Mark Wagstaff enlisted in the Marine Corps at 21 years old. Now 40, he served 10 years in the Marine Corps, was honorably discharged, and has spent the last decade as a public servant — first with the Department of Defense, and for the past year at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) in Las Vegas.

But on Feb. 14, Wagstaff was terminated. Despite having recently received an “outstanding” on his performance appraisal, “poor performance” was cited as cause for dismissal.

On Valentine’s Day, thousands of probationary federal employees — typically those who have been in their current role for less than a year — received similar notices that they were being fired for “performance”-related reasons. The firings were swift and often confusing, with employees being locked out of their government emails before they could get any answers.

Wagstaff, who transferred to the VA in April 2024 as a supply technician before being promoted to be an administrative officer of supply chain management in September, was a probationary employee because he started with the VA 10 months ago. As a veteran, working for the VA enticed him — it provided the sense of camaraderie that he missed from the military and allowed him to continue his career in public service, a point of pride throughout his life.

“I understand generations after me have a strong mistrust in public service, and I try to change that,” Wagstaff said in an interview. “I really have done everything in my will to encourage [people] to go into public service, because I feel as though everybody should be able to serve their country in some shape or form.”

He received an “impersonal” call Feb. 14 telling him he had been terminated and that he would receive paperwork via email. But his access to his government email was cut off, meaning he could not even see the official notice. It took until Feb. 20 for him to receive a physical termination notice. Because he’s no longer in the VA employee system, Wagstaff is concerned he won’t receive his last paycheck or an expected bonus — and has not heard anything from human resources about accessing either.

Wagstaff said he won’t bother applying for unemployment because his cause for termination was listed as poor performance. In the meantime, he’s concerned about his ability to survive without a paycheck — and is worried he may become homeless.

“I didn't think about the next steps of what my career looked like outside of public service, because I gave my life to this,” he said. “I'm dedicated to what I did.”

Federal agencies have not released data on firings by state. But in a state where the federal government owns more than 80 percent of the land, job cuts coupled with the federal hiring freeze implemented by President Donald Trump could lead to a slowdown of services everywhere from wildfire management to veterans’ hospitals to nuclear research.

‘Based on your performance’

Probationary federal employees are civilians typically in the first one to two years of their roles, who have a lower level of labor protections — they can be easily fired, as the Trump administration has demonstrated, without severance or notice. The status applies to workers in their first roles with the federal government, people who have recently been promoted or those who have changed agencies.

While exact data on the firings is unclear, there were about 220,000 probationary employees in the federal government at this point last year.

The mass firings were part of Trump and Elon Musk’s mission to cut the size of the federal workforce. Other measures have included making resignation offers across the entire federal workforce — which the Office of Personnel Management said 75,000 workers took — as well as implementing a hiring freeze. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is also going department by department making broader cuts.

Federal workforce data shows that in May 2024, Nevada was home to nearly 14,000 civilian federal employees. About half work at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs; the next biggest employers are the Department of the Interior, the Air Force and the Department of Agriculture. There were nearly 1,475 employees with less than a year in their current roles, and an additional 2,270 employees who had between one and two years of service.

These employees range from social workers at veterans’ hospitals in Las Vegas and Reno, nuclear weapons researchers at the Nevada National Security Site and wildfire and fuels management workers at the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.

“Political suicide”

Zach Jones was, until Feb. 13, a soil conservation technician at the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a subagency within the Department of Agriculture. 

Jones, who moved to Carson City from Montana when he got the Minden-based job in September, was part of a team that inventoried farmer and rancher concerns in the state, typically related to irrigation. The NRCS typically studies farmers’ soil challenges and then pays them to implement solutions that improve conservation. For Jones, this often involved mapmaking or going into the field to assess the condition of various Northern Nevada pastures.

Jones, 29, was worried about his status as a probationary employee but was reassured by higher-ups that political realities meant he would survive any downsizing.

“Everybody was like, ‘Oh yeah, you'll be fine,’” he said. “We work with farmers. It would be political suicide for the Republicans to try to cut their assistance programs or make it terrible.”

But Jones still received a termination notice Feb. 13 stating that “based on your performance … you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.” 

He saw the email on the morning of Feb. 14 — neither his boss nor the Nevada director of the NRCS knew it was coming, he said, and were upset by it. An employee of less than six months, Jones had not even been at NRCS long enough to have a performance review and had only gotten positive feedback from his supervisors.

Jones has tried to get information from human resources about information he needs to apply for unemployment — such as if he will get paid for remaining vacation days — but has not been able to get any answers.

A passionate conservationist, Jones wants to keep working in the field — but he doesn’t expect to be rehired anywhere in the federal government and is concerned about his ability to stay in Northern Nevada.

“I'm trying to find some things locally,” he said. “But there's not that many jobs that I'm seeing where I wouldn't have to move. Things are a little unclear as to what my future will be.”

Impacts on service

Part of the frustration for Nevada lawmakers is the lack of available data. Nevada Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen have sent letters to agency heads at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service requesting data on the number of terminations and job descriptions for each terminated employee in Nevada, but have yet to receive answers.

In an interview, Cortez Masto said that Lehman Caves inside Great Basin National Park in White Pine County has had to close due to job cuts and that she’s heard of service challenges at the Social Security Administration and the National Park Service. She’s worried about increased wait times for medical care and delays in processing paperwork at VA centers in Nevada.

And at Great Basin National Park — the only national park in the state — 20 percent of staff, or five rangers, have been let go, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Cortez Masto said she agrees with the need to cut waste in the government, but that the process has been haphazard.

“The way that this administration and Elon Musk are going about it is just burning down the house [and] having a devastating impact — not only on the employees that they're letting go, but on the services that are essential to states like Nevada, that are going to be harmful to Nevadans in the long term,” she said.

Wagstaff and Jones attested to her concerns. Wagstaff said when he was hired, the VA hospital needed more personnel to meet its day-to-day needs. The team had only recently hired enough people to meet its operational needs. Now, between the hiring freeze and layoffs of him and others, buyouts and potential further cuts coming, Wagstaff predicted that the hospital will move forward as if on an “operational pause.”

“That doesn’t just impact care,” Wagstaff said. “That impacts everybody across the board.”

Jones said NRCS in Nevada was already experiencing backlogs because of a shortage of engineers — and had recently hired several, meaning they would be probationary employees and likely let go. The agency had a contract with a resource conservation district whose engineer would design irrigation structures and pipes, but it had been cancelled in the past month. On top of that, numerous farmers had signed installation contracts funded by the Inflation Reduction Act — whose payments the Trump administration has indefinitely frozen. 

“The wait to have projects designed by engineers is definitely going to be much longer,” Jones said.

Caught in the political crossfire, Wagstaff said he understands the ups and downs of working in an agency subject to the whims of politicians — he was active-duty military during the 2013 budget sequestration and experienced downsizing during the first Trump administration.

But the mass firings without any precision or warning are unprecedented in his government career.

“I’ve never seen it operated on that magnitude,” Wagstaff said. “Everything I’ve seen in my lifetime, we know [when] something's getting ready to happen. Guidance is put out — phases, FAQs, all that stuff comes with it. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”