Ionly wanted to serve my country. Now I’m worried about my family going hungry.

I was selected for a highly competitive State Department Information Technology (IT) fellowship in 2024 — a program that included investing in my graduate degree. I was one of a few Black participants selected, and I quit two good-paying cybersecurity jobs to focus on the fellowship.

With the government’s help, I received my Master’s Degree, finished my training, and completed the painstaking process to obtain top-secret clearance. The government’s investment in me had paid off — and I was about to give back with my employment in public service.

Then, abruptly, I received an email that I was being dismissed. It gave some vague reference to my job performance, but completely without evidence. My outstanding grades, performance, and top-secret clearance demonstrated excellent job performance.

This was part of Elon Musk and DOGE’s efforts to eliminate federal jobs, ostensibly to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse.” But by speciously firing me just as I’d been cleared for service, Musk and DOGE utterly wasted the investment the government made in my education and training.

It made no sense at all — and of course it didn’t stop with me. I’m just one of the 1,350 State Department employees to have been dismissed through the summer. All told, this administration has stated it wants to eliminate at least 700,000 federal public service jobs.

When I was inexplicably dismissed, my family’s financial well-being took a nosedive. The opportunities I was qualified for proved impossible to find — and I was turned away from other jobs because I was overqualified for them.

Before losing my hard-won State Department fellowship, I hadn’t sought government assistance. But after being let go, I turned to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to feed my family. And I turned to Medicaid for health care, during my pregnancy.

When the federal government shut down and President Trump tried to cancel or claw back SNAP payments, my ability to feed my children shut down too. I had to rely on credit cards for groceries.

Even with the government now reopened and SNAP funds again available, the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” cuts SNAP by a historic 20 percent — and those cuts are now starting to go into effect. Thanks to this bill, around 2.4 million recipients will lose benefits in any given month, and what benefits people do get will be smaller.

Further, the bill imposes new work requirements despite the fact that 91 percent of families on SNAP that have working-age, non-disabled adults and children are already working. The USDA determined that work requirements have no effect on increasing employment among SNAP recipients.

Finally, the Trump administration has just announced that it will require all SNAP recipients like me to reapply for benefits — even though many of us are already required to reapply every six months. The Congressional Research Service has found that SNAP fraud is rare, so requirements like these only create more bureaucracy and push eligible families off the critical program.

In short, the administration has been impacting critical public service jobs like mine and shredding the social safety net that families — now including mine as well — rely on. The claims of fighting “waste, fraud, and abuse” simply don’t track. Instead, they’re just hurting public servants like me, along with our families and children.

I may have lost my federal opportunity, but I can still serve my country by advocating for better. We need our leaders to protect our investments in public services and our social safety net.

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Lousindy Mitton is a Cybersecurity professional

and RESULTS Fellow from Hollywood, Florida.

This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.