A year after mass layoffs, former federal employees are helping each other find work

This time last year, federal workers were fretting about getting DOGE’d—laid off by the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Now, many are wondering how they’ll land their next job.

Through DOGE and its aftershocks, over 300,000 federal employees have left their government posts as of December, whether they were laid off, fired, or resigned. Though the Trump administration touted its DOGE-motivated deferred resignation program as granting government workers a “dignified, fair departure” from their jobs, many said it certainly didn’t feel that way.

In the wake of so much uncertainty and the trauma of losing livelihoods—and, for some, their life’s work—the mass exodus brought the need for emotional and professional support. Federal alumni banded together to create department-specific groups, or leaned on the few that already existed. A year later, though, many former federal employees are still looking for work, and some who retained their government jobs are in need of guidance when deciding whether they want to keep working under the Trump administration.

In response, federal alumni groups have started offering employment resources and connecting each other with job leads. And at a time when many former and current government workers feel smeared by members of the Trump administration’s remarks about them, these groups have become a source of professional support that seems to have disappeared from government workplaces.

Rebuilding together

The Department of Energy Alumni Network, one of the more recently launched federal alumni groups, was founded to create a community for former employees to help each other grow professionally after nearly a fifth of the DOE workforce left the government. The group has nearly 900 members and is an independent nonprofit that is funded philanthropically.

Executive Director Jocelyn Brown-Saracino worked at the DOE for 15 years before leaving last April, and she told Morning Brew the group wants to help alumni find jobs that are worthy of their “skills and expertise.”

“There’s work to be done to help reframe the narrative about the value and work and quality of civil servants,” Brown-Saracino said. “Civil servants are some of the hardest-working, most dedicated, highly qualified individuals I’ve encountered in my life.”

The DOE Alumni Network publishes a weekly newsletter in which it shares job postings and leads, and solicits the same from its members, and organizes resume drafting and other career support programming, like workshops on how to enter the consultancy field. It also hosts networking events all over the country and recently debuted a mentorship program.

“A significant portion of our community is still looking for jobs…and so the major objectives of the mentorship program will be helping each other navigate career transitions,” Brown-Saracino said. “It has been incredibly uplifting to see people’s willingness to lend their time and their expertise to support each other right now.”

The DOE Alumni Network’s parent organization is the Environmental Protection Network (EPN), an Environmental Protection Agency alumni group that was founded during the first Trump administration, which also runs a one-on-one mentoring program. The organization’s other employment resources include EPN’s own job board, job search webinars, and partnerships with the Green Jobs Network and FedsForward, a federal alumni organization from multiple departments that publishes employment and job search resources.

EPN, which is also a nonprofit, will also soon support former EPA employees for up to three years through grants that will allow them to continue their scientific research. The new program is part of EPN’s mission to get EPA alumni ready to be re-hired into government roles, should that become a possibility.

“The Office of Research and Development at EPA has been cut, so that left a lot of scientists trying to figure out what’s going on. What we’re trying to do is support 10 of them to continue the work that they were doing, so that that work is not lost,” Steven Fantes, manager of EPN’s Civil Service Resilience Initiative, told Morning Brew. “The long-term goal is to get people back [in government].”

Tough decisions

Fantes said that while EPN does work with individuals who have left the EPA, the bulk of its work is supporting current employees navigating whether they want to—or are able to—continue working at the EPA. For those employees, the organization provides programming on whistleblowing and anonymous activism, alongside links to mental health support.

“We would love for folks to stay in the federal government if they’re comfortable and want to do it. We need folks to stay, but we are also here to help them transition,” Fantes said. “We do not talk anyone into staying or leaving. We meet them where they’re at and we come to them with whatever assistance that we can.”

But that assistance has to be given carefully: EPN communicates with current and former EPA employees via Signal, an encrypted messaging app, and doesn’t document or save any employee information in its system. Other alumni groups rely on Signal for communications, including Justice Connection, a Department of Justice alumni organization. The organization, part of the Government Accountability Project, was founded after President Trump’s 2025 inauguration by Executive Director Stacey Young, a former senior trial attorney with the DOJ who had worked there for over 16 years.

“After the election, it was very clear to me that federal employees were going to be under attack by this administration. And I knew that DOJ employees would be especially vulnerable because the DOJ was the only federal agency that investigated and prosecuted the president; he made his retributive intentions very clear,” Young told Morning Brew. “I thought that DOJ employees would need support from an outside organization if they were going to be able to weather the storm.”

That support includes mental health clinicians available to counsel current employees, media training resources for those who want to speak publicly about their experience, and legal support in which DOJ alumni represent current and employees pro bono. For employment help, Young and her colleagues regularly send members job opportunities and leads on Signal, particularly from firms and state and local governments that are interested in hiring DOJ employees, and Justice Connection recently launched an informational interviews program.

“Those interviews are with DOJ alumni who have already made the transition out of government. And this is a way for current and recent employees to really benefit from the networks that alumni often have, the wisdom that they often have,” Young said, noting that many DOJ employees haven’t looked for a job in years, if not decades. “It’s essential to let our public servants know that people on the outside have their backs.”

Easing the transition

A junior DOJ attorney, who spoke with Morning Brew under the condition of anonymity, said that the informational interviews she’s done with alumni through Justice Connection have been “incredibly helpful” in her search for a new job, and that members of the organization have supported her in ways that the Department hasn’t over the last year.

“Last year I had a question about my rights and they connected me with folks to talk to,” she told us. “For complicated reasons, I haven’t really had a lot of advocates on the inside. And so having folks that I can trust on the outside to rely on and to turn to when I need, often, legal advice, has been incredibly important.”

And she believes that her next job will be a direct result of Justice Connection.

“The community that has come together of current and former department career civil servants is pretty incredible,” she said. “If I land something, it will be because of the network.”