The ripple effects of Elon Musk’s DOGE firing squad have just begun.
First told she had been put on a list, then told she was probably OK only to be texted 45 minutes later to come back to the office. By then it wasn’t a surprise. “I’m fired, right?” she said. “I’m so sorry,” her supervisor replied. He urged her to digitally sign a required form before her computer access was cut off but then came back moments later to say they were holding off until Tuesday to fire everybody because of the Presidents Day holiday.
That was when Jeanmarie Wheeler, a natural resource specialist at the Bureau of Land Management in Challis, Idaho, lost it. “I basically exploded,” she told the Daily Beast. “I was so done. I felt so insulted.”
Wheeler is one of thousands of federal workers summarily fired by Elon Musk and his tech hooligans, who are wreaking havoc on hard-working, everyday Americans like Wheeler, and the ecosystems and consumers she aims to protect—people who eat salmon in her case.
She was still on probation, having finally gotten her dream job five months earlier, in October, after more than twenty years working seasonally with no benefits for the government. She has a degree in ecology from Colorado State University, and she does hydrology and riparian lands, which she explains has to do with measuring the health of the soil and plants.
She rented a house for $800-a-month in Challis because the home she shares with her husband in Meridian, Idaho, near Boise, is a five-hour drive. The house has no central heating, so she chopped wood to feed to the wood stove to stay warm.
She didn’t know anyone in Challis and life is tough in the winter, but she loved her job. “I was ecstatic,” she says, “learning new things, getting taught to do stuff I always wanted to do. They must have spent $3,000 training me and I got a $5,000 bonus, which was really something in a town this small. I was assigned to do court-ordered monitoring, measuring the health of the land.”
The government wanted her, then Musk didn’t, and because under the rules she was on probation for one year, she got the axe, along with two other workers, who she says were critical to the work they did in assessing water and soil quality. “All three of us, we are critical employees,” she says.
Wheeler and her colleagues are among the 80 percent of federal civilian workers who live outside the Washington metropolitan area.
The Salmon River runs through the center of Challis, where Wheeler and her co-workers were responsible for caring for and managing almost 800,000 acres of range land. The supervisor in letting her go said the agency would be more aligned with Trump’s vision of using public lands to make money. “That’s how I interpreted what he said,” she told the Daily Beast.
The Bureau of Land Management collects grazing fees from ranchers and approves new permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands, both of which are likely to soar under Trump, who regards climate change and reports of environmental damage as overblown.
She and her co-workers had just turned in a 170-page Range Health Assessment for a small allotment for a rancher seeking a renewal of his permit for grazing rights. She wrote the chapter about water quality. Everything must be meticulously measured—literally—with a tape measure to assess the soil quality for one small grazing allotment that includes how much cow poop the Salmon River, which runs through the center of Challis, could handle. “You don’t want E. coli in your salmon,” she says.
There are endangered species of fish in the river too, and they matter too. “Everything’s connected,” she says.
The letter officially firing Wheeler says that she did not perform well during her probationary period yet her final evaluation rated her outstanding. “I never had a bad evaluation, even in my seasonal stuff” for the government. She is filing an appeal with the U.S. Merit System Probation Board (MSPB)—if anyone is still left there to hear her case. (A federal judge has temporarily reinstated one member of the three-person federal appeals board who was fired by Trump’s DOGE meisters.)
Wheeler didn’t vote for Trump. She grew up in Washington, D.C., the daughter of a career public servant. But she’s lived in Idaho for decades now and just about everyone there is a Trump supporter. Challis is a hunter’s paradise on public land. “You name it, you can pretty much shoot it,” with elk and two kinds of deer favored, she says. She describes the ginormous freezers everyone has and the cook-off after the Super Bowl.
“My vote doesn’t count,” she says of her red state. After the firings in Challis, one person admitted to her he had buyer’s remorse.
With the tap of a computer key, Musk and his minions killed her dream. After years of applying online, she had struck gold only to see it dismantled by an unelected billionaire who has no idea of who she is or holds her in any value. “I’m 54, and this is the first time I have been hired as a permanent employee,” she said with a mixture of pride and frustration when we first talked.
When seasonal jobs with the Forest Service and other agencies were available, she took them. She supplemented her income by working in a plant nursery. Mostly she was a stay-at-home mom who drove hundreds of miles to make sure her only child, a daughter, got the best education in a rural state.
Her daughter recently graduated from the Naval Academy and is currently serving on the USS Nimitz, a NATO warship.
The day she was fired, Wheeler sent this text: “Firing people at the bottom… all of us together make 1 percent of budget…like that makes a difference at the top… but it certainly does at the bottom for thousands. The other people are a single Mom with two toddlers and a husband with 3 kids and no work in this small town. How does that make America great!?!”
The answer is not good. The willy-nilly firings are not playing well tinged as they are with what’s in it for Musk and his billionaire friends. There’s fear surrounding all these firings and what they mean for the policies of these agencies. Will the changed emphasis at the Bureau of Land Management as it better aligns with Trump’s vision turn it into a cottage industry for grazing fees and oil and gas drilling?
“I’m already packed and home,” Wheeler says after being fired from her dream job. “I’m so angry. If they give it back to me. I would probably take it. It’s still what I always wanted to do.”
