A week into February, Kaesee Bourne was nervous about her job. Last August, she had joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a fish and wildlife biologist working in California and Nevada. "What should have been a stable job had started to become very unstable," she said. After Donald Trump took office, Bourne and her colleagues begun receiving a barrage of concerning emails, memorandums, and instructions—not from their supervisors, or even people who were a part of the Fish and Wildlife leadership, but from representatives of the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This obscure federal agency has been tasked with the campaign of mass firings of federal workers led by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
When Bourne saw an OPM email asking for a list of probationary employees at Fish and Wildlife—a status that refers to recently hired employees, or employees recently moved into a new position—she asked her supervisor about it. But Bourne's supervisor had no additional insight; they had both received the email at the same time. "I've been hearing that the goal of the new administration was to make people feel stressed out and just make them feel the chaos," Bourne said. "It definitely worked."
