The individuals, who work in an agency that oversees the nation's nuclear stockpile, had been fired on Thursday and lost access to their federal government email accounts.
Summary
The Trump administration abruptly fired multiple National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) employees, then struggled to reinstate some due to a lack of updated contact information.
The NNSA, which oversees the U.S. nuclear stockpile, asked remaining employees to relay the message.
The terminations, part of mass federal layoffs orchestrated by Trump and Elon Musk, coincided with a Russian drone strike on Chernobyl, raising security concerns.
I'm waiting to see the headline: "Fired NNSA employees can't be found for reemployment because they moved to off-grid locations outside the blast-radius of all major centres"
"Everybody is replaceable" is only true for menial jobs. Some jobs are so critical and demand so much specialization that sometimes there's only one person that can do it right.
Can't wait until they fire half of NASA and then we lose all of our satellite, launch, tracking and deep space capabilities.
Whoops, we abandoned all the astronauts in orbit when we shut down Houston! Guess they're on their own! What do you mean, the ISS is about to crash into Washington DC?!
I can't imagine anyone would want to come back after being abruptly fired from what was likely a long career requiring expertise and multiple security clearances, likely after a military career. To have all that just brushed away with the swipe of a hand like you're entire life is fucking meaningless... I can't imagine what that was like for those people. People that had been loyal to the machine for a lifetime.
And then this asshole has the balls to ask them to come back? Wow, just wow!
They're so afraid of looking weak by admitting fault they'd rather look incompetent by claiming the US Government doesn't know how to contact the people in charge of our nukes.
I bet they need to eat, and this will give them time to find a new job while still eating.
Also, as their coverage will end with the job change they're certainly planning, it's time to get the entire family in for dental check-ups and to the GP for tests and jabs.
It would be absolutely hilarious if the workers took this opportunity to unionize and negotiate getting their jobs back with higher pay and better benefits.
I thought the federal employees were unionized to some degree, but were still fired? I read something to that effect a week ago but the article didn't go into much detail.
And, yes, it does make the union largely useless. They can file lawsuits, and cite law, and involve themselves in employee arbitration, but that only matters when the opposition engages in good faith.
The two groups don't often overlap. That's like "flying as sharks".
Consultants, by their nature, may have drastically-reduced job security, something people usually want from a union when they can't get it from their government.
Not sure its unionizing - just charging the market rate for highly valued skills and knowledge. We should be infuriated as tax payers that we are going to end up paying more because of this debacle.
In my professional experience it's most specifically people with a sales and sales-like background (which includes grifters).
People whose speciality is "wheeling and dealing" are horrible at managing anything whose success criteria is not purely based on convincing other people of something, so basically anything were actual things must be created, made, distributed and so on.
Since they can't actually make things work, they instead try and manipulate perception around it to convince others that things are working or for them to do it for them, and the former only holds for a while whilst problems accumulate and things eventually fail in an too-big-to-be deniable way (at which point they try to dump the blame on somebody else), whilst the latter when done by somebody supposedly leading something just yields a parasite manager that doesn't manage and whose selection of manpower is based on how easy it is to manipulate their "underlings" rather than competence, so things get badly done but said "manager" can't actually tell until it's too late.
I've definitely seen this to be true on the local level for years. So much potential for conflict of interest if nothing else. And yeah I think it applies even more to national government.
Now imagine what would happen if this had happened a year in the future… Everybody has new gigs, no intentions of coming back, and the institutional knowledge has been lost. Almost makes you think that these 2 presidents might be traitors