Since President Donald Trump took office for the second time in January, the lives and jobs of the 30,000 federal workers in the Kansas City region have been upended.
Mass layoffs and severe budget cuts have impacted the city, which has long been a hub for federal agencies, as the Trump administration and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency looks to cut spending and reduce government operations.
One such agency with a presence in town is the U.S. Department of Labor. Jeff Suchman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1748 — the union representing Labor employees in Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska — said it's unclear how many Kansas City workers have left so far.
Suchman told KCUR that about 150 employees and a number of contractors work for the department in the metro, but the union has not been told many people have quit, retired or been laid off.
"Communication from the higher-ups has ceased," Suchman said. "Nobody from D.C. is talking. Nobody even from regional management is talking."
Among its many duties, the Labor Department oversees offices like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It also investigates allegations of wage theft and child labor.
"Basically, if you are a worker or retiree in the United States, the U.S. Department of Labor is almost certainly doing something day in and day out that directly affects you," Suchman said.
Now, the workers performing those essential tasks are spread thin and unhappy about being forced back into the office full time. And Suchman said many of them are unclear about what the future holds.
Suchman spoke with KCUR's podcast Kansas City Today as part of our ongoing conversations with federal employees in the region. Read excerpts from the interview below, which have been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
On working at the Labor Department under the Trump administration
It's very difficult right now. We have an extremely motivated group of people. When you are an OSHA compliance officer, you live and breathe workplace safety. When you are a wage and hour investigator, a lot of the cases that you're working with are either with really vulnerable communities or in some cases, child labor or human trafficking.
If you are a workers' compensation claims examiner, you have people who are counting on you so that they can pay their mortgage. So for people who are extremely goal-oriented and extremely mission-oriented, like our people are, to have an administration that has made it very clear that they do not like you, they do not value the work that you do, and they want you to quit — it's incredibly frustrating and it's insulting.
On the workload for federal employees
We have lost hundreds and hundreds of employees across all of these agencies that I'm talking about. So the most immediate and broadly felt impact is people are having to do more work. And we were already at kind of bare minimum staffing levels.
We are now scrambling to even do our basic functions. The Department of Labor was extremely productive in a telework posture. That's all gone.
The whole purpose of that is to continue this chipping away at morale, to make people feel that they're unvalued, to treat people like children so that they will want to leave. And then in the very worst-case scenario, we have several dozen of our members who have been sent home and fired or, pending the outcome of a court case, will be removed from payroll.
On the value of work by federal employees
In the original so-called "fork-in-the-road" email, it came straight from the Office of Personnel Management. So 100% of federal employees got it. Every federal worker got the same email.
Of course, it didn't have an author on it, because when you do something that you're not proud of, you don't sign your name. But in that email, they said, "Your public sector job is low productivity and low value. So you should go to a private sector job that's high productivity and high value."
My day job is doing workers' compensation claims for injured federal firefighters, including firefighters with work-related cancer, making sure that their medical treatment is paid, making sure that they get their income. I don't feel like that's low-value work. I don't feel like that's low-productivity work.
You take somebody who investigates child labor cases for the wage and hour division. I don't think that they're doing low-productivity or low-value work. And my guess is that the people who are being trafficked, or the children who are having to work in these conditions don't think that either. So it's very, very insulting.
On planning for the future
It's very, very difficult to make long-term plans right now. We can see in the president's proposed budget for us that, for example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is mandated by law to be under DOL and to provide economic data so that policymakers and economic decision makers can make the best decisions, they're talking about that being downsized and then moved over to the Department of Commerce.
They're talking about certain agencies, like the Women's Bureau, being eliminated entirely. They've just shut down the Job Corps centers, including the one in Excelsior Springs. We're seeing this 30% budget cut, which would have to involve staffing cuts also.
Nobody is safe. Do you go out and buy a new house? And no one can make a long-term plan.
On the violation of union contracts
They have repudiated our telework section. They've tried to make unilateral changes to our [Equal Employment Opportunity] section in order to take away protections for our trans and non-binary members.
They have eliminated employee health programs. They've eliminated the employee assistance program for people who might be struggling and needing some mental health care. There are new contractual violations that are going on.
They fire people from the Merit Systems Protection Board. They fire people from the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]. They make it difficult for agencies to procure funding for arbitration cases. So instead of trying to do things by the law, they're trying to make it so that there's no one to hear the case.
If you're a current or former federal employee and you want to talk to KCUR about your work, email us at nomin@kcur.org.
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