STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The cuts to the government are a matter of money and also of people. Leila sat down yesterday with one federal employee who was fired on Presidents Day.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Even before my interview with Alex Hymowitz started, as we were chatting and checking mic levels, it was clear his life had been upended.
What did you have for breakfast, Alex? She just needs to get a level.
ALEX HYMOWITZ: Mic check. I had coffee.
FADEL: You had coffee?
HYMOWITZ: Yeah, I can't keep anything down right now.
FADEL: Oh, no.
HYMOWITZ: No.
FADEL: Are you anxious?
HYMOWITZ: More than you can ever imagine.
FADEL: Really?
HYMOWITZ: Yeah. Filed for unemployment yesterday, so it's tough. Everything right now is just really bad.
FADEL: Hymowitz is 29. He's a lawyer, and he recently left his high-paying corporate job for a life in public service as a presidential management fellow. It's a prestigious program created under President Jimmy Carter to attract the best and brightest minds into federal work across the government. But once President Trump was sworn into office and talk of mass layoffs began, fear started spreading.
HYMOWITZ: There was conversation about people being let go. There was conversation about investigations, you know, ending. And it was pretty obvious that probationary employees were under the gun. And it felt like just a matter of time before it was going to happen to me.
FADEL: And what type of work were you doing?
HYMOWITZ: So my office - I worked at a specific sub-agency at the USDA that was designed to help ensure cattle ranchers and cattlemen were getting paid, meat packers were paying on time. And my specific role was to work on the antitrust issues. And the idea was to create rules to protect small meat packers, poultry growers, farmers and the consumer.
FADEL: Who's doing that now?
HYMOWITZ: No one, at least the antitrust part.
FADEL: Walk me through what happened when you found out you were terminated. Did anybody ever interview you? Were people in the building looking for things to cut?
HYMOWITZ: So my parents had come for the weekend because they had seen some of the news going on about probationary employees getting cut. We just kind of hang out, go out for lunch. And I get a text message from one of my co-workers saying that she received a letter. So I went to go check my email. I didn't get anything. And then Sunday night - it's around 10 o'clock - I see an email come in from an email address that I had never seen before. It is a blank email with a PDF file that just reads notice of termination.
FADEL: And what did it say?
HYMOWITZ: That I was being let go for performance and for not meeting the mission of the agency.
FADEL: Did you have any bad performance reviews?
HYMOWITZ: I had no performance reviews. And I was holding back tears. My immediate supervisor was distraught. I think it was a combination of people not knowing how to process it on my behalf and also not knowing how to process it on their own behalf.
FADEL: What protections do you have? What are you going to do? Do you have any?
HYMOWITZ: You know, I've said that - you know, potentially starting some kind of class-action lawsuit on behalf of PMFs. Whether or not it actually goes through, I've already started making calls to some of the law firms that, you know, I worked with. But it just feels wrong just sitting and waiting for, you know, the appeals board to say whether or not my job was properly cut. So I'm not going to sit idly by.
FADEL: Let's say this decision gets reversed. Let's say the administration changes, and they make different decisions about future employment. Would you go back to public service?
HYMOWITZ: Probably not. At the end of the day, I want to help people. My direct supervisor told me that we were going to work on novel ideas. We were going to keep food prices down. We were going to help ranchers make sure that they were getting paid on time. We were going to help, you know, break up some of the issues in consolidation at the top of the meat packing and poultry world. And to help do that would have been incredible. And when you spend your whole life wanting to do something just for it to be ripped away from you with a nondescript letter doesn't make you want to go back to the place that just ripped that away from you.
INSKEEP: Alex Hymowitz is formerly with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Several hours after he spoke with Leila, the president issued a new executive order and cut the presidential management fellows program that Hymowitz had joined. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR鈥檚 programming is the audio record.
