From CBS News Headquarters in New York, this is the CBS Evening News.

Good evening. I'm Maurice Dubois.

I'm John Dickerson.

President Trump today began the second month of his second term as head of the U.S.

government, a government he is determined to shrink.

And he got some help today from a federal judge in Washington.

The judge and Obama appointee refused to stop the president's mass firings of federal employees.

The judge said unions representing those workers must take their claims of wrongful

firings to the federal labor relations authority.

The chairwoman of that agency, a Biden appointee, is one of the people, Mr. Trump, fired.

Since the president was sworn in, he has taken aim at the federal workforce of 2.4 million,

and fired, laid off or offered buyouts to untold thousands.

And we say untold because the White House is not telling us exactly how many as the job cuts continue.

But Weija Jang has been tracking down the jobs being eliminated.

And Weija, what have you found?

Well, we found that there is a group of more than half a million workers vulnerable to the administration's sweeping layoffs and many serving

key positions across the federal government. For some who have already lost their jobs,

they're now desperately looking for answers. Why? I'm really not sure what I'm going to do.

Katie Sandlin is still living out of boxes after uprooting her life in Carbon Hill, Alabama last month, a town of 2000 to work at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington, D.C.

I wiped out my savings account. I maxed out my credit card. I had to take out a loan.

But she called her job an opportunity of a lifetime, educating communities about NIH research.

People like me, where I'm from, rural Alabama, like these kind of jobs don't happen to people like me.

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