It happened on a day that's usually all about love. But this year, February 14 became known to federal workers as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Thousands of probationary employees — people who had been either recently hired or promoted — were given abrupt notice as part of the Trump administration's plan to reduce the federal workforce.
"The timeline that unfolded for the actual firing of probationary employees was incredibly tight and blisteringly devastating," said one worker from Midcoast Maine.
We're not using the names of any of the workers interviewed for this story because they fear their comments may have professional or legal consequences.
On February 14, this worker said she was called into a virtual meeting with hundreds of her colleagues at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They were told they were terminated, effective immediately.
"We were told that this is no reflection on us as individuals," she said. "This was an order that came from the top. We were the best and brightest that the service had to offer. This is a no way reflection on our contributions to service mission. They said these words, and you could see the shock on their faces, and you could see that people had been crying."
Her job had been to help protect wildlife refuges from Maine to Virginia. After years in the private sector, she was thrilled to do such meaningful work at a large scale, and was knee deep in projects. Suddenly she had to scramble before being locked out of her computer.
"To try to just get any last little threads of work done," she said. "And then to say goodbye to people in the office. It was really tragic and harsh."
She said she had the job for 10 months. Another worker who lives in Portland said she'd been on the job for barely a month when she was fired on February 21.
"I'm away from everyone that I know," she said. "My family is back in the Midwest. All my friends are back in the Midwest. I uprooted my whole life to be here. So I'm going through this process by myself."
She said she moved across the country to Maine to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide technical assistance to farmers. She applied for the job last fall while she was finishing grad school.
"I worked so hard in undergrad and grad school. I was always going going, going, always worried about if I was going to get a job, always worried about money," she said. "And then I thought that I had finally, like, reached a degree of stability that could just take a breath and just be a normal person and enjoy myself."
In her short time on the job, she said she loved it. But her excitement was tempered by a sense of unease in the office as the Trump administration warned of furloughs. Within a few weeks, she saw coworkers get laid off.
"It's cruel to walk in every day and open your laptop and not know if you were gonna see a letter there," she said.
Then, one morning, she opened her laptop and saw the letter in her inbox. It said based on her performance, her service was no longer in the public interest.
"That was incredibly insulting," she said.
A federal watchdog agency found last week that the USDA firings were not based on performance as required. That prompted an independent federal board on Wednesday to order that terminated USDA employees be temporarily reinstated. But even if this worker is able to return to her job, she's skeptical it will last. For so long, working in civil service was her goal. Now, she said, she's soured on it.
"The checks and the balances that are supposed to prevent things like this from happening that we are always taught as Americans that ensure that people are not discriminated against, that you be terminated fairly, that you're given like a degree of like, justice and fairness all crumbled in a matter of weeks," she said. "It's not safe."
"We are traumatized," said a former federal worker from Kittery. She was also let go on Valentine's Day. Despite the trauma, she said she'd go back to her job if given the opportunity.
"Because that's how deeply and passionately I feel about the work," she said.
She's a biologist specializing in bats. And she said she spent 15 years gaining experience in the field so she could one day work in federal civil service. She started at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in December.
"I just felt such a calling to it and it was exactly what I hoped that it would be," she said. "I felt like I was taking action, and I felt like I was really contributing. And bats are in pretty dire straits right now, especially in the Northeast, and it was just so wonderful to be able to actually feel like I was helping."
Now she's worried that important conservation work will be left unfinished. And she said she and her colleagues will have a hard time finding jobs in the private sector.
"Biology is a very competitive field because there is not a lot of money," she said. "And a lot of the jobs that were available to us were either with federal agencies or with state agencies that received federal funding. So we have now all been thrown into an already very competitive job field, with much fewer employment options, and I don't know what we're going to do."
She described the feeling of what just happened as "unbearable." And like thousands of other former federal workers, she wondering who — and what — will be next.
