I’m a reporter in Northern Virginia during one of the biggest cuts to federal jobs in modern history. You’d think it’d be easy to find laid off federal workers ready to tell their stories.
The truth is, I haven’t been able to track down as many as I would have liked. Partly because I could always be doing more to pound the pavement, but also because some laid off federal workers are understandably reluctant to speak out.
Not so for Colleen Jones, an Alexandria resident and former twenty-year employee of the now dissolved US Agency for International Development who lives in Alexandria.
Jones, a US Coast Guard veteran and mother of three, told me in an interview this week that getting laid off was devastating and “basically a gut punch.” She talked about the grueling stress of looking for a new job after losing health insurance that supported her 10-year-old son, who is autistic and has severe special needs.
Luckily for Jones, she found a way to turn her anger into something productive by volunteering for the campaign of Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for Virginia governor.
“I was so excited to support a candidate for Virginia’s governor who is committed to protecting and supporting all of the Virginians that are impacted by these attacks on federal employees,” Jones said.
Jones is taking part in a new push by the Democratic Party of Virginia to call out Republicans, specifically gubernatorial nominee Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, for downplaying the harm of the Trump administration’s layoffs of federal workers.
Earle-Sears and some of her fellow Republicans have somehow struggled to show much compassion for people like Jones. When a CNN anchor in August pushed Earle-Sears to comment on the federal job cuts, she said she wanted to “talk about real issues.”
Democrats have dubbed their latest effort the “Real Issues” Tour, and plan to hold a series of events around the state.
