Fired federal workers in WA describe ‘kick in the gut’

Raphael Garcia is a disabled Army veteran and a former management analyst with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Seattle, where he handled disability claims for veterans across the country and oversaw the onboarding of new employees.

Gregg Bafundo is a Marine Corps veteran, a former lead forest ranger in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest and a former wildland firefighter.

Garcia and Bafundo were fired last week, part of President Donald Trump’s mass firings of thousands of federal workers nationwide. They are among hundreds of workers — at least, no one seems quite sure how many — fired in Washington, across a sprawling list of federal agencies, responsible for everything from veterans’ health and public lands to airplane safety, public housing and nuclear cleanup at the Hanford site.

There were, as of late last year, around 56,000 federal workers in Washington.

Members of Washington’s congressional delegation said they have been unable to get answers from federal agencies on how many workers have been fired and from what departments.

“I have worked with Republican and Democratic administrations throughout my long career, we’ve always been able to talk to the agencies,” Sen. Patty Murray said Wednesday. “Right now President Trump and his co-president Elon Musk are really breaking American government. They are firing workers left and right with no plan, no strategy and no concern for who’s getting hurt.”

Trump has given Musk broad authority to fire federal workers as part of an effort to reduce government spending.

“The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk said in an Oval Office appearance with Trump last week.

Both Garcia and Bafundo, who appeared with Murray on a virtual news conference, were notified of their firings after work hours, via email. Both said they received, nearly verbatim, the same email, which said their firings were “based on my performance,” although they also said they had uniformly positive performance reviews.

Both were fired as part of Trump’s purge of probationary workers — those with fewer protections because they’ve been on the job less than a year. Garcia had been at the VA for about eight months. Bafundo had been at the Forest Service for nearly a decade, but had recently been promoted from a temporary employee to a permanent one, yet still technically classified as probationary.

Bafundo described last summer’s work, fighting the Retreat fire in Yakima County that burned more than 45,000 acres and narrowly missed the small town of Naches.

“Myself along with numerous other federal workers prevented that town from burning,” Bafundo said.

He described his firing as a “kick in the gut, stabbed in the back” and said veterans are “very low on the totem pole when it comes to this administration.

“I wrote a blank check to the American people that said ‘payable up to the value of my life’ and this is the return on that investment,” Bafundo said. “It’s really, really hard to take.”

According to estimates from Murray’s office, the U.S. Forest Service has fired about 3,400 workers like Bafundo nationwide.

At the VA, about 1,000 employees were fired last week and about 500 researchers — looking at areas such as mental health, opioid withdrawal and burn pit exposure — are not having their terms renewed, Murray’s office said.

Garcia worked at the VA because he was “drawn to the mission.” He described it as a dream job and said he worked beyond normal work hours to make sure claims got processed.

“Our federal government is dismantling essential support systems for veterans,” Garcia said. “It isn’t about efficiency, it’s about eroding the trust and dignity that our nation owes to those who answer the call to serve.”

Murray’s office estimated that between 450 and 600 workers are leaving the Bonneville Power Administration, a combination of buyouts and firings. The federal agency provides about half the electricity in Washington, a quarter of the electricity in its region, which covers Washington, Oregon and Idaho and parts of five other states. Firings at the BPA will not save the federal government money, as it does not receive federal funding — all of its revenues comes from selling electricity to ratepayers and other agencies.

“Cutting its employees does not save the federal taxpayer a dime,” said Liz Klumpp, a former BPA employee who retired in 2023.

About 25 Transportation Security Administration workers in Washington have been fired in the last two weeks, Murray’s office said, mostly from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The Federal Aviation Administration has fired about 400 workers nationally, including mechanics and aviation safety assistants, Murray’s office said.

Nationwide more than 5,000 employees have been fired from the Department of Health and Human Resources, Murray’s office said. It’s unknown how many are in Washington, but the state’s Epidemic Intelligence Service workers — who investigate disease outbreaks and train other public health workers — have been told they are being fired, Murray’s office said.

“In the middle of the bird flu threat, they are firing public health experts. Weeks after the deadliest plane crash in years, they are firing FAA workers,” Murray said. “They’re being fired on a whim because two billionaires don’t have a clue about what they do, and don’t care to learn.”