U.S. applications for jobless benefits rose modestly last week as business continue to retain workers despite fears of a possible economic downturn.

Jobless claim applications inched up by 6,000 to 222,000 for the week ending April 19, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s just barely more than the 220,000 new applications analysts forecast.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered a proxy for layoffs, and have mostly stayed in a healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years.

Even though President Donald Trump has paused or pulled back on many of his tariff threats, concerns remain about a global economic slowdown that could upend what has been an historically resilient labor market.

Like his pledge to institute tariffs, Trump’s promise to drastically downsize the federal government workforce occupied much of the early weeks of his presidency and is still in motion.

It’s not clear when the job cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency — or “DOGE,” spearheaded by Elon Musk — will surface in the weekly layoffs data. However, the federal government staff reductions are already being felt, even outside of the Washington, D.C. area.

Federal agencies that have either announced layoffs or are planning cuts include the Department of Health and Human Services, IRS, Small Business Administration, Veterans Affairs and Department of Education.

Despite showing some signs of weakening during the past year, the labor market remains healthy with plenty of job openings and relatively few layoffs.

Earlier this month, the government reported that U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 228,000 jobs in March. While the unemployment rate inched up to 4.2%, that’s still a healthy figure by historical standards.

Some high-profile companies have announced job cuts already this year, including Workday, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines and Facebook parent company Meta.

Thursday’s report also showed that the four-week average of applications, which evens out some of the week-to-week volatility ticked down by 750 to 220,250.

The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of April 12 declined by 37,000 to 1.84 million.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In her 28 years working for the federal government, Shea Giagnorio provided day care for the children of U.S. soldiers, training for employees and oversight for safety net programs.

Public service took her from Germany to Alaska to Kansas City, Missouri, where she moved last year for a long-sought promotion.

But when she reported to a downtown federal building for work one day last month, her access card did not work. After a co-worker let her into the building, she checked her email: Her entire office had been let go in the latest mass firing ordered by President Donald Trump’s administration.

The 46-year-old single mom has canceled her apartment lease, is selling her new furniture and may have to pull her daughter of college. She wonders what will happen to the at-risk populations her team helped serve at the Administration for Children and Families, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Not only me, but all these peoples’ lives are turned upside down,” Giagnorio said.

The impact of the cuts by Trump appointees and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency can be found everywhere in the Kansas City metropolitan area, which has long been a major hub for federal agencies about 1,000 miles away from Washington, D.C. Money once promised to the region for public health, environmental, diversity, food aid and an array of other programs has been axed, and thousands of local jobs are in jeopardy.

With nearly 30,000 workers, the federal government is the largest employer in the region. One longtime Kansas City economic researcher said he believes the region could lose 6,000 good-paying federal jobs, which in turn would wipe out thousands of others in service industries.

An IRS worker said thousands of her coworkers fear they will lose their jobs, even as they put in overtime processing tax refunds in a building so crowded that they struggle to find desks. Under pressure, hundreds more agreed this week to retire early or take a buyout.

A U.S. Department of Agriculture grant revocation disrupted a historically Black neighborhood’s plan to expand its program growing fresh produce in a food desert. A nearby pantry reduced its monthly grocery allotment for those in need after federal cuts left food banks shorthanded.

The withdrawal of federal funding for new lab equipment and vaccines means the city may be less prepared for the next pandemic.

A landlord may have to sell an office building for a loss after his federal tenants were among several that abruptly canceled local leases, adding a glut of real estate to the market.

And the city’s Tesla showroom has become a spot of weekly protest. Activists are seeking to have it closed by pushing a referendum intended to drive Musk’s electric car company out of Missouri.

The nation’s health department is slashing its full-time national workforce from 82,000 to 62,000. Among them were Giagnorio and her colleagues in her agency’s 10 regional offices around the country that helped deliver services through programs such as Head Start and emergency assistance for low-income families.

“The poor will become even more poor now,” Giagnorio said. “If we’re taking away social safety nets, what is the end result? If we’re not helping homeless people anymore, will they freeze to death in the winter? Is that what we want?”

Giagnorio, who spent most of her career as a U.S. Department of Defense civilian employee at bases in Germany and Alaska, is on paid leave until her June 2 termination. She wasted no time looking for another position after being locked out of her office, visiting a job fair hours later that Kansas City hosted for displaced federal workers.

But she doubts she will be able to find a public sector salary anywhere near the $117,000 she made and doesn’t know how her skills translate to the private sector. She worries about losing the health insurance that covers her family and having to pull her daughter out of Maastricht University in the Netherlands after her first year.

For now, she can’t get any answers from the agency to basic questions about her financial future. Does she still qualify for an early retirement buyout offer that had been extended? How much would she receive and when?

The days leading up to the April 15 tax filing deadline were always going to be busy for workers at the IRS processing center near Union Station, but this year, they were particularly stressful.

The IRS is considering a downsizing that could cut as many as 20,000 employees, or 25% of its workforce, in the coming weeks. The roughly 6,000 employees in Kansas City faced agonizing choices: decide whether to accept resignation or early retirement offers by April 14 or risk losing their jobs later.

“It’s a kick in the stomach to people that are doing everything they can to meet what’s required of them,” said Shannon Ellis, a longtime IRS customer service representative and president of the union representing local workers.

By Thursday, at least 238 Kansas City workers had taken the buyout offers and were expected to leave the agency in coming weeks. Ellis noted many of those same workers had been told they were essential and required to work overtime during tax season, some seven days per week.

Their building has been overcrowded since the IRS ordered remote employees back to the office in March. Workers sometimes struggle to find open desks. Some have to bring their own ink pens and share date stamps to perform basic job functions after budget cuts have depleted supplies.

Ellis said IRS workers share the public’s disdain for taxes but understand that collecting them is necessary to support important programs like Social Security. She said she’s decided to take a “roll of the dice” and stay in her job, spurning an early retirement offer.

“I love my job,” she said. “I’m not going to let the bully force me out.”

Urban farmer Rosie Warren grew 2,500 pounds of fruits and vegetables last year in community gardens to help feed the Ivanhoe neighborhood, where many Black families were concentrated under housing segregation policies of much of the 20th century.

Warren harvested greens, potatoes and watermelons as part of an effort to address food insecurity and health concerns in a neighborhood challenged by blight, crime and poverty. She was ecstatic last fall when the USDA awarded the neighborhood council a three-year, $130,000 grant to expand the gardens and farmers’ market serving the area.

Plans called for hiring an assistant to help Warren with growing more food and to add another market day aimed at serving more low-income older adults, mothers and children.

In February, the council received a notice terminating the grant. The USDA had determined the award “no longer effectuates agency priorities regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and activities.”

On a recent morning, Warren took a break from preparing the soil for planting to ponder the USDA’s decision.

“What do you do if you don’t support providing access to food to people who don’t have it? Wouldn’t this make your job easier?” she said. “I think it’s absurd. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Other food aid in the neighborhood has taken a hit at a time when demand is rising.

At the Bishop Sullivan Center food pantry, hundreds of low-income families are getting fewer groceries in their monthly pickups after USDA halted $500 million worth of deliveries to food banks. That included a planned order for 41,000 cases of meat, dairy and other commodities to a bank serving Kansas City.

“It just means giving families less food,” said pantry director Christopher Lowrance, who said he’s able to provide less chicken and other meat products. “It’s as simple as that.”

The Kansas City Health Department’s laboratory is badly in need of an upgrade, with equipment dating to when the building opened in the 1990s.

One basement space is water damaged and rarely used. Another has equipment that is so inadequate that the city has to ship samples to a state laboratory 150 miles away, causing inefficiencies, agonizing waits for results and delayed response times.

Kansas City’s health director, Dr. Marvia Jones, made it a top priority to modernize the labs this year after studying their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her agency planned to use federal funding to purchase new microscopes and testing equipment.

“That early disease detection allows you to do more rapid intervention, more rapid treatment, more rapid isolation,” she said.

But the funding for lab upgrades was abruptly eliminated last month as part of the Trump administration’s $11.4 billion cancellation of federal grants to states for public health. That news “crushed” the department’s carefully laid plans, Jones said.

Jones said the cuts, $3 million and counting for her department, mean the city will also have fewer vaccines to administer to low-income residents.

“It would be a sad shame for us to be in a worse position than we were before the pandemic,” she said. “We had processed all of our lessons learned, and then now this happens.”

Amir Minoofar was surprised when two federal agencies notified him that they planned to vacate the office building he’s owned for a decade in Overland Park, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City.

Minoofar said the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had recently agreed to extend its lease until 2029. The National Labor Relations Board, meanwhile, was paying month to month.

Minoofar said the government initially notified him the agencies would be out of the building in August, part of a DOGE-led blitz of hundreds of lease cancellations that has been marked by errors and subsequent reversals.

In the Kansas City metropolitan area, the government is moving to cancel 10 leases totaling 219,000 square feet that cost more than $4 million in annual rent, according to DOGE’s online “Wall of Receipts.”

Minoofar said he was more recently told the agencies will likely have to stay past August and their departure date is now unclear. He said he may have to sell the building, which has an appraised value of $2.9 million, and take a loss because of the difficult office market.

But he said he understands why the government would unload the space, which he said has often been sparsely used since the rise of telework during the pandemic.

“Businesswise, it makes sense for government to cut costs,” he said. “A lot of people are going to be unhappy but it’s a huge gigantic family and they need to take care of it. You cannot keep everybody happy.”

With liberal anger growing at Musk’s role in the government, protesters have gathered Saturdays outside his Tesla dealership in Kansas City to denounce the cuts.

State records show Tesla sales there have dropped amid calls for a boycott. Now, enough voter anger could even force the business to close.

Organizers of a newly launched “Unplug Musk” initiative are seeking to use democracy to strike at the world’s richest man by changing state law to ban car manufacturers from selling directly to consumers.

They say they plan to soon begin gathering the 111,000 signatures of registered voters that they would need to put the change on the statewide ballot in November 2026. If approved by voters, it would force the closure of the Tesla showrooms in Kansas City and St. Louis.

Missouri’s governor, Republican Mike Kehoe, a former auto dealer himself, sponsored a 2014 bill when he was a state senator aimed at requiring manufacturers like Tesla to sell through local dealers. The bill passed the Senate but died in the House after Tesla lobbied against it. The referendum revives that plan.

“There’s not a soul in this country who’s against trying to weed out government inefficiency but just taking a chain saw to people’s lives and their health care is a ridiculous way to achieve that. And it is going to cause some devastating impacts,” said organizer Brad Ketcher, a prominent Democrat and lawyer who helped draft the state’s 2022 marijuana legalization referendum.

An HHS spokesperson said the agency’s downsizing, including cutting jobs and consolidating divisions, would save money and make the organization more efficient. As for the $11.4 billion in grant funding cuts, the spokesperson said, “HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”

The IRS has offered a similar rationale for its downsizing, saying it is making process improvements that will ultimately more efficiently serve the public.

Musk said last year that Trump’s budget cuts would cause a “temporary hardship” that would soon put the economy on stronger footing.

One local economic researcher said it remained unclear just how deep that hardship will be in Kansas City, including whether it will just slow growth or cause population losses.

“It’s a big burden that’s being placed on a narrow group of people,” said Frank Lenk, director of the Office of Economic Development at the Mid-America Regional Council, a nonprofit of city and county governments in the Kansas City region. “It will definitely take some of the steam out of the local economy.”

Trump has credited DOGE with helping end “the flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars,” saving billions to help improve the nation’s finances.

The White House didn’t respond to questions about Kansas City. But Trump said recently he would invite the Kansas City Chiefs to the White House to make up for a 2020 Super Bowl victory celebration that was canceled during the pandemic.

__

Associated Press writer Heather Hollingsworth contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — U.S. applications for jobless benefits fell again last week as the labor market continues to hold up despite fears of a tariff-induced recession.

Jobless claim applications fell by 9,000 to 215,000 for the week ending April 12, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s well below the 225,000 new applications analysts forecast.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered a proxy for layoffs, and have mostly stayed between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years.

The four-week average of applications, which can soften some of the week-to-week swings, fell by 2,500 to 220,750.

The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of April 5 jumped by 41,000 to 1.89 million.

Slightly more Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, but the labor market remains broadly healthy despite an ongoing trade war.

Jobless claim filings inched up by 4,000 to 223,000 for the week ending April 5, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s less than the 225,000 new applications analysts forecast.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered a proxy for layoffs, and have mostly ping-ponged between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years.

The four-week average of applications, which aims to smooth out some of the week-to-week swings, was unchanged at 223,000.

The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of March 29 fell by 43,000 to 1.85 million.

The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell modestly last week, remaining within the same range of recent years.

Jobless claim filings fell by 6,000 to 219,000 for the week ending March 29, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s less than the 226,000 new applications analysts forecast.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered a proxy for layoffs, and have remained mostly in a range between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years.

However, following the Trump administration’s announcement of widespread tariff hikes yesterday, economists are worried about a global economic slowdown that could upend what has been an incredibly resilient labor market.

Like his pledge to institute tariffs, Trump’s promise to drastically downsize the federal government workforce is fully in motion.

It’s not clear when the job cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE,” will surface in the weekly layoffs data, but some economists have suggested they could show up in the Labor Department’s March jobs report, which comes out Friday.

The February jobs report showed that the federal government shed 10,000 jobs, the most since June of 2022.

On Monday, some workers at the Food and Drug Administration were told to pack their laptops and prepare for the possibility that they wouldn’t be back, according to an email obtained by The Associated Press.

The mass dismissals are expected to result in 20,000 fewer jobs — nearly a quarter of its staff — at the Department of Health and Human Services. About 10,000 jobs will be eliminated through layoffs, while another 10,000 workers took early retirement and voluntary separation offers.

Other federal agencies that have either announced layoffs or are planning cuts include the IRS, Small Business Administration, Veterans Affairs and Department of Education.

The layoffs are part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce through “DOGE,” spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk.

Despite showing some signs of weakening during the past year, the labor market remains healthy with plentiful jobs and relatively few layoffs.

The government reported that U.S. employers added a solid 151,000 jobs in February, and while the unemployment rate inched up to 4.1%, it remains a healthy figure by historical standards. Analysts surveyed by data firm FactSet forecast that nonfarm payrolls in March will show an increase of 130,000 and that the unemployment rate will tick up to 4.2%.

Some high-profile companies have announced job cuts already this year, including Workday, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines and Facebook parent company Meta.

The four-week average of applications, which aims to smooth out some of the week-to-week swings, fell by 1,250 to 223,000.

The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of March 22 increased by 56,000 to 1.9 million. That’s the most since November of 2021.

U.S. applications for unemployment benefits held steady last week, a sign that the labor market remains healthy as companies continue to retain their employees.

Jobless claim filings ticked down by 1,000 to 224,000 for the week ending March 22, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s mostly in line with the 225,000 new applications analysts forecast.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered a proxy for layoffs, and have remained mostly in a range between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years.

It remains unclear when job cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE,” will show up in the weekly layoffs report, though the Labor Department’s February jobs report showed that the federal government shed 10,000 jobs. That’s the most since June of 2022.

Economists don’t expect the federal workforce layoffs to have much of an impact until the March jobs report, which comes out April 4.

Those layoffs are part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce through DOGE, spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk.

Senior U.S. officials set the government downsizing in motion late last month via a memo dramatically expanding President Donald Trump’s efforts to scale back the workforce. Thousands of probationary employees have already been fired — though two federal judges last week issued orders requiring the rehiring of thousands of those workers.

Despite showing some signs of weakening during the past year, the labor market remains healthy with plentiful jobs and relatively few layoffs.

The Labor Department reported that U.S. employers added a solid 151,000 jobs in February, and while the unemployment rate ticked up to a 4.1%, it remains a historically healthy figure.

Some high-profile companies have announced job cuts already this year, including Workday, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines and Facebook parent company Meta.

The government’s weekly jobless claims report includes a four-week average of applications, meant to even out some of the week-to-week swings. That fell by 4,750 to 224,000.

The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of March 15 declined by 25,000 to 1.86 million.

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell slightly last week, indicating a still-healthy U.S. labor market.

U.S. jobless claims filings fell by 2,000 to 220,000 for the week ending March 8, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s fewer than the 226,000 new applications analysts forecast.

It’s not clear when job cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency will show up in the weekly layoffs report, though some analysts expect them to surface in data in the coming weeks.

Those layoffs are part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce through billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Senior U.S. officials set the government downsizing in motion weeks ago via a memo dramatically expanding President Donald Trump’s efforts to scale back the workforce. Thousands of probationary employees have already been fired, and now the Republican administration is turning its attention to career officials with civil service protection.

Despite showing some signs of weakening during the past year, the labor market remains healthy with plentiful jobs and relatively few layoffs.

The Labor Department reported that U.S. employers added a solid 151,000 jobs last month, with employment rising in healthcare, finance and transportation and warehousing. The unemployment rate ticked up to a still-healthy 4.1%.

Overall, while layoffs remain low by historical standards, some high-profile companies have announced job cuts already this year.

Workday, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines and Facebook parent company Meta have all trimmed their workforces already in 2025.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered a proxy for layoffs, and have remained mostly in a range between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years.

The four-week average, which evens out some of the week-to-week swings, ticked up by 1,500 to 226,000.

The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of March 1 fell by 27,000 to 1.87 million.

WASHINGTON — A young economist who had uprooted her life for civil service. A fierce housing advocate terminated just before buying her first home. A semifinalist whose dreams were dashed before they materialized.

For decades, the Presidential Management Fellows program was seen as a building block for the civil service with the expectation that the few who earned the position would one day become leaders in the federal workforce. Now the road ahead is uncertain. Hundreds of the fellows have been terminated or placed on administrative leave amid a nationwide slashing of the federal workforce.

One of President Donald Trump’s executive orders ended the program, which was created in 1978 to entice highly qualified workers with advanced degrees to join the federal government.

Trump’s Republican administration had ordered agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of workers in one fell swoop. That included recent classes of the fellows program, which has a two-year probationary period.

Fellows had persevered through an intense selection process that included multiple tests and evaluations as well as a blind interview. The agency website said about 10% of applicants are accepted, although that number has been recently as low as just 3%.

Charles Conyers, an Office of Personnel Management retiree who was a fellow in the class of 2003, said he was saddened and puzzled about the administration eliminating a program that brought to the government some of the “brightest minds in America.” He said losing their skills and ending a program that attracted and groomed exceptional future leaders was tragic.

While many fellows affected by the job cuts were reluctant to speak on the record, several did. As a group, they said they loved their jobs and see federal civil service as a way to serve their country. All would welcome, if given a chance, the opportunity to get back to work and use their expertise.

Jenn Kauffman, who has a background in public health and labor studies, was a semifinalist for the fellows program this year and had been waiting to hear if she would be accepted. As layoffs were announced, she began to worry if it would continue.

“I worked really hard and wanted that satisfaction to see it through,” she said.

On Feb. 19, during the week finalists would have been named, the Trump administration announced an executive order cutting the program.

Kauffman, 45, said she was crushed by the decision and worries that the mass layoffs and dissolution of the fellows program will forever change public service.

“It’s so easy to decimate something but so much harder to rebuild,” she said. “And I worry that the incredibly talented people who may have been my cohort or colleagues are going to go elsewhere, and there will be an incredible brain drain. It’s such a loss for the American people.”

Sydney Smith, 28, said many of the fellows were shocked at being let go because they came in to the government with ideas on how to make it more efficient.

Smith studied chemistry as an undergraduate student at Willamette University in Oregon before going on to study accounting at George Washington University. She heard about the presidential fellows program but was skeptical she would get in because of the low acceptance rate.

After she made it as a finalist in 2023, she started working for the U.S. Forest Service as an accountant. She’s a backpacker who loves the outdoors and is passionate about making public lands accessible. It was a perfect fit.

Now Smith’s goal is to finish the CPA exams, something she was doing to make herself even more qualified for federal service.

“I’m hopeful that in the future that there will be room for me in the government,” she said. “I don’t know what that would look like, but I am hopeful that it still exists.”

McKenzie Hartman, 26, was an economist for the IRS research division in Ogden, Utah, when she received an email Feb. 19 that she should return to the office with all her equipment.

The next day, a manager collected her equipment and walked her out. On the way home, Hartman took a wrong turn because her mind was elsewhere.

“It felt surreal,” she said. “I had planned on working for the federal government since high school.”

Hartman lost access to her office’s video conferencing software and couldn’t join her colleagues for her own goodbye gathering. She had to call in instead. Her termination letter came the following weekend.

“It’s crazy to get a letter terminating you for performance when everyone around you is saying incredible things about your performance,” Hartman said.

Since then, she has been applying for jobs and embarked on a road trip with her partner through several national parks, where she’s seen protests against the Trump administration’s cuts.

“For a lot of us, there is a question on whether we’ll return to federal service,” she said. “Many of us would like to, and this was what we wanted for our careers, but it’s demoralizing.”

Bianca Nelson, 31, had been working for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the unit she calls the “front door of HUD.” She never planned to leave. On Feb. 14, she got an email that she was terminated, effective immediately.

Nelson and her partner were planning to buy their first home that month — their “dream apartment.” Now, they’ve had to lean on savings to keep them afloat. She called it “gut-wrenching.”

She had to forward the termination email to her boss, who had not been told she or others would be fired. Days later, she picked up her belongings, including a bell given to her at a New York City Housing Authority groundbreaking ceremony — a memento representing her love for her work.

Since then, she has spent her days organizing paperwork for unemployment and insurance, taking networking calls, volunteering with her union, organizing a resource fair for other fired federal workers in her area and volunteering with housing advocacy organizations.

Ending the program, she said, is “closing a pipeline to future leaders.”

Madeleine Parker’s fellowship began in September 2023, one month after she finished her doctorate degree in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley.

Parker, 32, chose to work in housing because of its importance in offering families stability. She said she had hoped to continue working for the federal government.

“It’s been hard to step back from that,” she said.

She is trying to strategize on what comes next while worrying about the people who need the help.

“There’s the personal impact of my own job, but I have this immense concern about the impacts on the people we serve, from the programs I worked on and that my colleagues worked on, from affordable housing development to disaster recovery,” she said.

Juliane Alfen, 25, left her workplace at the U.S. Agency for International Development in tears, exiting to cheers from supporters who protested the abrupt way one of the world’s preeminent aid organizations had been decimated.

A 2023 fellow, her goal was to build a life and career around federal service.

Alfen learned of the fellowship through her graduate school program in international affairs at the University of California, San Diego. The day she learned she’d made it to finalist, she said, “I literally screamed and called my mom on the phone.” There had been more than 10,000 initial applicants.

Now, when she looks at her LinkedIn account, everyone is job hunting. She said she would love the opportunity to return to USAID, though the prospects for that are uncertain given the Trump administration’s gutting of the agency through his adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and halting its humanitarian work.

“I feel,” Alfen said, “like we made a difference.”

___

Fernando reported from Chicago.

NEW YORK — To billionaire Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team at the Department of Government Efficiency, Karen Ortiz may just be one of many faceless bureaucrats. But to some of her colleagues, she is giving a voice to those who feel they can’t speak out.

Ortiz is an administrative judge at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — the federal agency in charge of enforcing U.S. workplace anti-discrimination laws that has undergone tumultuous change since President Donald Trump took office. Like millions of other federal employees, Ortiz opened an ominous email on Jan. 28 titled “Fork in the Road” giving them the option to resign from their positions as part of the government’s cost-cutting measures directed by Trump and carried out by DOGE under Musk, an unelected official.

Her alarm grew when her supervisor directed administrative judges in her New York district office to pause all their current LGBTQ+ cases and send them to Washington for further review in order to comply with Trump’s executive order declaring that the government would recognize only two “immutable” sexes — male and female.

Ortiz decried management’s lack of action in response to the directive, which she said was antithetical to the EEOC’s mission, and called upon some 185 colleagues in an email to “resist” complying with “illegal mandates.” But that email was “mysteriously” deleted, she said.

The next day, after yet another frustrating “Fork in the Road” update, Ortiz decided to go big, emailing the EEOC’s acting chair Andrea Lucas directly and copying more than 1,000 colleagues with the subject line, “A Spoon is Better than a Fork.” In it, Ortiz questioned Lucas’s fitness to serve as acting chair, “much less hold a license to practice law.”

“I know I take a great personal risk in sending out this message. But, at the end of the day, my actions align with what the EEOC was charged with doing under the law,” Ortiz wrote. “I will not compromise my ethics and my duty to uphold the law. I will not cower to bullying and intimidation.”

Ortiz is just one person, but her email represents a larger pushback against the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to federal agencies amid an environment of confusion, anger and chaos. It is also Ortiz’s way of taking a stand against the leadership of a civil rights agency that last month moved to dismiss seven of its own cases representing transgender workers, marking a major departure from its prior interpretation of the law.

Right after sending her mass email, Ortiz said she received a few supportive responses from colleagues — and one calling her unprofessional. Within an hour, though, the message disappeared and she lost her ability to send any further emails.

But it still made it onto the internet. The email was recirculated on Bluesky and it received more than 10,000 “upvotes” on Reddit after someone posted it with the comment, “Wow I wish I had that courage.”

“AN AMERICAN HERO,” one Reddit user deemed Ortiz, a sentiment that was seconded by more than 2,000 upvoters. “Who is this freedom fighter bringing on the fire?” wrote another.

The EEOC did not feel the same way. The agency revoked her email privileges for about a week and issued her a written reprimand for “discourteous conduct.”

Contacted by The AP, a spokesperson for the EEOC said: “We will refrain from commenting on internal communications and personnel matters. However, we would note that the agency has a long-standing policy prohibiting unauthorized all-employee emails, and all employees were reminded of that policy recently.”

A month later, Ortiz has no regrets.

“It was not really planned out, it was just from the heart,” the 53-year-old told The Associated Press in an interview, adding that partisan politics have nothing to do with her objections and that the public deserves the EEOC’s protection, including transgender workers. “This is how I feel and I’m not pulling any punches. And I will stand by what I wrote every day of the week, all day on Sunday.”

Ortiz said she never intended for her email to go beyond the EEOC, describing it as a “love letter” to her colleagues. But, she added, “I hope that it lights a fire under people.”

Ortiz said she has received “a ton” of support privately in the month since sending her email, including a thank-you letter from a California retiree telling her to “keep the faith.” Open support among her EEOC colleagues beyond Reddit and Bluesky, however, has proven more elusive.

“I think people are just really scared,” she said.

William Resh, a University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy professor who studies how administrative structure and political environments affect civil servants, weighed in on why federal workers may choose to say nothing even if they feel their mission is being undermined.

“We can talk pie in the sky, mission orientation and all these other things. But at the end of the day, people have a paycheck to bring home, and food to put on a table and a rent to pay,” Resh said.

The more immediate danger, he said, is the threat to one’s livelihood, or inviting a manager’s ire.

“And so then that’s where you get this kind of muted response on behalf of federal employees, that you don’t see a lot of people speaking out within these positions because they don’t want to lose their job,” Resh said. “Who would?”

Richard LeClear, a U.S. Air Force veteran and EEOC staffer who is retiring early at 64 to avoid serving under the Trump administration, said Ortiz’s email was “spot on,” but added that other colleagues who agreed with her may fear speaking out themselves.

“Retaliation is a very real thing,” LeClear said.

Ortiz, who has been a federal employee for 14 years and at the EEOC for six, said she isn’t naive about the potential fallout. She has hired attorneys, and maintains that her actions are protected whistleblower activity. As of Friday, she still had a job but she is not a lifetime appointee and is aware that her health care, pension and source of income could all be at risk.

Ortiz is nonetheless steadfast: “If they fire me, I’ll find another avenue to do this kind of work, and I’ll be okay. They will have to physically march me out of the office.”

Many of Ortiz’s colleagues have children to support and protect, which puts them in a more difficult position than her to speak out, Ortiz acknowledged. She said her legal education and American citizenship also put her in a position to be able to make change.

Her parents, who came to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1950s with limited English skills, ingrained in her the value of standing up for others. Their firsthand experience with the Civil Rights Movement, and her own experience growing up in mostly white spaces in Garden City on Long Island, primed Ortiz to defend herself and others.

“It’s in my DNA,” she said. “I will use every shred of privilege that I have to lean into this.”

Ortiz received her undergraduate degree at Columbia University, and her law degree at Fordham University. She knew she wanted to become a judge ever since her high school mock trial as a Supreme Court justice.

Civil rights has been a throughline in her career, and Ortiz said she was “super excited” when she landed her job at the EEOC.

“This is how I wanted to finish up my career,” she said. “We’ll see if that happens.”

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Applications for U.S. jobless benefits fell last week as the labor market remains sturdy ahead of an expected purge of federal government employees.

The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits fell by 21,000 to 221,000 for the week ending March 1, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s significantly fewer than the 236,000 new applications analysts expected.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered a proxy for layoffs, which have remained mostly in a range between 200,000 and 250,000 for years.

The four-week average, which evens out some of the week-to-week volatility, inched up by 250 to 224,250.

The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of Feb. 22 rose by 42,000 to 1.9 million.