Stay tuned after the episode to hear our latest edition of And Then What?

I got a phone call by District Ranger at the Darrington District.

He called me a few days before the actual termination order came through, just to say, like,

hey, I'm sure you've been reading the news, because there's a lot of information in the news about these probationary employees being

fired. And I was in that probationary period. It's typically, it's a year from your hire date,

a year of working time from your higher date. So I had, it wouldn't have been until later this

summer that I would have been out of my probationary period. So he called me a few days before the termination actually happened and said,

you know, we don't know anything yet really.

Yes, this information is in the news, but I'm not hearing anything coming down from people above me from the chain of command.

So I just want to say, we hope you can come back. I don't know if this is

going to happen, but it might. And then a couple days later, on the 14th, he called to say that

I had been terminated. I was pretty stunned at first. Just shocked that it was happening at all. So it was shocking to see

the stability of a federal job vanish in like a second. This is Sam Webster. And Sam, as you guessed,

was one of thousands of Forest Service, National Parks, and Bureau of Land

Management employees who got caught up in what has come to be known as the Valentine's Day

massacre, where, as part of sweeping doge cuts or department of government efficiency, tens of thousands

of federal employees were fired.

In part, because we know some of those impacted,

some of them were people who listened to the show,

you've even heard stories from some of them on this show.

So the numbers in those headlines felt less like numbers on a spreadsheet to us,

and more like people.

...