The night before Valentine’s Day, Ricky Noschese and his wife Laurie left their jobs at a military and veterans hospital in North Chicago and stopped to pick up a heart-shaped chocolate cake to share with their three kids, a family tradition.

As he waited in the car, Noschese’s phone lit up with one of the alerts he had set up 10 months earlier, when he started supervising a team of technicians in charge of keeping equipment running at Lovell Federal Health Care Center. In less than a year on the job, he had identified more than $10 million in cost savings and had a long list of ideas to improve operations and complete long-delayed projects.

But when Noschese checked his phone, it wasn’t about a problem with the ventilation systems, fire alarms, elevators or emergency generators that he monitored even when he was away from Lovell, which is run jointly by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs, his employer.

“This is to provide notification that the Agency is removing you from federal service,” the email began. “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest. For this reason, the Agency informs you that the Agency is removing you from your position with the Agency and the federal civil service effective February 13, 2025.”

Puzzled by the generic wording of the email, which was sent by the VA’s chief of human resources, Noschese wasn’t sure it was real. But when he and Laurie got to work the next morning — he in the hospital’s HVAC shop, she as chief of its multiple pharmacies — his boss looked defeated and confirmed that what the email said was true.

Ricky Noschese, an electronic industrial controls mechanic supervisor at the Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, was placed on administrative leave on March 17 after he was terminated along with other probationary employees in February 2025.

Noschese is one of more than 24,000 federal workers, including nearly 1,700 at the VA, who were fired in February after President Donald Trump put billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk in charge of cutting spending and shrinking the federal workforce as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. This new entity swiftly commandeered the Office of Personnel Management, which functions as the government’s HR department, and set about terminating “probationary” workers whose relatively short tenures made them easier to fire.

In Washington state, the VA fired 12 people in Spokane, 14 in the Puget Sound area and six in Walla Walla, according to an internal email obtained by The Spokesman-Review. In North Chicago, 18 people were fired, according to Lovell employees. Many had received exemplary performance reviews, but they all got the same email saying that, “based on your performance,” their work was not “in the public interest.”

On March 13, federal judges in California and Maryland ordered the government to immediately rehire the terminated employees. The Trump administration has filed appeals in both cases, but the VA recently began notifying its fired workers that they would be placed on administrative leave for an unspecified time, receiving pay but not allowed to work until further notice.

“It is a sad, sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup said in a hearing in in San Francisco in February, after unions sued the government over the mass termination.

In a court filing March 18, the VA said all of its fired probationary employees had been reinstated but acknowledged that it didn’t have contact information for all of them. Emails notifying the affected workers that their termination had been rescinded were sent to addresses to which they no longer had access.

When the news reached them, several of the employees said they still felt apprehensive because they could still be subject to a forthcoming “ reduction in force ” announced by VA Secretary Doug Collins on March 4 that aims to eliminate at least 70,000 positions.

In response to questions from The Spokesman-Review, VA Press Secretary Pete Kasperowicz said only that the department “is complying with the court’s March 13 temporary restraining order” and “cannot comment further due to pending litigation.”

With the support of his boss, Noschese wrote a detailed, four-page document to justify his employment. He described how he had helped save taxpayers more than $10 million by using his nearly two decades of experience as an HVAC technician to identify efficiencies and find a cost-effective way to extend the life of the air handling units that circulate air through the 43-building, 1.5 million-square-foot campus. Lovell serves 90,000 patients each year , including veterans, active-duty service members and their dependents, along with the nearly 50,000 recruits who pass through the Navy’s only boot camp each year at the adjacent Naval Station Great Lakes.

“Removal of this position, especially the supervisor, will leave the facility at a dangerous deficit,” Noschese wrote in the justification memo, noting that half of the positions in his job series already were vacant.

In performance reviews he provided to The Spokesman-Review, Noschese scored “exceptional” in every category, and he received a year-end bonus for “outstanding” performance. Asked about the savings Noschese said he identified, spokespeople at Lovell did not contest his claim.

As the head of a 12-person team responsible for ensuring clean water, fire safety and other essentials required to maintain the hospital’s accreditation, Noschese and his bosses hoped he would be exempted from the mass firing. But after they sent the justification memo up the chain, they got a curt response: The document was too long. He should sum up his position in no more than three sentences.

Noschese was told that a member of hospital leadership did that, but it made no difference. He had to turn over his badge and go home.

“I’d never loved a job this much,” Noschese said in an interview March 17, before learning that his firing had been put on hold. “Everything that I did, from the moment I stepped into that position to the moment I was forced out.”

Noschese said he was drawn to the VA’s mission after his wife started working there during pharmacy school. The high school sweethearts grew up on the northern edge of Chicago and got married after she graduated from the University of Illinois, while he learned the HVAC trade.

“The fact that the organization that I had dedicated my entire career to, nearly 15 years at this point, was the same organization that hurt the person I love, that was a really hard thing to swallow,” said Laurie Noschese, who had the additional burden of having to reassure the 160 people she supervises that “everything is going to be OK” while they knew her family was one of the first ones affected by the firings.

Ricky Noschese was looking forward to bringing back an apprenticeship program to get veterans into good jobs and replace employees who are nearing retirement. He also thought, he recalled with a rueful laugh, that a government job would be stable.

Having to fill a vacant position is costly and hurts productivity, he said, and firing workers en masse under a false pretense is not only “completely and utterly wrong” but also inefficient.

“You talk about waste,” he said. “That’s where the waste really, truly comes from.”

Russ Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and a lead author of the policy blueprint known as Project 2025, said in a private speech last year that his goal was to put federal employees “in trauma,” as reported by ProPublica and Documented.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Elon Musk holds a chainsaw handed to him by Argentine President Javier Milei, behind, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Feb. 20.

Michael Cecil, a professor at Gonzaga University School of Law, said that while Trump himself may not choose to fire an HVAC expert or a supply-chain specialist, their termination is the downstream effect of his administration’s sweeping effort to root out what the president calls a “deep state” of government employees who may get in the way of his agenda.

“The administration is painting with an incredibly broad brush on matters of regulatory policy and federal employees,” Cecil said. “That’s the real-world implication of pursuing a political agenda in a very broad-stroked way. It impacts people in communities all across the country.”

DOGE has recently claimed to have saved $115 billion, but its “wall of receipts” contains numerous miscalculations and other errors, as reported by the New York Times and other news outlets. Jessica Riedl, an economic policy expert at the Manhattan Institute, said its actual savings may be as low as $2 billion.

‘Like a family’

After Megan-Richelle Cole gave birth to her son in June 2024, she returned to work at Lovell as an inventory management specialist in the pharmacy department, where she managed the supply of medications and ensured that patients didn’t receive recalled or expired drugs.

Megan Richelle Cole, an inventory management specialist at the Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, Illinois, was placed on administrative leave on March 17 after she was terminated along with other probationary employees in February 2025.

The Army veteran moved back home to the northeast corner of Illinois after she had to leave a similar job at the VA hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, when her doctor’s recommendation that she work remotely during her pregnancy conflicted with the hospital’s in-person work policy. Although she began working at Lovell in 2010, Cole was considered a probationary employee after returning to work in September.

When she was fired Feb. 24, Cole was in the final stages of buying a house. She suddenly had no income. To make matters worse, the VA didn’t provide her with a form required to file for unemployment benefits, and she had to withdraw from the home purchase.

“Everything was going smoothly, like it was supposed to,” she said, until the sudden termination left her feeling humiliated and lost. “Nobody knew anything. It was just heartbreaking.”

Cole’s supervisors tried to preserve her job, to no avail. They pointed out that reimbursements that she processed from recalled and expired drugs resulted in more than $775,000 in savings in fiscal year 2024, she said. While her coworkers and bosses in North Chicago were supportive, she said being fired left her feeling “very small” as she walked to her car in disbelief.

‘Just let me work’

Adam Mulvey just wants to do his job.

After 20 years in the Army — with deployments in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq — he retired at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in 2019. He started working for Washington state’s Emergency Management Division, serving as chief of logistics during the COVID-19 pandemic and several major wildfires before his family decided to move to Illinois to be closer to his wife’s parents.

Mulvey knew Lovell would be a good place for his family to get their health care, since it serves not only veterans but also the dependents of military retirees, and he was surprised to learn that there was an opening for an emergency manager. After talking with contacts at the American Lake VA near Tacoma, he thought working for the department “sounded like a really good family.”

He started the job in March 2024, 11 months before he learned that emergency management jobs were not exempt from the mass termination. He was fired Feb. 13.

Adam Mulvey, an emergency manager at the Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, Illinois, was placed on administrative leave on March 17 after he was terminated along with other probationary employees in February 2025.

Trump administration officials have suggested that the mass termination of probationary employees targeted people who didn’t want to work. Speaking to reporters at the White House on March 4, Trump adviser Alina Habba pushed back on criticism of firing veterans, who make up about 30% of the federal workforce.

“We care about veterans tremendously,” Habba said. “But at the same time, we have taxpayer dollars — we have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people that actually work. That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans by any means. We are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment, or not willing to come to work.”

Mulvey said he has enjoyed spending more time with his kids, but after a few days he wanted to be back to work.

“It’s painful to not be working and doing that job on a daily basis,” he said, adding that he wants his children to see him standing up for all the VA employees who lost their jobs. “They were far too young. In a few years, they won’t remember that I wore a uniform, but now they’ll see that I’m standing up for a community. I’m standing up for something.”

You can read the full Spokane Spokesman-Review version of this story here.