Fired Federal Workers Protest Cuts at Senate “Job Fair”

WASHINGTON (03-04) – In the cavernous atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building on March 4 a resolute crowd of illegally fired federal workers, contractors and others who along with their supporters held a “job fair” followed by visits to senators’ offices in seeking their support for fired workers to be rehired.

The visits also aimed to “pressure senators to rein in unelected smash-and-grabber Elon Musk” and his DOGE minions who have ruined many lives in their intransient and callous indifference by “cutting waste” in the federal government through illegal terminations of workers and the closing of agencies and departments. The job fair and office visits also highlighted the false and misleading Trump ad nauseum mantra of “Make America Great Again.”

The hastily fired workers were engaged in projects and programs whose funding would have continued to project American soft power to buttress national security and influence around the globe. Their termination now leaves a vacuum to be filled by others, if at all.

According to organizers of the Fork Off Coalition, “The American public is waking up to the damage caused by unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s illegal firing spree and rampage through sensitive federal government systems. Across the country, federal workers are sharing stories of their terminations and the important work that will go uncompleted if their jobs are not reinstated. They are also raising the alarm about Musk’s actions to put extremely popular government programs like Social Security at risk.”

During their office visits, the activist workers shared their personal stories of termination and projects eliminated by Musk’s DOGE purge. At each office visit, workers asked the senators staff members to convey their message to the representative in taking immediate and meaningful action by rehiring them and restoring their projects while reigning in “Musk and his allies in the Trump administration, including OMB Director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought.”

Under the direction of the world’s wealthiest individual, DOGE, in addition to the firings, has placed a freeze on allocated funds by terminating contracts, programs and projects as Musk continues to wreak havoc with his relentless and patently impetuous behavior, a hallmark of how he conducts his own personal businesses and an ill-suited model for government.

One group of workers while walking in through a hallway happened upon Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), who welcomed them warmly and engaged in a brief conversation assuring them they had his full support, and that he would continue advocating for their rehiring. Saying, too, that he was fully aware of the importance for the continuation of their work.

This correspondent accompanied a diverse group of professionals from an alphabet soup of agencies and departments including the CDC, HHS, NIH, NPS and USAID, among others, who at each senator’s office individually related to staff members the profoundly negative impact on programs and research that their termination and that of funding has and will have.

Among them was Dr. Peter Kerndt, Senior TB/HIV Medical Advisor at USAID who was fired when Musk’s DOGE terminated the agency. Dr. Kerndt expressed his concern regarding the loss of funding for a research study aimed at achieving the goal of creating an AIDS-free generation in Mozambique whose patients are required to take daily medications to suppress the virus. The program’s termination leaves the country at risk of increased infection rates in spreading the deadly disease that will result in many unnecessary deaths.

The program’s ending also means the staff’s dedication to public service, institutional investment, time and complex research of the many resolute medical professionals in studies over the years, has been cast aside by Musk and DOGE. Their destructive purge will result in massive and unnecessary “slow deaths” among the 25 million people currently receiving the lifesaving medications.

Dr. Kerndt also lamented the termination of a joint TB project between Stop TB and USAID that was utilizing the “introducing New Tools Project” (iNTP) for early detection of the highly transmittable disease. Through the program, a new battery-operated low radiation digital chest x-ray unit the “Ultra-portable Delft X-ray machine with computer-aided detection (CAD)” was developed for use in remote and underdeveloped locations around the globe.

Images collected from the unit can be rapidly transmitted to a radiologist who, using an AI program, is able to make a quick diagnosis in assisting the control of the disease. The project’s objective was to eradicate TB in 24 high burden countries by 2030. In 2022 the Ministry of Health in Uzbekistan received two of the USAID machines as a target country in meeting the 2030 goal.

Now, with the termination of funding for rapid diagnosis and the loss of medications, TB will be able to spread further. This, in turn, will negatively impact the health of innumerable individuals and their communities along with the economy of their countries making them less stable due to the ‘catastrophic costs” of the illnesses which in turns threatens “our own national security.”

As a further insult, online references to any of the project links at USAID have been removed keeping the knowledge of the work being done at the vital agency from the very public who have funded it.

As an another example of the benefit to American soft power in projects and programs around the world, former US ambassador to Turkmenistan Matthew Klimow, when speaking recently at the Caspian Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, noted that one aspect of US-Turkmenistan relations was the exchange programs that the US offered, which provided a way to expose young Turkmen, university students and – in the case of the US State Department’s FLEX program – high school students, to a broader view of the world and to Western ideas.

Klimow also described a well-received water resources program by USAID that had a $3 million budget as one that, “punched above its weight class.” If the current administration should ask for his advice, Klimow said he would tell them: “It’s a little investment for an outsized impact, and, yes, it is welcomed. People want what the United States is offering.”

Report and photos by Phil Pasquini

© 2025 nuzeink all rights reserved worldwide