The author (not pictured) asked her coworker on a date.
Westend61/Getty Images/Westend61
I had a crush on my coworker and decided to tell him when my contract was up.
He told me he was flattered but that he had a girlfriend.
I wonder if the timing was off, but I'm glad I put myself out there.
I remember noticing him early on at my former job. He was funny and had a sunny smile, but he also struck me as confident and competent. A wave of excitement filled my heart every time he was around me, and I felt like a teenager with her first crush — even though I was in my mid-20s.
Maybe you don't like spoilers, but I do, so I will tell the truth right now. This is not a love story. This is a story of rejection after declaring my feelings to my former coworker when my contract ended.
I waited until my last day of work to finally confess my feelings for him, but I'm not sure it was the best decision.
I finally asked my coworker out
I didn't take the decision to tell him lightly. I debated with myself for a long time if I should tell him while we still worked together.
On one hand, I thought it would be heartbreaking for me if he politely declined and I had to see him every day. On the other hand, if he accepted my invitations and we began going out together, an awkward situation would arise. Even if we were working in different departments, being in a small company where we met every day surely didn't help my dilemma.
So, ultimately, I decided to come clean when my contract was finally up. When my six months ran out, I said goodbye to all my coworkers and devised a plan. I decided to finally confess my feelings as he stepped out of the office. Unfortunately, he didn't leave the office alone, so my plan was foiled. But I couldn't keep my romantic feelings to myself anymore.
When I got home, I wrote him a message, finally revealing that I had a crush on him and wanted to tell him in person, but there hadn't been an appropriate occasion. A few minutes afterward, I added that we could have a coffee together one day — if he wanted to.
My hands were sweating as I stared at the three dreaded bubbles showing he was typing. A long text message appeared; he was incredibly kind, even when rejecting me.
He said that he knows how difficult it is to declare your feelings, so he thanked me. Still, he was already seeing another girl.
Being rejected is painful. It can easily affect our self-worth and make us feel like failures. Even though I expected this rejection, I wasn't prepared for that intrusive emptiness that left me feeling lost and thinking that no one would ever want me.
Telling my friend what happened made things slightly more tolerable, but I needed a way to cleanse this intoxicating mixture of emotions from my body and mind.
Summer meant a lot of exercise classes in parks and on the beach. I decided to trade emotional pain for physical strain, and I went to a total-body class in July's heat. Moving my body and sweating felt amazing. It made me temporarily forget this situation.
I'm ultimately proud of myself
One question kept nagging me: Was it even worth telling him the truth?
But now that some months have passed, I don't have any regrets about how things went. Sometimes, I think if I had told him earlier, things could have gone differently, but anguishing over how something could have been is never sensible.
Regardless of the timing, I am proud of stepping out of my comfort zone and declaring my feelings. As an introvert, this can be incredibly challenging.
Even if it was painful at the moment, being rejected was better than remaining in doubt about his feelings.
Rejection is like a period at the end of a sentence. It can feel like an abrupt close, but endings often turn into new beginnings.
Some Amazon fulfillment workers affiliated with the Teamsters will strike starting Thursday.
AP Photo/ Stefan Jeremiah
Amazon workers at several warehouses went on strike on Thursday.
The strike comes in the middle of Amazon's key holiday shopping and shipping season.
Amazon said that it wasn't seeing an impact on its operations.
Amazon workers at seven Amazon fulfillment centers went on strike Thursday, though the retailer said it wasn't seeing effects on its holiday delivery operations.
The workers are walking off the job after Amazon refused to bargain with them over a contract, according to a statement from the Teamsters, which represents the employees.
The strike will affect three Amazon fulfillment centers in Southern California as well as one each in New York, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Illinois, according to the Teamsters. The union said it will also set up picket lines at other Amazon facilities.
The action comes in the middle of the key holiday shopping season. Amazon's highest quarterly revenue has historically come during the final three months of the year. This year, that period included the company's October Prime Day as well as deals for Black Friday.
"If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon's insatiable greed," Sean O'Brien, general president of the Teamsters, said in the statement.
O'Brien said that the Teamsters "gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members."
"They ignored it," he added.
An Amazon spokesperson said Thursday morning that the company hasn't seen its operations affected by the strike.
Spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement that the Teamsters recruited non-employees to participate in the strike and intimidate Amazon employees. When Business Insider asked for evidence of those claims, an Amazon spokesperson said, "We know our employees, and we know they are not out there. Our employees repeatedly claim to management that they experience harassment from activists."
"We appreciate all our team's great work to serve their customers and communities, and are continuing to focus on getting customers their holiday orders," Nantel said.
Workers at some Starbucks stores were also preparing for a potential strike this week. On Tuesday, a union representing about 10,000 baristas said its members had voted to authorize a strike, though negotiations with Starbucks have continued and no strike date has been set.
Do you work for Amazon and have a story idea to share? Reach out to this reporter at [email protected]
The Financial Times, which first reported the EY firings, referred to these instances of being dismissed for minor offenses as "stealth firing."
Joe Galvin, the chief research officer at the executive coaching platform Vistage, told Business Insider that this sneaky sacking is "a "covert behind-the-scenes activity" that "violates the principle of respect for the individual."
A corporation might think: "I'm trying to downsize a little bit without saying I'm downsizing a little bit," Galvin said.
"So you go through this process that does nothing but break trust."
Short-term gain for long-term problems
Stealth firing leads from an era of "quiet firing," where companies methodically made employees' roles increasingly uncomfortable and less appealing, such as implementing strict return-to-office mandates.
This trend, along with the quietly agreed-upon severance packages of "silent layoffs," is a tactic to avoid the optics of publicly cutting dozens of staff.
Cynthia Patterson, the founder of the HR consultancy firm PeopleOps.how, who has 20 years of experience in HR across tech, AI, healthcare, and retail industries, told BI that while quietly trimming headcounts in these ways may work in the short term, they can cause serious issues for a workplace.
"Any short-term outcome is offset by the negative cultural impact," Patterson said. "Employees are left second-guessing their own value and stability, creating an environment of anxiety and mistrust."
"This dynamic mirrors the patterns of toxic and/or abusive work cultures, where fear and uncertainty are used — intentionally or not — as tools for behavioral control," Patterson said.
A shift in power
People are also perceptive, and employees who see their colleagues be shown the door for minor indiscretions will only make them wary and dissatisfied.
Patterson told BI companies who push people out in arbitrary ways are mistakenly viewing avoidance as kindness.
"Employee performance management is part of running a business," she said. "And it can't be skipped because it feels uncomfortable or inconvenient to the employer."
Stealth firing, Patterson said, simply exposes a company's inability or unwillingness to have honest, necessary conversations about performance — and "signals to employees that the organization doesn't have integrity."
Galvin told BI that companies willfully harming their reputations in this way may find they are the ones suffering and bleeding talent if an era of revenge quitting hits in 2025.
"The signs are pointing up toward a really strong 2025 — our community is energized, hiring's going back up again, investments are going up, expectations for profits and revenues are up," he said. "The power shifting."
Weigh up your options
It's always a smaller world than you think when it comes to work and looking for your next job, Ciara Harrington, the chief people officer of the leadership training platform Skillsoft, told BI.
"It's in the interest of everybody to keep good relationships," she said. "I don't think anybody really wants to leave a company on bad terms."
Sometimes, companies have to let their staff go, and the best thing for everyone is to do so with respect and honesty. That way, while the news isn't what the employees hope for, they still maintain a level of respect for the company.
The alternative is that employees post on public platforms such as LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, and job review sites about their negative experiences, such as how they felt undervalued and lied to.
Patterson said these stories could reach future employees, customers, investors, and even employment lawyers, opening up companies to potential legal disputes.
"Strong companies know their employees are human beings and deserve to be treated as such," Patterson said.
Galvin told BI that if there are signs that your company is looking to stealth fire you, it's time to start weighing your options.
Even if your employer isn't planning on firing you, if their communication is poor, and you feel unsafe, it's best to get out anyway.
"In the absence of a story, we create one," Galvin said. "If you sense that's happening to you, you either have the direct conversation with your manager or start looking for your next job."
Author Kylie Mohr joined a training group this fall to learn how to set fires.
Courtesy of Kara Karboski
Puffs of smoke rose above a meadow in northeastern Washington as a small test fire danced in the grass a few feet away from me. Pleased by its slow, controlled behavior, my crew members and I, as part of a training program led by the nonprofit organization The Nature Conservancy and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, began to light the rest of the field on fire. The scene had all the trappings of a wildfire — water hoses, fire engines, people in flame-resistant outfits. But we weren't there to fight it; we were there to light it.
It might sound counterintuitive, but prescribed fires, or intentionally lit fires, help lessen fire's destruction. Natural flames sparked by lightning and intentional blazes lit by Indigenous peoples have historically helped clean up excess vegetation that now serves as fuel for the wildfires that regularly threaten people's homes and lives across the West and, increasingly, across the country.
For millennia, lighting fires was common practice in America. But in the mid-to-late 1800s, the US outlawed Indigenous burning practices and started suppressing wildfires, resulting in a massive buildup of flammable brush and trees. That combined with the dry, hot conditions caused by the climate crisis has left much of the country at a dangerously high risk of devastating wildfires. The top 10 most destructive years by acreage burned have all occurred since 2004.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, federal land managers reevaluated their approach to fire and did the first prescribed burns in national parks. We're still making up for lost time: Scientists and land managers say millions more acres of prescribed burns are necessary to keep the country from burning out of control.
But the scale of the task doesn't match that of the labor force, whose focus is often extinguishing fires, not starting them. Responding to the increase in natural disasters has left America with few resources to actually keep them from happening. As Mark Charlton, a prescribed-fire specialist with The Nature Conservancy, told me, "We need more people, and we need more time."
This fall, I outfitted myself in fire-resistant clothing and boots, donned a hard hat, and joined a training program called TREX to better understand how prescribed burns work. TREX hosts collaborative burns to provide training opportunities in the field for people from different employers and backgrounds. The hope is that more people will earn the qualifications they need to lead and participate in burns for the agencies they work for back home.
Our team would walk across the area we planned to burn to collect data on weather and fire behavior.
Courtesy of Kara Karboski
The program's emphasis on learning, coupled with the support of the University of Idaho's Artists-in-Fire Residency (which helped pay my way), is why I, a journalist with no fire jobs on my résumé, could join a prescribed-fire module of about two dozen more experienced participants. I had to pass a fitness test — speed walking three miles with a 45-pound backpack in under 45 minutes — take 40 hours' worth of online coursework, and complete field-operations training to participate as a crew member. While hundreds of people have participated in TREX burns across the country since the program's inception in 2008, the dramatic growth of wildfires is outpacing the number of people being trained to reduce their impact.
The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of forests and grasslands across the country, burning an average of about 1.4 million acres, roughly the size of Delaware, each year with prescribed burns. It burned a record 2 million acres in fiscal 2023. But it's still not enough preparation, considering wildfires have burned over 10 million acres in recent years and people continue building and living in wildfire-prone areas. "It's a huge workload we have, and we know it," said Adam Mendonca, a deputy director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service who oversees the agency's prescribed-fire program. The agency plans to chip away at the problem with the roughly 11,300 wildland firefighters it employs each year who squeeze the work in during the offseason, when there are fewer fires to fight.
But relying on wildland firefighters can be problematic. "We only have those resources for a short time," said Charlton, who served as the incident commander on the Washington burns I joined this fall. "After a long fire season, people are exhausted. It's hard to get people to commit." Plus, wildfires are increasingly overlapping with the ideal windows to do prescribed burns — often the spring and the fall, when conditions are cooler and wetter, making fires easier to tame.
That was especially true this year: Multiple large fires burned across the West into October. These late-season wildfires, coupled with two hurricanes that firefighters helped respond to, strained federal resources. That month, the nation's fire-preparedness level increased to a 5 — the highest level — indicating the country's emergency crews were at their maximum capacity and would've struggled to respond to new incidents.
In response to the elevated preparedness level, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group urged "extreme caution" in executing new prescribed fires, saying backup firefighters or equipment might not be available. "We get to the point where we're competing for resources," said Kyle Lapham, the certified-burner-program manager for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and the burn boss on the Washington burns.
There's also a qualification shortage. Prescribed burns require a well-rounded group with a variety of expertise and positions — including a burn boss, who runs the show and must have years of training. Charlton estimated that hundreds more qualified burn bosses are necessary to tackle nationwide prescribed-burn goals.
A lot of planning — and trained expertise — is required before any burning can begin.
Courtesy of Adam Gebauer
Just as concerning is an interest shortage. The Forest Service has struggled to hire for and maintain its federal firefighting force in recent years, in large part because of poor pay (federal firefighter base pay was raised to $15 an hour in 2022) and other labor disputes over job classifications, pay raises, staffing, and more. The agency is also expecting budget cuts next year and has already said it won't be able to hire its usual seasonal workforce as a result.
Legislation inching its way through Congress could help, though its fate under a new administration is unclear. The National Prescribed Fire Act of 2024 would direct hundreds of millions of dollars to the Forest Service and the US Department of the Interior for prescribed burns, including investment in training a skilled workforce — but it hasn't progressed past a Senate subcommittee hearing in June.
Without a boost in funding, the agency will continue relying heavily on partnerships with nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy and the National Forest Foundation to staff prescribed burns. The Forest Service also recently expanded its Prescribed Fire Training Center to host educational opportunities out West. Critically, though, time is of the essence.
During my TREX training in October, about 20 foresters and firefighters from as far south as Texas and as far north as British Columbia worked beside me. Our group included employees of the Washington Department of Natural Resources and two citizens of the nearby Spokane Tribe of Indians, who have a robust prescribed-fire program of their own.
Over two weeks I got a front-row seat to how much planning (sometimes years) and time a single prescribed burn takes. We conducted several burns in the mountains north of Spokane on the property of a receptive landowner who'd hosted TREX in previous years. He provided the training ground and, in exchange, got work done on his property. This isn't a common scenario — burning on private land can be more complicated, and so more burns happen on state or federal property.
When I arrived, the burn's incident-management team had already put together a burn plan detailing our objectives — reducing wildfire risk to the landowner's house, thinning small tree saplings, knocking down invasive weeds, opening up more wildlife habitat — and the exact weather conditions, like wind speed, relative humidity, and temperature, we needed to safely burn. Prescribed burns on federal lands also go through an environmental review.
At the site, we scouted contained areas we would burn, called units, with trainees making additional plans for how to ignite and control fires. Keeping a fire in its intended location, called "holding," meant lots of prep work, like digging shallow trenches to box the fire in. During the burn, teams monitored smoke and occasionally sprayed the larger trees we wanted to preserve with water when flames threatened their canopies; others poured fuel on the ground, igniting bushes, grass, and smaller trees to slowly build the fire.
Those nights, I went to bed dreaming of smoke. I left with a deeper appreciation for those who set fires for a living.
Courtesy of Kara Karboski
Managing the fire didn't end when we finished burning the 30 or so acres. In some cases, it can involve days of monitoring and cleanup. To make sure the fire was out, my crew and I combed through areas we'd burned the day before for smoke or heat. If we discovered something still smoking, we'd churn up the ground with a shovel or pickax, douse the hot spot with water, and repeat. Just when we thought we were done, we'd find another spot we'd missed.
I went to bed those nights dreaming of little puffs of smoke and woke up with small flakes of ash embedded behind my ears. The work was rewarding and exhausting — I left with a deeper appreciation for the workers who do it for a living.
While every prescribed burn is different, it's always a careful equation. Everything needs to line up: supportive communities, the right weather, and, of course, the workers necessary to plan, burn, and extinguish. Only then can you light the match.
Kylie Mohr is a Montana-based freelance journalist and correspondent for the magazine High Country News.
Jeff Bezos once said Amazon would become "Earth's Safest Place to Work," but Sen. Bernie Sanders says the e-commerce juggernaut isn't even the safest place to work in its own industry.
A sweeping new report from the Sanders-led Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) says that Amazon's focus on speed leads to "uniquely dangerous" warehouses.
In the report, which Amazon, in a response updated on December 16, disputes as "fundamentally flawed," Sanders said the company's workplace injury rates are worse than it lets on, with nearly twice as many recordable injuries per 100 workers occurring at Amazon than at non-Amazon warehouses in each of the past seven years.
All US employers, including Amazon, must report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration any injuries that cause "death, days away from work, restricted work or transfer to another job, medical treatment beyond first aid, or loss of consciousness."
The report also said that Amazon, in public documents and reports to the committee, "repeatedly compared the injury rate for its warehouses of all sizes to the industry average for large warehouses," which have 1,000 or more employees. Only 40% of Amazon's warehouses have that number of workers, it said.
The comparison is likely more favorable as "the injury rate for the subcategory of large warehouses is consistently higher than the overall injury rate for the entire warehousing industry," according to the report.
"We benchmark ourselves against similar employers because it's the most effective way to know where we stand," Amazon said in response to the report. "Putting ourselves in a different category would be misleading."
It also estimated that about two-thirds of large warehouses are Amazon's, and it employed nearly 80% of all of the workers at facilities of that size.
In other words, although Amazon compares its rate against national averages compiled by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for a subset of the warehouse industry, the report finds that Amazon is such a large employer it tilts the calculation of national statistics.
While Amazon has promoted its success in bringing its reportable injury rate down since 2019, the HELP committee's analysis showed that year had an unusually high rate of 9.01, while its long-term trend has remained relatively flat since 2017 between 6.54 and 7.74. The overall industry range in that period was 4.8 to 5.7, and the non-Amazon range was 3.17 to 4.18, according to the committee's analysis.
The report attributed much of the elevated injury rates to Amazon's "obsession with productivity and speed," which it said drives workers beyond safe limits.
"There is not a safe way to make rate without being injured," one worker identified as RN told the committee, referring to the target number of items processed per shift. "There is not a single person I worked with while I was at Amazon that didn't have an injury."
"Our safety progress is well documented, and we're proud of it," the company said. "We'll continue to invest in safety and continuous improvement for years to come as we work toward being the very best in the industries in which we operate."
If you are an Amazon worker who wants to share your perspective, please contact Dominick via email or text/call/Signal at 646.768.4750. Responses will be kept confidential, and Business Insider strongly recommends using a personal email and a non-work device when reaching out.
Just as Amazon warehouse workers are threatening to launch the "first large-scale" unfair labor practices strike at Amazon in US history, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) released a report accusing Amazon of operating "uniquely dangerous warehouses" that allegedly put profits over worker safety.
As chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Sanders started investigating Amazon in June 2023. His goal was "to uncover why Amazon’s injury rates far exceed those of its competitors and to understand what happens to Amazon workers when they are injured on the job."
According to Sanders, Amazon "sometimes ignored" the committee's requests and ultimately only supplied 285 documents requested. The e-commerce giant was mostly only willing to hand over "training materials given to on-site first aid staff," Sanders noted, rather than "information on how it tracks workers, the quotas it imposes on workers, and the disciplinary actions it takes when workers cannot meet those quotas, internal studies on the connection between speed and injury rates, and the company’s treatment of injured workers."
Since the dawn of the generative AI era a few years ago, the march of technology—toward what tech companies hope will replace human intellectual labor—has continuously sparked angst about the future role humans will play in the job market. Will we all be replaced by machines?
A Y-Combinator-backed company called Artisan, which sells customer service and sales workflow software, recently launched a provocative billboard campaign in San Francisco playing on that angst, reports Gizmodo. It features the slogan "Stop Hiring Humans." The company markets its software products as "AI Employees" or "Artisans."
The company's billboards feature messages that might inspire nightmares among workers, like "Artisans won't complain about work-life balance" and "The era of AI employees is here." And they're on display to the same human workforce the ads suggest replacing.
On a September morning in 2024, two Jonathan Cohens — one from the Rockaways in Queens, the other from London — stood in an empty 15,000-square-foot parking garage near Hudson Yards in New York City. As they walked over chipped yellow lines, they explained how the space would help Joco, their shared e-bike startup for […]
Nvidia's workforce has increased more than 20-fold in the last twenty years.
Anna Kim/Getty, Tyler Le/BI
Nvidia's workforce has grown nearly 20-fold since 2003.
The company's stock price surge and low turnover have enriched many long-term employees.
Nvidia's median salary now surpasses Microsoft's and other Silicon Valley peers.
Nvidia was largely unknown just a few years ago.
In 2022, google searches for Jensen Huang, the company's charismatic CEO, were almost nonexistent. And Nvidia employees were not nearly the source of fascination and interest they are today.
Nvidia recruiters are now swamped at conferences, and platforms like Reddit and Blind are full of eager posters wondering how to land a job or at least get an interview at the company, which has around 30,000 employees.
They want to know how many Nvidians are millionaires — likely quite a few.
The skyrocketing stock price has made that the case, but so has the longevity of its employees. Twenty-year-plus tenures are not uncommon, and even now when AI talent has never been more prized, staff turnover has been falling in recent years. In January, the company reported a turnover rate of 2.7%. Tech industry turnover below 20% is notable, an HR firm told Business Insider earlier this year.
The data behind the evolution of Nvidia's workforce tells the story of the company's meteoric rise just as well, if not better than the revenue or stock price. Until the early 2000s, the chip design company, which was founded in 1993, was relatively under the radar.Here is Nvidia's story in four charts.
Nvidia's workforce has grown nearly 20-fold since 2003
Beyond Nvidia's historic rise in market value, the company has a lot to offer employees. It maintains a permissive remote work policy even as tech giants like Amazon mandate a return to the office. It has also built an appropriately futuristic new Santa Clara, California, headquarters which robotics leader Rev Lebaredian described to Business Insider as so tech-infused it is a "type of robot."
But the culture isn't for everyone.
Publicfeedback, for example, is a very intentional part of the workplace culture. Huang famously has dozens of direct reports and eschews one-on-one meetings, preferring to call out mistakes in public rather than saving harsh feedback for private conversation, so that everyone can learn.
Nvidia has become one of the best-paying firms in Silicon Valley
Four years ago, Nvidians' median salary wasn't at the top of the market. In 2019, Microsoft's median employee salary was nearly $20,000 higher than an Nvidia worker. But as of January 2024, Nvidia's median salary (excluding the CEO) surpassed Microsoft and has left other tech giants in the dust.
Yet, this chart only reports on base compensation.
Years of stock-based compensation and "special Jensen grants," along with four-digit growth in the stock price within the last decade, have led to wealthy employees and, at times, internal tension surrounding rich Nvidia employees not pulling their weight.
Nvidia's GPUs are capable of immense computing capacity at nearly unprecedented speed because they perform calculations simultaneously rather than one at a time. Instructing these powerful chips required a new software paradigm.
CUDA is that paradigm and building it took years and cost Nvidia dearly. In hindsight, the benefit of this investment period is undeniable. CUDA is the main element that keeps AI builders from easily or willingly switching to competing hardware like AMD's MI325 and Amazon's Trainium chips.
It's not a literal translation of every employee's contribution, but looking at the revenue-to-headcount ratio can show trends in efficiency, investment, and return.
Nvidia's revenue-to-headcount ratio showed a downward trend from 2003 until 2014, and then steady upward progress until the AI boom in 2023. During that year, this ratio doubled.
CUDA is likely not the only factor affecting this data point, but it may help explain why investors questioned CUDA expenditures for years — and why they no longer do.
But the company isn't as far ahead in other areas.
Nvidia has less than one in five women employees — but it has pay parity
Despite the dizzying progress of Nvidia's technological achievements, gender representation in the company's workforce and the semiconductor industry as a whole has remained relatively unchanged in the last decade. As of January 2024, Nvidia's global workforce was 19.7% female.
Nvidia's stats are in line with the industry totals for female representation, but ahead of the pack when it comes to women in technical and management positions.
According to a 2023 Accenture analysis, the median representation of women in the semiconductor industry is between 20% and 29%, up from between 20% and 25% in 2022. Over half of the companies in the sample reported less than 10% representation of women in technical director roles and less than 5% in technical executive leadership roles.
In January Nvidia reported that women at the company make 99.5% of what men make in terms of baseline compensation. For the last two years, the turnover rate for women at the company has been slightly lower than that for men.
Donald Trump's new DOGE commission, tasked with cutting spending, has floated laying off federal workers.
Government employees said they were preparing by networking and freshening their résumés.
Amid the concerns with DOGE, some employees said there could be benefits to its aims.
Federal employees are reporting mixed feelings about President-elect Donald Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency and its ideas to cut costs by laying off workers and enforcing return-to-office mandates.
Some are worried, some are optimistic, and most are considering their other career options, 10 people who spoke with Business Insider said. Most asked for anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.
"We're just workers. We work in a nonpartisan way," one Department of Health and Human Services employee said, adding that they were nervous, especially because they recently bought a home. "It kind of feels like we're being villainized."
On the other hand, Jesus Soriano, who's been a program director at the National Science Foundation for 13 years and is president of the agency's American Federation of Government Employees union, said that while employees were scared, there were "reasons for optimism with DOGE."
Trump said his picks to lead the unofficial commission, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, "are technologists."
"They have — both of them in their own fields — translated science into products that have tremendous impact on the public and that contribute to America being a preeminent powerhouse," he said.
Musk is the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and other various companies, and Ramaswamy started a tech-focused pharmaceutical company called Roivant Sciences.
In the wake of the DOGE Commission, many government workers said they were updating their résumés, networking more, or assessing new career options — regardless of their political beliefs.
"Everyone is putting their ducks in a row," a Department of Housing and Urban Development administrative worker of 10 years who worked under Trump's first term told BI. "You can't be lackadaisical, regardless that the government may take forever to do something. You better be one step ahead at all times."
While it's still unclear how exactly DOGE would cut government spending, Musk and Ramaswamyhave pledged to eliminate some government agencies, which could mean laying off thousands of federal workers, and compel otherswho have been working from home to return to the office.
The federal government is the largest employer in the US, paying more than 2 million civilian workers. The Departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and Defense are among the top employers, with workers earning average salaries near $100,000. Just under half of all workers across 24 agencies were telework-eligible as of May 2024, according to an Office of Management and Budget report.
"Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don't want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn't pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home," Musk and Ramaswamy wrote about their cost-cutting plans in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.
Brian Hughes, a Trump-Vance transition spokesperson, told BI the administration "will have a place for people serving in government who are committed to defending the rights of the American people, putting America first, and ensuring the best use of working men and women's tax dollars." He didn't offer any details on cuts.
Soriano, the National Science Foundation program director, said government workers were "still scared." He said five colleagues he'd talked to were actively seeking new jobs or opting to retire.
Increased efficiency is a welcomed idea. In-office mandates, not so much.
Trimming government spending and improving efficiency is an idea often discussed on both sides of the political spectrum.
President Ronald Reagan pursued a similar goal with the Grace Commission, a team of 160 private-sector executives who proposed more than 2,000 cost-cutting measures. President Bill Clinton also attempted to reduce federal spending and improve government efficiency with the National Performance Review, led by federal employees.
The efforts had mixed results. Many proposals from the Grace Commission that relied on congressional acts didn't end up happening, while executive orders were successful in reducing the head count of federal workers. Clinton's panel similarly succeeded in cutting 300,000 federal workers but managed to get only a quarter of proposals that required legislative action through Congress.
An operations manager at the US Postal Service who has worked in the department for 27 years told BI every company had inefficiencies, and "that's what we all strive to decrease."
He has concerns, however, about people stepping in to make suggestions for the Postal Service without having "tribal knowledge" of the department.
"If you're just going to be appointed to this type of commission or committee with no knowledge of what exactly the Postal Service does, then that could potentially be a problem," he said.
DOGE's intent to eliminate remote work is also a concern for some workers. The HUD employee, who'd been working remotely, said return-to-office enforcement would "absolutely" be enough to cause them to resign. They're preparing for layoffs under DOGE by looking at other employment opportunities, and they said their colleagues at HUD were taking similar steps.
Joyce Howell, an attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency — who's been at the agency for more than 31 years and serves as executive vice president of its AFGE union — said the incoming administration had stoked concern about layoffs at the EPA and fears that its mission could be compromised.
"We have town halls once a month, and we've actually broken our Zoom account in terms of the number of people attending," she said of union meetings.
Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in the Journal op-ed that the commission would target more than $500 billion in what they calledunauthorized government spending. They said federal employees who were laid off would be offered early retirement. At a town hall in October, Musk said he would consider giving laid-off workers up to two years' severance.
An employee at the Food and Drug Administration said it wasn't that easy: "We're here to support a mission. We have families to feed, and it's not as easy as just quitting our jobs," the FDA employee said.
"We're just normal, everyday people — we're being portrayed as inefficient, lazy people," they added. "It feels like they're coming for us just for their own agenda, not realizing that we're the backbone of the federal government."
Another federal-government lifer said many workers like them — people who'd been there for years — were nervous they might be the first to go. The career tenure of a median federal government worker was 6.5 years in 2024, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, well above the median 3.5 years private workers have spent in their roles.
One senior official at the Commerce Department said they anticipated a civil-servant brain drain. "The scientists are the most concerned," the official said, with those in climate, meteorology, and environmental science particularly worried.
The Department of Education has meanwhile been singled out as an entire agency that could be on the chopping block.
Sheria Smith, the president of theAFGEunion at the Department of Education and a civil rights attorney at the agency, said department elimination was "on the lower end of concerns" because it would take time and need to go through Congress.
Rather, being turned into a "Schedule F" workforce, which allows government agencies to reclassify workers and remove certain protections that make them easier to fire, could mean employees who aren't "aligned with the executive wholly" could be laid off based on performance.
And given the widespread denigration of the Education Department and return-to-office threats, people are most likely looking for other work. "I'd be surprised if they weren't," Smith said.
Some Uber and Lyft drivers have set up their own services as their pay has declined.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Some Uber and Lyft drivers are starting businesses driving people they've met through the apps.
It's more profitable and offers better autonomy, four drivers told Business Insider.
Uber and Lyft drivers can make as little as $3 a ride, pushing some to look for alternatives.
Brian started driving for Uber in California in 2013. At the time, it paid enough to be his full-time job.
Since then, working for the ride-hailing app has become less profitable, he said. But Uber and its rival Lyft still play an important role in his work — to recruit customers for his black-car service.
"I get a lot of people that I pick up randomly on Uber asking me, 'Hey, do you do private rides?'" Brian said in an interview with Business Insider. "And I say, 'Yes,' and I give them my business card, and if they want to book me, I'm happy to give them a price quote."
Brian is one of four drivers who told BI about starting his own business offering rides outside Uber and Lyft. He and the other drivers interviewed for this story asked that BI not use their full names for fear of being deactivated by Uber and Lyft. BI has verified their identity and work for the apps.
All four have had a similar experience: Driving exclusively for Uber and Lyft used to pay well, they said. But over the past few years, ride-hailing drivers' earnings have fallen to as little as $3 a ride. They say their businesses offer customers more reliable, higher-quality rides than they can often find on the apps — and sometimes, for less money.
Drivers pitch Uber and Lyft customers
About half of Brian's trips come from his list of private clients, he told BI. The other rides he still finds on Uber and Lyft, mostly to fill in what some drivers call "dead miles" — distances driven to get to or from a ride, which the apps don't compensate drivers for.
A trip for a private client could involve picking someone up at 3:30 a.m. to go to the airport or driving to and from a baseball game on the weekend. Those trips tend to make him more money than similar routes on the apps, he said, since Uber and Lyft aren't taking a share of the fare.
Unlike his experience with the apps, he's gotten to know many of the people he drives for, which he said helps generate repeat business and get him new customers.
"I won't advertise, but someone will post me on the Nextdoor app like, 'Hey, this driver is good, reliable — his prices are reasonable.'"
When BI asked whether drivers can pitch their own businesses while on a trip for Uber, an Uber spokesperson said the app's drivers are independent contractors. The spokesperson also referenced company statistics that Uber drivers make more than $30 an hour "while active on the app."
A Lyft spokesperson referenced the company's terms of service, which state that drivers can have other employment "including but not limited to providing services similar to the Rideshare Services to other companies."
Making money on Uber and Lyft is harder, some say
Torsten Kunert, a ride-hailing driver and YouTuber who makes videos about the industry, said he's noticed more drivers trying to develop their own businesses over the past year and a half. He offers an online course for drivers looking to make the change, with advice ranging from pitching Uber and Lyft riders on their services to navigating commercial insurance.
Riders are often looking for a better deal. Kunert said that he often prices his rides for private clients below the going rate for a similar trip on Uber. Prices for various app-based services, such as Uber and Airbnb, have increased over the past few years as the so-called millennial lifestyle subsidy has dwindled.
"The rider and the driver are pretty much experiencing the same story, really," he said.
Offering private rides has its costs, Kunert said. Drivers have to buy their own commercial insurance and develop their list of clients. Many drivers who start their own businesses also drive high-end vehicles, such as luxury sedans and SUVs, which can involve a higher monthly auto loan or lease payment, he said.
The drivers BI spoke with said the switch was worth it.
Phil, an Uber driver in Ontario, Canada, told BI he offers rides around his town for 10 Canadian dollars regardless of distance. He still occasionally works for Uber, picking up similar rides for 3 or 4 Canadian dollars just to pitch riders on his private service. "The pay is so poor," he said.
One driver in San Diego who runs his own black-car service told BI that he drives a Cadillac Escalade and mostly serves business clients who pay him more than he would make on Uber's black-car service.
It's more work than just picking up trips through Uber or Lyft. The driver said he spends more time cleaning his car and texting clients to set up rides than when he relied on the apps for work.
But he said his earning potential has gone up. Some clients pay him $100 an hour to wait outside business meetings just so they can have a car ready to leave as soon as they're finished, he said.
Many drivers for the apps are "just saying 'this is not worth it anymore,' or they're becoming independent contractors on their own," he said.
Kunert said many drivers he advises enjoy not having to worry about Uber or Lyft deactivating their accounts or figuring out whether the pay the apps offer for a trip will make them any money.
"You truly, for the first time, you step into your self-worth, and you become a true independent contractor," he said.
Do you work for a ride-hailing or gig delivery service and have a story idea to share? Reach out to this reporter at [email protected].
Trump has promised mass deportations, which economists warn could stoke inflation.
Rebecca Noble/Getty Images
Trump's plans to deport millions of immigrants could exacerbate America's demographic challenges.
The US birth rate has been falling, which economists say could hobble the labor market and economic growth.
Trump's plan could result in an older population and fewer workers, economists told BI.
Donald Trump's plan for a sweeping immigration crackdown involving mass deportations has been described as potentially inflationary, but economists say it could exacerbate another problem America faces: an aging population.
Immigration was thought to be one solution to Americans having fewer kids, and reversing the trend could result in a larger population of older people and lead to a smaller workforce, economists have said.
Demographic shifts are likely to be greater if immigration is significantly curtailed, Alan Berube, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said.
During his campaign, the President-elect promised to deport unauthorized migrants, of which there are around 11 million in the US, according to the Center for Migration Studies. Trump also promised to ban refugees from some countries and reinstate travel bans he implemented in his first term, which could restrict immigration flows.
If immigration were to fall to "low" levels—which the Brookings Institution defines as 350,000-600,000 net migrants per year—the US population could drop by 4% by the end of the century, Berube said, citing a 2023 Brookings projection. If the US were to completely close its borders, the population could drop 32% by 2100.
If immigration were to fall to "low" levels, the US population could see a slight decline by the end of the century.
Brookings Metro
Berube told BI that the effects of the immigration policy Trump ultimately pursues in his term would likely fall between those two estimates. He added that this could create issues for the rest of the population, which will need to support a larger cohort of older people.
In the group's low immigration scenario, America's 65-and-older population would make up 57% of the working-age population by the end of the century, up from 28% in 2022.
Brookings Metro
"The US workforce right now is aging more rapidly than at any point in our country's history," Berube said. "Even as our population ages, if we cut off the supply of immigrant labor, the challenges that go along with an aging population and an aging workforce are going to get much more serious."
Trump and the Republican party have said that the goal of deportations would be, in part, to drive down the cost of healthcare, housing, and education for Americans.
"The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver," Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump's camp, told BI in an email when asked about the potential impacts of Trump's immigration policy.
Economic challenges
Fewer people coming into the US would likely be a headwind to growth, given that the birth rate has been trending down for decades. The general fertility rate hit a record low in 2023, with just under 55 births for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Berube said immigration is thought of as a band-aid to demographic problems since immigrants tend to be younger, which offsets the aging population. Immigrants also tend to work at higher rates, supplementing the job market.
The US had around 8.3 million unauthorized immigrant workers in 2022, according to data from the Pew Research Center.
Certain sectors are particularly at risk of labor shortages in the event of fewer migrant workers, according to José Torres, a senior economist at Interactive Brokers.
Sectors with a high proportion of undocumented immigrant workers, like construction and agriculture, could see the number of workers fall. Those industries are already facing steep labor shortages, with construction in particular facing a shortage of 200,000-400,000 workers each year.
While Trump's pro-market policies will offset some of the economic impact, Torres thinks GDP could fall by half a percentage point once Trump implements his immigration crackdown.
"When you have immigrant flows, that's growth positive. That lifts your GDP in the short run because you have all these folks that are coming in. They're coming for economic opportunity, they're working really hard," Torres told BI. "So that's going to be a headwind to the labor market overall," he said of deportations.
Todd Buccholz, a former White House economist during the George H.W. Bush Administration, thinks Trump's immigration policies will have a mild economic impact, partly because he doubts immigration will fall over the long term.
"I think it's important that the country recognize the aging of the population, the lower fertility rate," Buccholz said. "If you say, no one else is coming in, the gate is locked and no one else can play … we're going to be shrinking and have more senior citizens and fewer people to support them. I think that raises real issues," he added.
On Wednesday, Musk and Ramaswamy outlined their vision for DOGE, which Musk previously said would cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.
Their opinion piece, published in the Wall Street Journal, is lengthy and dense, filled with Supreme Court rulings and decades-old statutes. Here are the main takeaways.
DOGE will be staffed by 'small-government crusaders' and work with the Office of Management and Budget.
Since its inception, DOGE has existed as an agency outside of government rather than a department — this way, Musk and Ramaswamy aren't government employees and don't have to divest from their businesses.
The DOGE co-heads re-hash this point in their column, writing that they will "serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees." They are working with Trump's transition team to organize "a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America." DOGE employees will work closely with the Office of Management and Budget, which prepares the president's budget requests for Congress.
Musk and Ramaswamy will be DOGE's main advisors and oversee three categories of reform: "regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings."
DOGE will turn to recent Supreme Court rulings as a guide.
Musk and Ramaswamy wrote that their goal for deep reform will be rooted in two Supreme Court rulings.
The pair cited West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, a 2022 Supreme Court ruling in which the court restricted the agency's ability to regulate carbon emissions, and Loper Bright v. Raimondo, a 2024 ruling where the court overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984). The Chevron decision dictated that federal courts should defer to federal agencies in their interpretation of statutes; in overturning it, the Supreme Court stripped agencies of significant power.
Musk and Ramaswamy said in the opinion piece that the rulings from the court point to regulations that "exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law."
The pair said that rolling back a range of "illicit" regulations would create economic prosperity in the country. And they wrote that the move would be a major step in remedying what they deem to be "executive overreach."
DOGE will rely heavily on executive action to pursue its cost-cutting agenda.
Musk and Ramaswamy make clear that they won't aim to pass new laws in their roles, meaning they won't have to rely on Congress.
According to their opinion piece, DOGE will work with legal experts working at government agencies to use their interpretation of the rulings to identify which regulations to cut. After determining which regulations are wasteful, DOGE will make their recommendations to Trump, who could then take executive action to "pause" certain rules and begin the process to review and reverse them.
DOGE also plans to go after the federal government's procurement process, which agencies use to get goods and services. Musk and Ramaswamy write that many federal contracts haven't been properly investigated and that broad audits of agencies "during a temporary suspension of payments would yield significant savings."
Musk and Ramaswamy explain how they'll reduce the size of the federal workforce.
Musk and Ramaswamy make it clear that by eliminating federal regulations, there should also be "mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy."
The pair stated that DOGE will work with agencies to identify the minimum number of staffers needed for departments to function and still maintain their effectiveness.
"Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE's goal is to help support their transition into the private sector," they wrote. "The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit."
And Musk and Ramaswamy poured cold water on pandemic-era work-from-home policies as they aim to reform the government's finances.
"Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome," the pair wrote.
Musk and Ramaswamy plan to target public media and Planned Parenthood.
To fulfill its promise of saving taxpayer money through executive action, DOGE plans to "take aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended." Though Musk and Ramaswamy don't detail all of the programs they hope to target, the two mention the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Planned Parenthood, along with other "progressive groups."
Congress created the CPB in 1967. It is the single biggest funding source for public radio, television, and online services, largely for local public media stations. Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio each receive some of their funding from the CPB.
Musk and Ramaswamy address critiques about spending goals and executive overreach.
Since DOGE was announced, critics have questioned whether Musk's previously stated goal of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget is feasible, particularly given their limited power without Congress. In 2024, federal spending reached $6.75 trillion, with a combined 45% of it going to health insurance programs, like Medicare, and Social Security.
Musk has a history of overcoming steep odds in the private sector. Both Tesla and SpaceX have survived near-financial ruin to become wildly successful, partly because Musk has bet on industries others deem too risky to touch.
The co-heads face the critiques head on, writing that any claims of executive overreach are unfounded. Instead, they say they will "be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat" by applying their Supreme Court interpretations. According to their stated logic, a future president would need to pass a law to reinstate any regulations that Trump scraps.
Critics have also pointed to the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 as a potential roadblock for the agency; the statute requires the president to spend funds that Congress has appropriated. Musk and Ramaswamy note that Trump has implied that the statute is unconstitutional and predict that the Supreme Court would agree. Regardless of the statute's future, DOGE plans to move forward with its mission.
Musk and Ramaswamy argue that questions about entitlement programs like Medicare "deflects attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse," but don't specifically address that critique otherwise.
DOGE will end by July 4, 2026.
Musk and Ramaswamy wrote that they expect to "prevail" in their fight to enact sweeping governmental reforms.
And they emphasized that it's their objective for DOGE to be phased out by July 4, 2026.
"There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud," the DOGE co-heads wrote.
Representatives for Musk and Trump did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment; a representative for Ramaswamy declined the request.
Houses in San Francisco are notoriously expensive, with the average home price hovering around $1.26 million. It’s no wonder that a fire-ravaged shack priced at $299,000 in one of San Francisco’s southernmost neighborhoods saw at least 20 people tour the property this past weekend, according to The San Francisco Standard. Potential buyers were asked to […]
