s swift, sweeping cuts to the federal workforce is set to derail the livelihoods of potentially thousands of military families.
The turmoil within the military community caused by the recent firings of probationary employees, looming terminations and a rolling series of deadlines for federal employees to return to work should not be surprising.
For decades now, the federal government has marketed itself as the employer of choice for military spouses, who are unemployed at five times the national rate despite being more educated than their civilian spouse counterparts.
Recent Democratic and Republican presidents have championed their cause, including President Donald Trump, who signed Executive Order 13832 in 2018, encouraging federal agencies to hire military spouses, “tapping into a pool of talented individuals” to “promote the national interest of the United States and the well-being of our military families.”
Lawmakers and officials, including Trump, have long accepted the importance of military spouse employment to the financial security of military families, a quarter of whom have experienced food insecurity in recent years, and its potential impacts on national security.
Trump once championed hiring of military spouses
Trump’s executive order said his federal military spouse hiring policy would “help retain members of the Armed Forces, enhance military readiness, recognize the tremendous sacrifices and service of the members of our Armed Forces and their families …”
Military families took him at his word, as they have every president who has advocated for the federal government to hire more spouses.
“They said that at every spouse orientation at a new duty station: ‘You can volunteer! Or you can get a job in the government.’ They tell you that: that the government wants to employ military spouses,” one military spouse in Louisiana told me.
Military spouses and their families move involuntarily every two to three years, on average. As a result, it’s not unusual for those who work in the federal government to frequently change positions or even organizations within their agencies.
Many are perpetually probationary employees — the category of worker the Trump administration targeted in its recent first round of firings.
They can be probationary employees even when they have spent years and years in federal service.
Arielle Pines had proudly clocked 15 years working at the Department of Veterans Affairs when she was fired by email last week, despite years of exceptional performance reviews.
“It’s not just people who are new to the federal government,” she says, pushing back on a common misconception about probationary employees who are getting the boot.
“There are five of us [in my office] who moved over from other HR departments. We are military spouses, we are veterans, one with 18 years.”
Arielle lives in New Mexico where her husband is stationed as a senior enlisted airman in the Air Force, specializing in airplane maintenance, just as her dad did a generation before.
In November, she transferred between human resources offices at the VA.
Technically, it was a lateral move, but it came with a more demanding workload and a raise. It also came with a standard probationary period.
She thought nothing of it. In her 15 years of federal service, she has had five probationary periods as she moved from jobs as a nurse to an emergency room technician to a medical support assistant and then over to the administrative side of the organization.
Arielle, whose father is a disabled veteran, believes fiercely in the mission of the VA. When she was 11, Arielle began volunteering at the VA hospital in Spokane, Washington, passing out snacks to veterans in the community center and helping them find the locations for their appointments.
“I saw my dad deal with pain day in, day out, as a maintenance guy in the Air Force,” she describes.
“He has permanent back pain, nerve pain. At a very young age it taught me to give back to those who have given their all to us. It’s something I have always wanted to do.”
And now it’s gone.
She’s trying to appeal through the Merit Systems Protection Board, but Trump has tried to oust the administrator, raising concerns about whether the independent agency charged with protecting federal employees from improper firings can arbitrate cases like hers.
Arielle is one of almost 50 military spouses employed by or recently fired from the federal government that I have been talking to in the last month.
They are living around the country and overseas, on postings with their service member.
Almost every one of them describes weeks of uncertainty and stress of a variety they have never encountered before.
For perspective, these are spouses who have supported their service members and children through countless moves and dangerous deployments — including the Tower 22 drone attack in Jordan, where three service members were killed last year, and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, where an ISIS-K bomber killed 13.
These are men and women (mostly women — 90% of military spouses are female) married to soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines — both enlisted and officers — who have made careers in the armed forces as it struggles to retain service members whose training and expertise has been tremendously costly to American taxpayers. A number of these military spouses are veterans themselves.
Losing more than a job
Rachael, a military spouse whose last name we are withholding to protect the privacy of her family, says her termination notice cited her performance.
“I have fabulous performance reviews so it’s just false.”
She’s on administrative leave from the CDC until mid-March after being fired on Saturday.
“There were no details about any benefits included.”
Rachael is married to an active duty army pilot. They have a young child, recently purchased a house and need her income to pay the mortgage.
But the financial considerations of her family are not the first thing she mentions when she describes the devastation of losing her job: it’s the work: she was making a difference for people who really needed it and able to work in her area of expertise, a given for most employees but a rarity for military spouses.
There aren’t many jobs out there for people with Ph. Ds who have a specialty in data analytics and move every few years.
But the CDC World Trade Center health program had one. Rachael was on the team that does research and provides services for people whose health was affected by breathing toxic air from the smoldering rubble of Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks — first responders, workers and residents of lower Manhattan.
Her office had also been preparing to study a new cohort of people who breathed in the choking, carcinogenic cloud from all the material that burned after the towers came down: children.
“We’re just making sure that people are getting what they’re supposed to be getting. We want to make sure they’re getting their monitoring exams that look at their lung function to look for 9/11-related diseases like asthma and lung cancer that they may nsot be certified for.” explains Rachael.
Rachael had been working on the program for a year and a half, six months shy of exiting her probationary period.
“I thought [the terminations] would be a methodical approach: figure out what’s needed, what’s not. But that is not what this is. Instead, it is just blanket firing of probationary employees because they have fewer rights without regard for their function.”
Military families are baffled
After Trump signed his January 20 executive order calling the federal workforce to return to offices in-person, many agencies advised military spouses they were not exempt if they lived within 50 miles of a federal facility, even those who had been hired exclusively as remote workers under a federal hiring authority specifically for military spouses.
Military families scrambled to accommodate hours of commuting, arranging for childcare, making plans to go on leave without pay or fly in a parent for impending deployments that would render them single parents.
Since then, the Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department of the federal government, issued multiple memos trying to clarify how agencies should accommodate military spouse federal workers as they call in their workforce.
The latest, from February 12, stated clearly, “This guidance clarifies that the spouse of active-duty members of the U.S. Armed Forces on remote work are categorically exempt.” and “Military spouses are consequently not eligible employees covered by return-to-office plans.”
As a result, some agencies moved to exempt military spouses categorized as remote workers from coming into work in person.
But in moves baffling to many affected military families, other agencies did not.
“My understanding of the policy is that military spouses on telework [agreements] should also be exempt but that’s not being honored either,” a military spouse who works in human resources said of her agency.
Spouses of fully disabled service members, also clearly singled out for an exemption in the memo, are being called in, she says.
The remedy is onerous. Military spouses must now advocate for themselves on an ad hoc basis with supervisors who are unfamiliar with government regulations protecting military families and the reasons multiple administrations and congresses have advocated for them.
“When you make a situation when military spouses have to ask for the exemption, you’re putting the onus on them,” says Maria Donnelly, a military family advocate and current active duty military spouse who has previously worked as a federal employee.
“They’re often too scared or unwilling to piss someone off or lose their jobs.”
‘I can’t have a career’
The overwhelming sense of uncertainty and stress pervading the federal workforce is also driving out military spouses who anticipate they will be fired.
“The writing is on the wall. It’s only a matter of time. And I’m worried the longer I wait, even if I’m safe right now, the more flooded the job market will be,” one Marine Corps spouse told me.
“It’s … pretty devastating,” she says, as she starts to cry on the other end of the phone.
She has survived the latest round of firings at her agency, but feels she is next on the chopping block as one of the most junior employees in her office.
She’s already talking about her job — her dream job — in the past sense.
Her salary will probably be cut in half, she says, but hopefully she’ll find something she hasn’t had since the cuts to the federal government began: job security.
But her large family will be taking a significant financial hit.
“It makes [my husband] want to get out [of the military], to be perfectly honest,” she says.
“We’ll be paycheck to paycheck again.”
And to many military spouses like her, proud to support the military service of their spouse, but glad to have found an identity of their own, the takeaway is clear and crushing:
“I can’t have a career,” the Marine spouse says, pausing for a moment to think about what that means for her and her family. “Yeah, I can’t have a career.”