More than 200 University of Michigan community members and faculty gathered at the Wallace House Gardens Thursday afternoon for a lecture from Andrea Hsu, National Public Radio journalist. The lecture, titled “Inside the Firings and the Future of the Federal Workforce”, discussed the overhaul of the federal government through targeting the workforce upon President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The event was hosted by the Wallace House Center for Journalists for their 38th annual Graham Hovey Lecture, which honors the careers of previous Knight-Wallace fellows.
Hsu was a Knight-Wallace Fellow in 2012, studying innovative approaches to health care awareness. In her time as a journalist, Hsu first worked as a researcher for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Beijing bureau before joining NPR. Since 2021, Hsu has served as NPR’s labor and workplace correspondent, leading coverage on a variety of topics, including labor unions, workplace trends and the federal workplace.
Hsu said she anticipated a great deal of change to take place in the federal workplace when Trump took office, but she was still taken aback by how quickly the changes have been enacted.
“I knew from his first term that he had plans and unfinished business from his first term for the federal workforce,” Hsu said. “So we knew change was coming, and still, I was surprised, as were many people both inside and outside the government, at how swiftly he began remaking the federal government.”
Hsu said such swift actions by high level government officials can have serious consequences if executed poorly.
“It was clear from the start that his administration was taking a ‘move fast, break things’ approach, but what’s also become clear is that the stakes are totally different,” Hsu said. “Failure may be celebrated in Silicon Valley as part of the process, but in government, you have hundreds of millions of people relying on you, and there are consequences for swift action.”
In February, more than 24,000 workers at various federal agencies were fired as part of Trump’s efforts to “reform” the federal workplace and reduce its size. Hsu said an action like this is unprecedented.
“An unfathomable thing happened, which is that agencies fired nearly all their probationary workers en masse,” Hsu said. “Now we know it was some 24,000 people fired in February, and these were mostly more recent hires. No administration had done something like this or used the probationary period in this way.”
Hsu said as soon as these firings began, she was contacted by numerous former workers who expressed their frustrations.
“I started getting messages from people who had been fired, and some of them just wanted to vent,” Hsu said. “Some were desperate to get the word out about what was happening. Some shared how stressed they were, and I remember one gentleman wrote me and told me he was so stressed he was thinking of hurting himself.”
Hsu’s employer NPR has recently suffered massive federal funding cuts in July as Congress cut $1.1 billion in public broadcasting funds.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Knight-Wallace Fellow Hyeonjun Lee, who attended the lecture, said journalists are crucial in situations such as these to help protect and inform individuals.
“I think there are parts of Trump’s policy decisions that I cannot agree with logically,” Lee said. “On a personal level, it is deeply shocking. I believe there should be a mechanism in place to protect the individual. I think that’s why journalism is so important.”
Hsu further spoke on the repercussions she has seen from Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which produces economic and labor data — after they released an unfavorable report on the job market. Hsu explained many BLS workers are scared their work will no longer be trusted.
“One staffer told me he worries that Trump’s supporters will just take the president’s words that the numbers were rigged,” Hsu said. “Even those who doubt the numbers were rigged, he worries they might walk away thinking these revisions were just huge mistakes. Finally, even those who understand the revision process well, now that Trump has fired the commissioner, they might not believe anything the agency puts out and people might think, ‘Well, Trump had a hand in that.’”
Hsu said several staffers have told her that the implications of the public no longer trusting the BLS could be significant.
“BLS workers, past and present, have told me how important it is that they remain insulated from politics,” Hsu said. “Why? Because so many economic decisions made in this country are tied to the data they put out. One staffer told me, even the perception that government data could be manipulated by politics could change that.”
Hsu remarked on the lack of stability that thousands of government workers may no longer have.
“The federal government has a lot of dedicated workers who really care about the work they do, but many of them are feeling uneasy right now,” Hsu said. “Stability used to be a hallmark of a federal government career, and that’s no longer the case.”
In an interview with The Daily, Knight-Wallace Fellow Jędrzej Słodkowski expressed his sadness for the workers who lost part of their identity in these firings.
“I’m very sorry for the people of the US that they suffer,” Słodkowski said. “I think the worst thing is the workers of this country believe in their work, and one day someone said, ‘No you’re fired.’ They’re crushing their identities.”
Daily Staff Reporter Alyssa Tisch can be reached at tischaa@umich.edu.
The post Wallace House Center for Journalists hosts lecture on firings in the federal workforce appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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