After he applied to his 599th job, John Burg stopped counting.

Burg was laid off as a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development in January 2025, after a decades-long career that took him to Thailand, Kosovo and El Salvador. He was one of more than 300,000 federal workers and contractors whose jobs were eliminated by the Department of Government Efficiency.

One year, one massive spreadsheet of job leads and only a handful of interviews later, Burg has returned to the job he had in college, doing carpentry jobs for his Takoma Park neighborhood, just outside of Washington.

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“A lot of licensed contractors won’t do work for less than $60 because it doesn’t fit their economy of scale. That’s my bread and butter,” he said. “Little old ladies, they need lightbulbs changed. I do stuff like that as well.”

He’s built his business to include some larger jobs, like a neighbor’s porch renovation, but is making just 15% of his previous salary.

“I feel more connected to my local community than ever. More disconnected from my financial goals,” he said.

And he’s not alone. NBC News spoke with thirteen former federal employees and contractors who were laid off during the DOGE job cuts or took the “Fork in the Road” buyout offered by Elon Musk. Seven are unemployed, two are re-employed but making far less than they previously did, two have side hustles and four have moved to find work.

WellFed, an organization that supports former federal workers, estimates just 25% of their members have found new jobs. One Aid, an organization of former USAID workers and their implementing partners, estimates at least 50% of their membership is still unemployed.

“Laid-off workers are now moving into a category that is long-term unemployment. The unemployment checks have stopped. They’re having trouble with healthcare,” said WellFed co-founder and program director Rebecca Ferguson-Ondrey, who herself lost her job at the Administration for Children and Families almost a year ago. 

In the Washington, D.C. region, where almost 10% of the population works directly for the federal government, and many more for federal contractors, these job losses were keenly felt.

“It‘s very challenging to translate some of those skill sets and that public sector experience into the private sector,” said Catherine Baker, a former employee at a USAID implementing partner and the Managing Director for Strategic Partnerships and Communications at OneAID.

Even then, she said, “We just aren’t creating enough jobs as a nation, and certainly in the larger D.C. metro region, to absorb that workforce into the private sector.”

David Harbourt lost his job as the lead safety and occupational health manager at the Food and Drug Administration Center for Veterinary Medicine in Maryland last year. Now, he commutes from New Market, Maryland, to Kansas two weeks per month, working as a consultant. “The job market, particularly in Maryland, is unforgiving now.... There’s a stigma being a former Fed,” he said, echoing a sentiment shared by other former federal employees. “And that affects your marketability.”

While he’s away, his wife balances working full-time and caring for their two children.

“When you’re parents, you usually work as a unit,” he said. “But when you lose that again, now it falls all on one individual— who has a full-time job, who has to deal with your own stresses at work like any other American.”

Long periods away from home have also weighed on Harbourt.

“My dad used to travel a lot for work ... when he was first starting out, and he always talked about how it is something that really affected him, because he missed being away from his family,” he said. “And that was always something that’s stuck with me and something I wanted to avoid, if at all costs. But unfortunately, because of the nature of landscape these days, we all have to kind of take our opportunities when they come around.”

Many of the former federal employees who spoke to NBC News said working in public service felt like a calling. Months of unsuccessful job applications have chipped away at their mental health.

“It’s tough. It’s tough. And depression is something that is a constant thing to avoid or do battle with and try not to fall into,” Burg said, taking a break from installing board and bead paneling on a neighbor’s porch. “Balancing on ladders with a nail gun and holding lumber up with one hand and a nail gun in the other, there’s really no time or opportunity to be depressed. You really have to stay focused and just get work done.”

Bree Danner found out she’d lost her job at the Centers for Disease Control in early 2025 while traveling to Indianapolis to say goodbye to her dying grandmother. She’d worked various jobs at the agency for nine years before finally securing a permanent position in overdose prevention in August 2024. She was let go as a probationary employee six months later.

Danner says being fired damaged her “feelings of self-worth as a professional.”

“I need work that feels mission-driven and feels meaningful to me and is aligned with my values,” Danner said. “I’m passionate about service and helping others.”

Danner spent the past seven months focusing on being a foster parent for an immunocompromised pre-teen at her home in Atlanta. She’s spent her savings and severance and has racked up credit card debt.

Other federal workers have struggled to access healthcare and housing after losing their jobs.

Becky, who declined to share her last name because she is worried that speaking out may negatively affect her as she applies for jobs, moved back to her hometown in Kentucky after losing her job at the Center for Drug Research and Evaluation. The cost of living is lower, but she took a big pay cut.

“I felt like it was the only feasible, reasonable option for myself and my daughter,” she said, adding that she’s a single parent. “I’m trying to make the best of it and trying to get my daughter to make the best of it, but I do feel like I would rather be in the D.C. area.”

Becky lost her job in mid-July but didn’t receive confirmation of continued health coverage until November. During that time, Becky, who is diabetic, bought one month of more expensive coverage through the Affordable Care Act for herself and skipped doctors’ visits, her flu shot and A1C checks, she said. She was still billed for months of insurance she did not know she had.

In March, she became eligible for employer-sponsored health insurance, but her current job ends at the end of the school year.

“It’s still kind of a blow to … who you are,” she said. “I’ve been working all these years and contribute a lot and give a lot back to a place that I work and twice in a year I’ve lost a job.”

Her neighbors in Kentucky are sympathetic but largely support DOGE cuts to the federal government.

“They’ve been told that story, right, that the government, federal workers are lazy and they don’t do anything,” she said. “And I feel like the opposite is true. Not that the government can’t improve, not that we can’t be more efficient, but I feel like most— in fact, I would say, all of the federal workers that I have worked with, they take their oath very seriously,” she said.

“I’ve had a couple people say, ‘Well, it needed to happen.’ Well, did it? It hasn’t made the government more efficient,” she added. “It hasn’t saved the government money.”