Politics

From Dream Jobs in the US Forest Service to Unemployment, Meet 2 of Illinois’ Fired Federal Workers

Siobhan Peacy, a U.S. Forest Service interpretive specialist at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, got the call she’d been dreading on Monday — she was one of the tens of thousands of probationary employees fired by the federal government.

Peacy was probationary in name only, an 11-year employee at Midewin whose status reset when she took a new position in November 2023. But her decade of service didn’t count, so on Tuesday, she joined her fellow former co-workers — one-third of Midewin’s staff was fired between Feb. 14-17 — as they cleared out their cubicles and did their best to tie up loose ends.

Peacy called and emailed teachers, letting them know that the Mighty Acorns environmental education program she’d been providing to their students no longer existed.

“One teacher said, when she told her 9-year-olds, their faces changed from sad to angry,” Peacy told WTTW News.

The kids vowed to write letters to their senators, a sweet gesture but not the way Peacy wanted the students to interact with nature. There’s plenty of time later in life for protests and advocacy, she said. What she’d wanted to instill was passion and love.

She’d wanted them to conquer their fear of bugs and to marvel at the way seeds spread.

“When kids would say, ‘I wish we could be outside every day,’ that means we reached them,” said Peacy.

Emily Harvey, who ran the education department at Midewin, was also fired. Her call came on Saturday, despite colleagues’ reassurances that she was too good at her job to be let go for poor performance.

“In my gut, I knew. It doesn’t matter,” Harvey said.

‘Oh My God, It’s Happening’

The Midewin education team and some of their 2024 accomplishments. (Courtesy of Siobhan Peacy)

Harvey said she’d started receiving strange emails from the Office of Personnel Management (the federal government’s HR agency) immediately following the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

“The emails looked like spam, like hacked email,” she said.

Leading up to that point, she’d been more focused on what the new administration might mean for women’s reproductive rights, and thought the Department of Government Efficiency sounded like something that couldn’t actually exist.

But then came the offers of deferred resignation, and a colleague was given early retirement.

“It was this sickening feeling of, ‘Oh my god, it’s happening,’” Harvey said.

Those offers were followed by a steady stream of what Harvey called “daily insults” — emails from OPM like one that encouraged people to leave their low productivity jobs in the public sector for high productivity work in the corporate world.

“The overall message was, ‘You all are lazy and your work doesn’t matter,’” Harvey said, which wasn’t a sentiment she’d ever heard from people when interacting with the public.

“I was only ever met with appreciation for what we were doing,” she said. “I used to tell people, ‘I have the best job on this planet and I’m going to retire from this job.’"

It was a realistic goal. Her own grandmother had retired from the Forest Service after years spent at Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, and she never failed to tell Harvey how proud she was of her granddaughter’s job at Midewin.

“She’d say, ‘The government will take care of you.’ It’s been such a 180-degree smack in the face,” Harvey said.

She thought about her team, including Peacy, and the thousands of people they reached through events, guided hikes and other programs in 2024 — all free. She thought about the pride she felt in the solar eclipse viewing party Midewin hosted last April.

“Four hundred people showed up to the prairie. It was a really amazing feeling, experiencing that together,” Harvey said. “That’s what breaks my heart — we don’t get to do that anymore.”

In recent days, the Trump administration has attempted to rehire some of the employees it let go.

Harvey said she’d be torn if such an offer came her way.

“I would love to have my job back, but it’s terrifying, it’s so uncertain,” she said. “My heart still aches for those who are still there, in fight-or-flight mode every day. No one feels safe, everyone’s wondering who’s next.”

Peacy said she worries that in the absence of people like herself — whose job description was one part naturalist, one part educator, one part historian, one part ranger — public outreach efforts will all but disappear, and youngsters won’t receive the kind of exposure to Midewin that would spark a sense of connection and stewardship.

“They’re trying to shut that down in people, so they can take the land,” Peacy said.

Harvey likewise said that she feared the privatization of public lands might be the motivation for decimating staffing, like that at Midewin.

Gone, she said, are not only educational specialists such as herself and Peacy but a hydrologist, who tested the groundwater; restoration personnel conducting research on Midewin’s bison herd; fleet management; and building maintenance.

“There’s just not going to be people to get jobs done,” Harvey said. “Clearly these decisions are being made by people who don’t understand what we do.”

Like the tens of thousands of other out-of-work federal employees, the two women have more immediate pressing concerns, like scrambling to find health insurance. None of those fired received severance pay, Harvey said.

“We’re all left high and dry,” she said. "I think people don’t understand how serious and terrifying this is.”

Contact Patty Wetli: @pattywetli | (773) 509-5623 | [email protected]

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