Kansas City federal employee speaks on anxiety, confusion at VA

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - ‘Please reply to this email with approximately 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week’ was a line in an email sent to all federal employees last week, Elon Musk later taking to social media saying employees that do not respond to the email by the Monday 11:59 p.m. EST deadline could lose their jobs.

The Trump istration later told agencies employees do not have to respond to the email, but it left many scared and confused.

An employee who has worked at the VA for years spoke anonymously to KCTV5 about the uneasy feelings and anxiety amongst his colleagues.

“Everyone is very scared and nervous,” said the employee. “Are we going to have jobs? How are we going to pay for our bills. It’s harrowing. It’s chaotic. It’s unfortunate because we are in a hospital. It’s a chaotic setting to begin with. When you start introducing more chaos to that setting, it just makes it worse. We are all tired. You’ve read that people in the healthcare field are burnt out and more tired and we need more .

“We’re just getting beat on every day. Every day it just feels like there is no respite in sight for us.”

This employee says he started working at the VA because he has a comion for helping veterans and has many family who currently or previously served.

“I could not think of a better place to work,” said the employee.

But he says the last month has been ‘terrible’, especially as the VA was told to already reduce their staffing to pre-COVID numbers.

“It’s insane,” said the employee. “Now we have less numbers than before and we are being told every single day that we are worthless, that we don’t care, that we just sit around and don’t work. It’s very tough. We have so many people that are unsure. Are we going to get fired tomorrow? There are these things that are happening where we are just an afterthought. We don’t feel like people. We feel like we are nothing to them.”

He says probationary employees have already been fired, whether they had recently started working there or had been promoted, some for the quality of their work.

“The message being sent out that these were underperforming employees is not 100% accurate,” said the employee.

He added there was a lack of dignity in the way they were let go.

“They are just showing up to work and their cards to get into the building don’t work,” said the employee.

READ MORE: At least 100 IRS workers laid off in Kansas City metro Thursday, more cuts possible

It’s led many to question as they show up for their shift if they still have their jobs as communication has been minimal. Then last week, all federal employees received an email requesting they respond with what they did last week.

“My first thought was how are they even going to review this information?” said the employee. “That’s an insane thing. Then I started to get skeptical. Were they going to be using AI, which isn’t very reliable. Why are they tracking this information? Are they trying to understand? There was no context provided for why they wanted this information and so I was fearful. How am I supposed to answer that question? My job can’t be broken down into 5 bullet points, it’s too complex for that.”

He said they, as an organization, were encouraged to respond to the email by the Secretary of the VA, so he did respond.

“It’s just so belittling,” said the employee. “It’s very hard. How is this helping? That’s the big thing. I can understand if we have someone from the outside wanting to learn more about what we do or trying to understand how they can us. After I clicked that send button, it just felt like you were digging your own grave. Like every communication we’re getting from this group feels like we are incriminating ourselves almost. That we’re doing something wrong, and we have to justify what we did.”

“Where I work, just in my area, most of us have had the top scores you can get on your performance appraisals. That’s a difficult thing to do in the government. To then be belittled and told that we hang out, take naps, and don’t work is a bummer. It undermines all the hard work that we do. I know so many people that work more than 40 hours a week that are there because they care about what they do. So sending that email just felt like we’re complicit in the things that are happening.”

The employee told KCTV5 the people that are going to be hurt the most with this are the approximately 55,000 veterans they serve.

“What we’re here for; it’s a very selfless thing,” said the employee. “We’re here to take care of veterans, It’s not the deep state, there’s no conspiracy. We want people to have a good quality of life and have some dignity in their lives. It’s become more of a distraction than anything, but we just keep ironing through the best we can.”

He added at the end of the day they are real people being affected by these changes. He says he s reducing waste in the government, but cutting jobs and to the VA doesn’t accomplish that.

“There’s great utility in what we do,” said the employee. “It’s not a money-making endeavor. It’s to provide the quality of life that we all deserve. What I would want the DOGE people to understand, or at least hear, is that we reducing waste. We don’t want fraud, waste, and abuse. We are very adamant on trying to drive that stuff down and reduce it as much as much as possible, but removing our , removing our help and staff does not help that. It’s not conducive to decreasing waste. If anything, it’s going to increase our workloads and make our jobs even harder than they need to be.”

Copyright 2025 KCTV. All rights reserved.