Caitlin Cross-Barnet had struggled with depression, and now her husband, Mike, found her on their narrow, third-floor fire escape. As he tried to coax her back in, she replied: “It’s not high enough to jump.”

On the 26th day of Trump’s term, Richard Midgette, 28, was fired from his IT job at Yellowstone National Park. He drove to the only bridge in his town, stopping just past its edge. From the car, he listened to the rushing of the water and, for the first time, contemplated whether to end his life.

On the 30th day of Trump’s term, Monique Lockett, 53, tried to block out the stress. The U.S. DOGE Service was demanding access to sensitive databases she worked on at the Social Security Administration. Her top boss had just been forced to resign, and rumors of layoffs were brewing. Monique settled into her cubicle just before 8 a.m., then slumped to the floor.

When Trump took office in January, 2.4 million people worked for the federal government, making it America’s largest employer. In four months, Trump and a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk have hacked off chunks of government in the name of efficiency, with tactics rarely seen in public or private industry. The cuts so far represent just 6 percent of the federal workforce, but they have effectively wiped out entire departments and agencies, such as AmeriCorps and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was slashed 85 percent; the Education Department was cut in half.

Some have found themselves fired, rehired, then let go again. Many have been ridiculed as “lazy” and “corrupt.” They’ve been locked out of offices by police, fired for political “disloyalty,” and told to check their email to see if they still draw a paycheck.

In interviews, more than 30 former and current federal workers told The Washington Post that the chaos and mass firings had left them feeling devalued, demoralized and scared for themselves and the country. Many described problems they’d never experienced before: insomnia, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts. Others with a history of mental struggles said they’d found themselves pushed into terrifying territory.

In response, White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said, “President Trump wants all Americans to thrive under his administration, and he has done more than any president to end the chronic disease crisis in our country.” She added, “It is an honor, not a right, to serve your country in a taxpayer-funded position, and workers unaligned with the American people’s agenda can take part in the growing private sector.”

Trump has blamed federal workers for “destroying this country.” He and his officials have vowed to eliminate employees promoting diversity, to force those who “aren’t doing their job” back to offices five days a week, and to slash $1 trillion from the federal budget — a still-distant goal, even with the layoffs. And more hits may be coming: Republicans in Congress are proposing to save $50 billion by forcing government workers to pay more into retirement benefits while shrinking the value of those benefits.

Many workers said they believe cruelty is part of the plan.

In a 2023 recording surfaced by ProPublica, Trump budget director Russell Vought said, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. 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.”

Vought, who was giving a private speech for a pro-Trump think tank, concluded: “We want to put them in trauma.”

Before her husband found her on the fire escape that chilly morning, Caitlin, 55, had spent 12 years working for the federal government.

She studied creative writing in college and graduate school and took a job in 1994 teaching at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles — an elite private school attended by children of Hollywood executives. But the work felt like a betrayal of her values. Instead of fighting inequality, she told friends, she was perpetuating it.

So, at 35, Caitlin quit and moved with her husband and children to Baltimore to study sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She drove around with bags of new socks in her trunk for people on her commute who were homeless.

She was hired in 2012 by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in Baltimore. Her job was wonky, even by government standards — testing tiny changes to Medicaid to yield better patient outcomes and save taxpayer money. But Caitlin told her friends that those tiny adjustments, especially in maternal health, could save lives.

Caitlin used data to show that birth centers could lower costs and yield higher birth weights and fewer ER visits for pregnant women on Medicaid, including minorities. She oversaw a government-funded program to help pregnant mothers addicted to opioids.

Within days of Trump’s second inauguration, the government was removing gender and minority health data from its websites. “All the progress she worked for, suddenly it felt like it was unraveling,” said one co-worker, who, like many federal employees in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

The cuts were not the only reason for her despair. Caitlin was recovering from a difficult hysterectomy. Family problems had recently taken a toll. She had struggled with depression on and off for years, but had never attempted suicide. As the threats to her job increased, however, so did her distress.

Along with more than 2 million other federal workers, she received the Jan. 28 “Fork in the Road” email, encouraging her to quit and warning that she could be fired. It worried her, but she decided against the buyout. She and other workers were warned they’d be disciplined if they didn’t turn in colleagues who continued work on diversity and equity programs despite a presidential order to stop.

“That one hit her especially hard because it was trying to turn her co-workers against her,” said Emily Cross, one of Caitlin and Mike’s three children.

To reach Caitlin that day on the fire escape, Mike folded his body out the bathroom window. He squeezed down next to her on the black metal grating and told her, “We can get you help.”

He guided her back inside, and soon after, he and Emily convened an emergency meeting with Caitlin’s psychiatrist. They persuaded her to check into a residential mental health facility in Virginia.

Before she entered the facility, Caitlin applied for several jobs outside government. The exhaustion and worry had become too much, she told her family. She wanted a way out.

By sheer numbers, America has rarely seen sudden job losses on this scale. In 1993, IBM fired 60,000 people, setting the all-time record for largest layoff. Since Trump took office, the government has pushed at least 130,000 people out of jobs — with more than 50,000 fired and 76,000 accepting buyouts, according to media reports. Additional reductions planned in coming weeks could double that total.

Roughly a third of the 30 workers who talked to The Post had been fired. The rest feared being laid off or reassigned — having to move to offices hundreds of miles from family or leave behind the people and missions to which they’d devoted their careers.

Some interviewed by The Post said they had joined the federal workforce for the stability and security of a government job. Many noted that they could earn more in the private sector. Almost all mentioned the chance to help others and make a difference.

They worked at 12 federal agencies and in more than a dozen states. One had spent more than 30 years in government; another only two weeks.

A manager in the Midwest for the Department of Veterans Affairs, forced in February to lay off probationary employees, said she kept scheduling emergency meetings with her psychiatrist, who increased her antidepression meds from 25 milligrams to 50 to 100.

“You spend every day worrying about those under you,” said the VA manager. “The depression now is worse than during my divorce, worse than when my mom died of cancer.”

Phone operators for the Veterans Crisis Line said they’d seen a rise in calls from federal employees and others worried about cuts to the VA.

With so many federal workers seeking help, Rosalyn Beroza, a therapist in the D.C. suburbs, convened a network of more than 60 counselors to provide free and low-cost therapy.

“To so many people, it feels targeted to injure and break them,” Beroza said. “With natural disasters, we have mental health workers helping people on scene. This one’s a man-made disaster, but it’s no less traumatizing.”

A National Institutes of Health employee in the South, worried for weeks that she’ll lose her job, said she’s checked her government benefits to calculate how much money her family would receive if she killed herself. She took the job several years ago because the stable hours and job security helped her manage bipolar disorder, a family affliction she inherited. But in recent weeks, suicidal thoughts have come back so strongly that she’s depended on a safety plan with her husband — limited medication in their house, no guns, and emergency contacts on speed dial.

“Federal workers aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet,” she said. “We’re real people with families who are hurting and, in the worst cases, dying. Why don’t people out there see that? Why doesn’t anyone care?”

On Feb. 14, Richard Midgette cleared out his desk at Yellowstone National Park headquarters. On the way home, he blasted indie rock music to drown out the sound of his own sobbing. The route home took him across the only bridge in Gardiner, Montana.

He had never suffered from depression or other mental problems, he said. But as he sat, newly unemployed, in his idling car just past the bridge, he was overwhelmed by dark thoughts.

He wondered how he would pay for a new apartment lease, his student loans and medicine for his Crohn’s disease. He’d worked at the park for only two months. He recalled the foolish pride he’d felt when he first put on a National Park Service uniform after besting 200 others for an IT job he had worked years to attain.

“I thought I was finally getting somewhere,” he said, “building a career and a life.”

He pulled into a gas station next to the bridge and considered calling his parents. His dad had voted for Trump, and for weeks had been cheering the president’s promises to purge the government.

Instead, he dialed Kat Brekken, 69, his boss from a previous job in park concessions. She immediately drove to the bridge and gave him a hug.

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told her.

They kept talking in her old Chevy Suburban until the sky grew dark and their faces were illuminated by the light of the gas station mini-mart.

Gradually, the suicidal impulse faded, replaced by fear, sadness and anger at the casual way he had been tossed out.

“I decided there’d be no greater failure than me throwing away my life,” he said. “It’s exactly what they want. I’m not going to give them that satisfaction.”

Last month, he was rehired only to be fired a second time — after courts ruled some of Trump’s layoffs illegal, then legal again.

“It’s like whiplash,” Midgette said. “I’ve given up on ever working for the federal government again, at least under this administration.”

For decades, researchers have studied the mental effects of such layoffs in the private sector.

In one oft-cited study, people ranked unemployment as more traumatic than being cheated on or going through a divorce. Even more than abruptly becoming blind or deaf.

Sudden job loss increases risk of suicide, depression and anxiety, studies show. Mass layoffs magnify that impact.

In 2011, economists examined a decade of data and found that mass layoffs resulted in an additional suicide for every 4,200 men and for every 7,100 women losing their jobs. Mass layoffs can devastate entire communities, they noted, fracturing social networks and creating pools of applicants fighting over limited jobs.

“We’re seeing it in the federal workforce,” said Sally Spencer-Thomas, a psychologist who has consulted on workplace suicide for Fortune 500 companies, first responders and health-care systems. “If you boil suicide down to its most common factors — a thwarted sense of belonging, feeling like a burden to others, having the mindset and means — that’s happening across government.”

One Trump administration tactic, made clear by Trump and Musk’s statements as well as their policies, is trying to make some workers so miserable that they quit. Experts on workplace mental health say it echoes a case in France two decades ago.

In 2004, leaders of a company then known as France Télécom wanted to cut 22,000 jobs but couldn’t outright fire many who had civil servant protections. Over several years, employees were demoted, reassigned to ill-suited jobs and forced to work far from families. “I’ll get people to leave one way or another,” the CEO reportedly told managers, “either through the window or the door.”

At least 35 employees killed themselves. Years later, the CEO and two executives were criminally convicted of “institutional moral harassment” in the deaths. Courts in France — which has some of the world’s strongest labor laws, including many that don’t exist in the U.S. — cited “a conscious scheme to worsen the work conditions.”

Suicide is a complex phenomenon, experts note, and teasing out the causes in any case is difficult. But research points to clear contributing factors: feelings of worthlessness, stress, lack of access to health care and insurance, and unemployment.

Some advocates are particularly concerned for veterans, who make up 30 percent of the federal workforce. Almost a third of all veterans already suffer from a service-connected physical or mental disability. Roughly 11 to 20 percent of those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. Many have training and access to firearms, which increases suicide risk.

“We are shattering people’s sense of mission, identity and value as human beings,” Spencer-Thomas said. “Those left behind by the layoffs are struggling with survivor’s guilt and this sense that their world is collapsing.”

The day he was inaugurated, Trump signed an order requiring federal workers to return to the office five days a week. Casting government employees as lazy, he predicted “a very substantial number of people will not show up to work.”

Social Security worker Monique Lockett, 53, rarely missed a day of work and didn’t intend to start. So she bought a new briefcase that rolled on wheels.

Into it went a keyboard and mouse, because Social Security’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland, lacked equipment for the droves of returning workers. She packed a heater, because the aging building was often cold. And a water bottle, because last year, inspectors found Legionella bacteria in the building’s pipes.

The job increasingly weighed on Monique, said her sister Neiksha Lockett, who shared a house with her.

With no basis, Trump and his lieutenants accused her agency of widespread fraud. They announced plans to cut thousands of workers from Social Security, already staffed at a 50-year low.

As many retired and took buyouts, Monique picked up the extra work, co-workers said. After long days at the office, she would collapse into her favorite armchair.

“I’ve hit my limit,” her sister recalled her saying, referring to demands from Trump appointees and members of the Department of Government Efficiency. “These people don’t know what they are doing.”

She worked with her agency’s most sensitive databases, containing the financial information of every taxpaying American. In recent days, DOGE engineers had demanded access to those databases. Acting commissioner Michelle King resisted; then on Feb. 16, King resigned.

On the morning of Feb. 18, Monique and others returned from the Presidents’ Day weekend to an office tense with news of King’s departure and rumors of more cuts.

Monique was at her cubicle on the third floor of headquarters when she collapsed, co-workers said. The medical examiner listed the cause of death as “hypertensive, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.” Monique’s family and many close co-workers blamed her heart attack on stress at work.

Monique had risk factors for heart disease, including obesity, high blood sugar and high cholesterol, according to her medical records. Two experts who reviewed her records at The Post’s request said in cases like hers, stress, uncertainty and tension at work can contribute to cardiac arrest.

“There is very good evidence that emotional upset can trigger acute and potentially even lethal heart problems,” said Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Duke University researchers in 2012 studied the work histories of more than 13,000 people and found that a single job loss raised a person’s risk of heart attack by 35 percent.

Her death in the middle of the office at a traumatic, pivotal moment left her family and co-workers shaken and angry.

“I’m angry because this didn’t need to happen,” one co-worker said. “She didn’t need to die.”

The last time the federal government massively shrank its workforce, President Bill Clinton was in office. Musk has likened his cuts to those reductions: “What @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s. The current Dem party has just gone so crazy far left that it isn’t recognizable anymore!”

But former officials say the 1990s “Reinventing Government” initiative was undertaken slowly and carefully, with bipartisan authorization from Congress. Over the span of seven years, the program eliminated roughly 400,000 federal jobs — a 17 percent cut — mostly through voluntary buyouts and attrition. Back then, the White House pushed back on painting federal workers as lazy.

“Most federal workers believe in service and could be making a lot more in the private sector,” Robert Reich, who was Clinton’s secretary of labor, said in a recent phone interview. “There’s a humane, rational way to do this. You don’t need to parade around a stage with a chainsaw.”

For weeks now, Vought’s quote about deliberately traumatizing workers has played over and over in the mind of one U.S. Forest Service biologist in California.

He first came across it on a sleepless night in January, scrolling on his phone and wondering if he’d lose his job. That night, he said, his heart began juddering, as if it were trying to escape his chest.

He recalled turning to his wife, a nurse, to say: “These people are going to f---ing kill me.”

Asked to comment on Vought’s quote, the White House sent a statement from an unnamed senior administration official: “What about the January 6 defendants and political prisoners who suffered real trauma and committed suicide over the harassment, bullying and imprisonment by bureaucrats who weaponized the government against them?”

For the biologist, the panic attacks soon were coming three times a day. He’d never thought much about mental health in his 15 years of federal service, but now he signed up for therapy and went on meds. He declined calls from his mother, he said, because he didn’t want to hear her praise Trump for streamlining government — and say that if her son didn’t like it, he could find another job.

One day, the biologist’s 9-year-old son came home from school with a question. Schoolmates had been talking about Musk and Trump, the boy said, and how they were going to fire the stupidest workers.

“Dad,” he asked, “why would they want to fire you?”

Two weeks after her husband talked her off the fire escape, Caitlin checked into a mental health facility in Fairfax County, Virginia. She had no cellphone or laptop, and could talk to family only using the facility’s phone. In daily calls to her husband, she pressed for updates from her work, the latest layoffs and program cuts.

“I tried not to give her too much information that was upsetting,” Mike said.

Two weeks into her stay, on Feb. 27, the facility’s staff set up a computer for her. A nonprofit wanted to interview Caitlin for a job advocating for Medicaid — the program she had worked to improve for 12 years. That same week, House Republicans had voted for an $880 billion budget cut that would require severe reductions to Medicaid — a scenario Caitlin had long feared.

That night, on a call with her husband, Caitlin remained in good spirits. The job interview had gone well. She told Mike she loved him and missed him.

But when she called the next morning, Caitlin was inconsolable.

“I’m having a really bad day,” she told him.

Mike tried to reassure her, but Caitlin kept saying, “I’m not enough. I’m not good enough.”

Over the years, in her darkest moments, Caitlin had often told him she felt she didn’t measure up. She never felt adequate as a daughter, as a wife and mother, or as a researcher.

“Of course you’re enough,” Mike said over the phone. “You do so much. … You’re more than enough.”

“You’re enough for me,” he tried to tell her. But soon after, she hung up.

The next call Mike received, 98 minutes later, was from a hospital in Virginia. He later learned that the mental health facility had staff checking on Caitlin every 15 minutes, but she saw an opening between checkups and killed herself.

Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services, where Caitlin had worked, laid off more than 10,000 workers. That came in addition to 10,000 lost to buyouts or retirement — a 24 percent total reduction. Caitlin’s unit, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, cut 300 jobs. In recent days, her HHS colleagues in D.C. and Maryland were forced to line up outside their offices to find out if they still had a job by swiping their badges at the entrance.

In a statement, an HHS spokesperson said, “HHS takes any loss of life or distress among our employees seriously, and our focus remains on providing the support and resources necessary to ensure their well-being.”

The week Caitlin died, one of her grieving colleagues at HHS found out that her husband, a federal contractor, was losing his job.

By week’s end, the colleague couldn’t sleep, struggled with suicidal thoughts and felt as if she were drowning in a pool of rising black water. “You have to get up,” she chided herself when the alarm went off at 6:30 a.m.

“You have to take the kids to school,” she said an hour later.

“You have to work,” she said as she sat down at the office, “to keep a roof over their heads.”

Meanwhile, Caitlin’s husband, Mike — who’d spent decades editing for newspapers in Los Angeles and Baltimore — worked hard on her eulogy, but then wondered after her burial if he should have been more emotional.

In their 34 years together, Caitlin had often been the spontaneous idealist. He was the steady one who planned everything.

They’d been planning a trip to Colombia to bird-watch. And India, for their son’s wedding celebration. And Africa for a safari. They had visited 48 states and were missing only North and South Dakota.

After her death, Mike avoided the headlines that had consumed Caitlin in her final weeks.

“What’s happening to our country?” she would often ask him about Trump’s latest orders and the future of American democracy. “What are we going to do about it?”

These days, the questions haunting Mike are smaller in scale. He wonders how to honor his wife’s work, how to grieve for her without getting lost in the same despair.

Sitting at night in their empty rowhouse, he asks, “What am I going to do without her?”

Aaron Schaffer and Alice Crites contributed to this report. To reconstruct the last days of Caitlin Cross-Barnet and Monique Lockett, the reporters interviewed more than 20 relatives, co-workers and friends and reviewed phone records, police reports, medical records and death certificates. The Post spoke to Kat Brekken to corroborate the scene at the bridge.