Why these Americans agree with the DOGE firings: 'Welcome to the real world'
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- Business Insider has been covering stories of federal workers fired by the White House DOGE office.
- Some readers told BI they had limited sympathy.
- They said their private sector careers hadn't guaranteed job security or retirement.
In April, I wrote about a federal worker who was five months shy of eligibility for a full pension of $6,000 a month when she was fired in the DOGE cuts.
I received nearly 100 emails from readers, and almost all expressed how little sympathy they felt.
"Welcome to the real world," several said.
"Go get a job and work till you're dead like the rest of us," another wrote.
"National Steel went bankrupt. US Steel bought them for nothing. Thousands lost what was promised to us," another said.
Of course, not everyone feels this way. I tend to get more emails from people with negative responses to stories than from those who aren't bothered. But I was curious to learn more, so I spoke with six of the people who were critical of the federal worker.
They were over 60 and lived in California, Nevada, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Four were retired, and most lived on fixed incomes much lower than the pension the subject of my story would have received. They all said they didn't want their tax dollars to pay for high salaries and generous benefits for certain government employees when private sector workers aren't afforded the same rewards. They also questioned whether some government jobs were needed at all. All but one voted for now-President Donald Trump in this past election.
While news of federal firings has slowed down, DOGE's purging of the government workforce is not over. The cuts happening now are more permanent and methodical, and the Trump administration is planning to reclassify some workers to make them easier to fire. The six people I spoke with said what DOGE is doing to the federal workforce is par for the course in the private sector. Several had lost their pensions because their employers went bankrupt or stopped paying into them and switched to the less-generous 401(k) model.
Leslie Swor, 70, retired seven years ago after a career in the Coast Guard, an independent securities regulator now known as FINRA, and then Oracle. To supplement her income, Swor works a contract job as a school crossing guard in East Los Angeles, California. She told me public sector workers shouldn't expect to have a "hefty" pension for life. After all, private sector workers don't take that as a given.
Swor said she had "fabulous benefits and annual raises and bonuses" early in her career in the private sector. In 2007, when she became an administrative assistant at Oracle, those benefits were no longer the norm.
"Life for us out here in the private sector, in my experience, seemed to get much worse," Swor said.
They think federal salaries and benefits are overly generous compared with the private sector
The readers I spoke with were surprised that the subject of my story, Katherine Ann Reniers, was making so much money in a government job, in addition to generous benefits, and said the private sector had not been as cushy.
Reniers, a fired US Agency for International Development worker, earned a base salary of $177,000. In addition to a pension, she and other federal workers have the Thrift Savings Plan, which is similar to a 401(k). In that plan, the government matches a small percentage of an employee's contributions. Reniers would have qualified for federal health insurance for life if she had hit two decades of service.
Nearly 20 years ago, Reniers took a pay cut to leave the private sector, dropping from $150,000 to $54,000 in annual pay to get on a path that she saw as stabler for her family in the long run. At first, she moved every two to four years, sometimes to countries that had high rates of violent crime and lacked decent healthcare. In 2010, she was pregnant when she was assigned to Haiti after a devastating earthquake. Reniers, now 53, rose through the ranks to become a USAID division chief and lives in Maryland.
Swor said her perception of federal employees was that they traded higher private sector salaries for more stability and better benefits. That's largely true for federal workers with a bachelor's degree or above. A Congressional Budget Office analysis of fiscal 2022 data found that federal workers who graduated from college had lower salaries but better benefits — including health insurance, retirement, and paid leave — than their counterparts in the private sector. Public sector jobs also tend to be held by white-collar, highly educated professionals. Reniers, for example, has a master's degree, speaks four languages, and has a lot of work experience in Africa and Europe.
For workers with only a high school education, the federal government, on average, offers better pay and benefits than the private sector.
Mike Knouse, a 62-year-old landscaper from Maryland, was also frustrated by what he viewed as generous public sector compensation. He's worked for 40 years at private companies but said he never had a pension or more than two weeks of paid vacation. His current employer doesn't offer a 401(k).
Salaries and benefits for 2 million federal employees, including military and civilian personnel, accounted for about 4.3% of the nation's $6.8 trillion in annual spending in fiscal 2024. According to the CBO, social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and benefits for veterans and military personnel account for more than 50% of the US budget.
If DOGE does find savings, Knouse would like to see lower taxes, better healthcare for retirees, and more Social Security.
"I'm hoping that he could also cut the pay scale for federal employees, or any future hiring by the federal government, because it's got to balance out," Knouse said, referring to Trump and the DOGE office's cuts.
Some questioned whether tax money should pay for pensions
In general, full-time federal workers can start receiving their full pension once they hit the minimum retirement age of 62. Those who've worked two decades or more for the federal government can retire earlier. Foreign service officers at USAID and the State Department — as well as law enforcement officers, firefighters, and air traffic controllers — can retire after 20 years and qualify for larger pension payouts after hitting that anniversary.
I asked the people I interviewed how they viewed federal pensions and whether they wished the private sector still offered them. These "defined benefit plans," which guarantee a certain payout, have become less common in the private sector as employers have adopted more "defined contribution plans" like 401(k)s or employee stock ownership, which offer varying payouts based on the market.
Swor, for her part, was OK with pensions being eliminated in both sectors.
"I think people might be waking up that this is our money," Swor said of federal pensions. "Why not just receive Social Security?"
Richard Myers, a 67-year-old retired commercial real estate developer in Nevada, felt conflicted about the federal pension system. On one hand, he understood that the government has to provide good benefits to attract talent. But it seemed overly cushy to him that certain workers could retire with a full pension — maybe even at 45 if they entered the government young enough — and go on to have another career.
Ultimately, he said he understood a pension like this for military or law enforcement officers, as well as someone like Reniers, who had to move around a lot overseas at the government's request.
"After 20 years, you've probably paid your dues," Myers said. "But someone with a desk job in Washington, DC?"
He said he joked with his friends that there would be a revolution in the US — not rich versus poor but public sector versus private sector, because workers in the latter category arriving at retirement age will be asking, "How do they have all this extra money?"
They asked whether the US needs all the current government jobs
While most people I spoke with didn't completely agree with the way the Elon Musk-linked DOGE office was implementing the cuts, the pursuit of finding and eliminating government waste appealed to them. So did Trump's "America First" mantra, which partly explained their skepticism of USAID.
Cynthia Bean, a 64-year-old from Indiana, said she had never heard of the agency and didn't understand why "billions of our tax dollars are being funneled through it to nonprofits in other countries."
Bean, who owned a real estate title business for 20 years, said she voted for Trump because he talked about running the US government like a business.
She said she didn't have a problem helping other countries prevent and treat HIV/AIDS or other diseases. People also need water and power, she added. Some 83% of USAID programs, including those that invested in disease prevention and clean water, have been cut by the Trump administration.
Joyce Weaver, an 80-year-old senior home care aide in Pennsylvania and a Democrat who voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, said the government may be overspending on millions of federal employees.
"What Trump is doing needs to be done but not with so much pain for so many and so much danger for the whole country," Weaver said.
Trump's criticism of federal workers, including calling them "crooked" and "dishonest," and Musk's suggestion that some government roles are "fake jobs" resonated with several of the people I interviewed.
"We do need government jobs, and I don't care what anyone says, they do deserve a pension," Paul Alto, 61, who lives in Cleveland, said. "But I think there are a lot of jobs that were made up."
As for Reniers, she recognized she's more privileged than most but said that's not all due to government pay and benefits. She has homes in Maryland and Belgium because of her inheritance. To address that inequality, she said, Americans should support taxing the rich.
"Why aren't Americans fighting for pensions at their own companies, as opposed to saying federal workers like me shouldn't get a pension?" Reniers said. "In America, so many people are working so hard for low wages. I get there's a discrepancy between them and the wealthy. So I'm like, let's tax the rich."
