After DOGE Targeted V.A., an Iraq Veteran Faced Uncertainty and Crisis

U.S.|She Devoted Her Life to Serving the U.S. Then DOGE Targeted Her.

It had been six days since Joy Marver was locked out of her office at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, five days since she checked herself into a hospital for emergency psychiatric care, and two days since she sent a letter to her supervisors: “Please, I’m so confused. Can you help me understand?”

Now, she followed her wife into the storage room of their house outside Minneapolis, searching for answers no one would give her. A half-dozen bins held the remnants of 22 years spent in service to the U.S. government — first as a sergeant first class in Iraq, then as a disabled veteran and finally as a V.A. support specialist in logistics. She had devoted her career to a system that had always made sense to her, but now nobody seemed to know whether she had officially been laid off, or for how long, or why.

“Are you sure you never got an email?” asked her wife, Miki Jo Carlson, 49.

“How would I know?” asked Marver, 45. “They deleted my account.”

“Maybe it’s because you were still probationary?”

“My boss said I was exempt,” Marver said. “I was supposed to be essential.”

In the last few months, more than 30,000 people across the country were fired by President Trump’s new initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency, a historic reduction of the federal work force that has been all the more disruptive because of its chaotic execution. Entire agency divisions have been cut without explanation or mistakenly fired and then rehired, resulting in several lawsuits and mass confusion among civil workers. After a court ruled last week that many of the firings were illegal, the government began reinstating workers, even as the Trump administration appealed the decision and promised more layoffs.

The V.A. alone said it planned to cut about 80,000 more jobs this year — including tens of thousands of veterans — and for Marver the shock of losing her job was eclipsed by the disorientation of being repeatedly dismissed and belittled by the government she served. She had watched on TV as Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk took the stage at a political conference wielding a chain saw to the beat of rock music, slicing apart the air with what he called the “chain saw for bureaucracy.” She had listened to Trump’s aides and allies deride federal employees for being “lazy,” “parasitic,” “unaccountable” and “essentially wasting” taxpayer money in their “fake jobs.”