Jeannie Klein-Gordon spent more than 11 years getting to a permanent position with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Her time at the agency ended after a little over a year.
Klein-Gordon is one of thousands of probationary employees across a swath of government agencies impacted by the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce.
Before landing a job at the Peoria National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research (NCAUR), also known as the Peoria Ag Lab, Klein-Gordon spent four years as an undergraduate in her home state at Oregon State University.
There she transformed a childhood spent on a dairy farm into a respect for farmers and interest in biology and horticulture. Specifically, she became interested in plant pathology, the study of plant diseases. Klein-Gordon finished out her undergrad years assisting with research at the USDA Agricultural Research Services (ARS) in Oregon.
“I studied biological control of apple and pear trees for fire blight, which is a disease that will completely destroy, run through orchards and just kill trees,” she said. “And I knew while I was doing undergrad, that I really wanted to go forward through my Ph.D.”
Klein-Gordon spent five years on doctoral work at the University of Florida, before moving to Michigan State University for two shorter post-doctoral stints. From there, Klein-Gordon applied to a position as a research plant pathologist at the Ag Lab in Peoria.
“I really enjoyed USDA ARS in my time as an undergrad. I really appreciated the environment there,” said Klein-Gordon. “Everybody was super nice, very passionate about science and agriculture and helping growers.”
After an approximately seven-month hiring process, Klein-Gordon moved from Michigan to Peoria in December 2023. She brought her family with her.
Klein-Gordon set to work on research projects.
Her recent work focused on Red Crown Rot, a disease that appeared in Illinois in 2018 and presents a significant threat to the state’s multibillion-dollar soybean industry. The team’s experiments looked to develop products for farmers to fight the disease.
That ended Thursday, Feb. 13, when Klein-Gordon’s employment was terminated by email at 10:05 p.m. She was 15 months into a standard three-year probationary period for government scientists.
The Workforce Optimization Initiative
The “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) Workforce Optimization Initiative” is an executive order issued Feb. 11. It outlines changes to create a “critical transformation of the Federal Bureaucracy.”
Early reports show layoffs have mainly focused on probationary employees, which includes recent hires and those promoted or moved to new positions. Affected agencies include the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.
Bri Walker is another former probationary employee of the Peoria Ag Lab.
Walker held an administrative position at the Ag Lab as secretary of office automation, which she describes as an older title for what is now referred to as an executive assistant. Her duties included scheduling appointments for the center’s director, coordinating interbuilding communication, taking notes at leadership meetings, giving tours and organizing stakeholder events with farmers and agriculture industry representatives.
“You know, there’s sort of a very old joke that behind every great man is his secretary furiously scribbling,” said Walker. “I don’t think we have that dynamic necessarily anymore, but it’s true that admins make the world go round, paperwork has to get done.”
Walker came from Los Angeles, where she worked an administration job for a homeowners’ association of 800 luxury estates. She says the neighborhood was home to “D-list and C-list” celebrities. Walker learned about the job opportunity at the Ag Lab following an unrelated move to Peoria in 2021.
“I read through [the listing] and I was like, ‘Oh, this is literally my job, this is literally what I do,’” she said. “But for a much better cause than a bunch of people who are sniping at each other over the color of their house paint.”
Walker interviewed in March 2024 and started the following month.
Her employment was terminated by email on Thursday, Feb. 13, at 11:02 p.m. She was 10 months into a one-year probationary period.
The leadup to layoffs
Walker and Klein-Gordon were not completely blindsided by their dismissal.
The terminations followed months of concerning emails from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, or OPM.
In late January, both employees received the widely reported-on “Fork in the Road” email, named after its subject line. The email offered a majority of federal workers an opportunity to resign from their jobs and go on leave with pay through September in what was called the “Deferred Resignation Program.”
Walker says reactions among Ag Lab employees ranged from skepticism to worries the early OPM emails were phishing scams.
“Then, finally a clarification from an email address we were used to with the official branding said ‘please respond to these emails. They are official,’” she said. “That was when we realized something was weird and different about this admin change.”
Walker and Klein-Gordon declined to take the “Fork in the Road” offer. So did many of their coworkers. Walker says the only people she knows who did bundled the offer into their early retirement options.
“I spent 11 and a half years getting to this position and I got the position of my dreams,” said Klein-Gordon. “This is my dream job. I wasn’t going to be talked out of it.”
On Feb. 3, 2025, probationary employees at the Ag Lab received another email. Walker says this email informed the workers they had been identified as probationary and included an attachment re-outlining the Fork in the Road offer.
“[Probationary employees] do not have very many legal protections or appeal protections as to whether or not they can be terminated,” said Ethan Roberts, union president of the Local 3247 American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 80 Ag Lab employees. “They can’t be terminated without cause, but their protections are not the same as a permanent government employee.”
Roberts, Klein-Gordon and Walker do not know for certain how many probationary employees were impacted by the layoffs. At the time of writing, Roberts knows of 12 union employees and approximately 20 total employees. That estimate represents more than 10% of 168 staff employed by the Peoria Ag Lab before layoffs began.
Roberts thinks it’s likely all probationary employees were fired and reductions in senior staff are on the way.
The letter that probationary employees received on the evening of Feb. 13 read in part: “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.”
All three say there was a meeting at the Ag Lab on the afternoon of Feb. 13, warning them these emails might be coming.
“But nobody knew for sure whether it was going to come. And so we were like ‘OK, refresh your email. Okay, let’s refresh your email,’” said Klein-Gordon. “And it hit people at different times. And so I was like, ‘Oh, did you get one? Oh, did you get one?’”
Probationary employees, Klein-Gordon said, spent the night trying to determine where they stood in the line for termination.
Roberts says the notifications came from the Research, Economics and Education (REE) Division, several rungs up the organizational ladder of the USDA. He argues the people sending the emails could have no clear picture of the performance of the employees they were dismissing.
Both Klein-Gordon and Walker told WCBU recent performance reviews performed by supervisors at the lab had gone well.
“All of my performance reviews were — we have a binary system, so it’s either fully successful or not,” said Walker. “All of my performance reviews were fully successful and I received two monetary awards for my performance in my first eight months.”
Challenges of running a lab after a workforce reduction
Union President Ethan Roberts says it’s certain operations at the Peoria facility will be impacted by the layoffs. The Ag Lab, notable for discovering how to mass produce penicillin, is also involved in making corn more disease resistant, improving food quality and value and researching the impact of cover crops on overall crop health.
“It’s devastating because these were all new employees. We’re basically losing our future here.” he said. “This was everybody that was replacing retirees. This was everybody starting new projects. It has absolutely destroyed morale here. We feel like we are just going through the motions and doing our job and there’s really not a lot to look forward to.”
For example, Jeannie Klein-Gordon was filling a role that had been vacated by a retiree five years ago. She was preparing to start an experiment when she was laid off. Klein-Gordon had hammered out plans with team members to monitor the experiment over the weekend.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to that data, that program, nobody knows,” said Klein-Gordon. “We’re all caught off guard.”
Bri Walker says the situation is even further complicated by an aversion to putting plans in writing at the facility over the last several months.
On Friday, Feb. 14, when both were given access to the building to clean out their things and say goodbye, Walker frantically completed the work she still could. She uploaded information for coworkers to the cloud over the length of an entire workday.
“My biggest concern, honestly, was just the people who are getting left behind and stuck with even more work,” Walker said. “Our building was already operating on shortages of staff from the previous Trump administration.”
Officials in the Trump administration often point to saving money, eliminating waste and ending fraudulent spending as objectives of the workforce reductions. Walker and Klein-Gordon say they were provided no further reasoning for their layoffs beyond performance.
They argue it’s difficult to see how the dismissals could improve efficiency.
“If they recently got a new technician, well, they just lost their technician. And all that training that they put in. All that time to hire, and now there’s a hiring freeze, so they can’t even hire a new position.” said Klein-Gordon. “You can get really strict on moving people. You can move people around and that’s a whole process as well. And when you get into that, that’s inefficient as well, right?”
Roberts believes the entire strategy of eliminating probationary employees is illegal and circumventing the required processes for a governmental workforce reduction.
“Reductions in Force [RIFs] are a multi-month process. They’re very long, they’re very complicated and they’re very painful for everybody involved, both agency and the employees,” he said. “It is a multi-step, incredibly complex process that is meant to protect the employees and to accomplish the goal of the RIF, which is typically to reduce the budget to a certain amount.”
Roberts says the union is exploring all possibilities for addressing the situation and is calling on the public and elected officials to question the level of oversight applied to the layoffs.
In a response to questions from WCBU looking for more information on the scope of the firings and the estimated cost savings, the USDA issued a statement through a spokesperson. The statement emphasizes newly confirmed Secretary Brooke Rollins’ support of the measures taken:
“Secretary Rollins fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people. We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy. As part of this effort, USDA has released individuals in their probationary period of employment. Secretary Rollins is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.”
Administration at the Ag Lab did not respond to a request for comment from WCBU.
Klein-Gordon still feels very strongly about the value of the Ag Lab’s work and its mission.
“I don’t want to waste taxpayer dollars either. I think if you ask any ARS employee, nobody wants to do that. That’s not something that we go out to do,” she said. “We want to have an impact for our growers and then downstream, of course, whether it’s more downstream or directly, help just the general US population.”
Questioning their future in Peoria
There are still a lot of unknowns for Klein-Gordon. She says she isn’t certain when her benefits end, where her unemployment paperwork is, or what pay period her last check will cover.
There are difficult decisions to be made for her and her family.
“We thought this was going to be our ‘til retirement, between the two of us,” Klein-Gordon said. “We built a house here. We now have to think about, what do we want to do? Do we want to stay here?”
Greater Peoria Economic Development Council CEO Chris Setti says the Ag Lab was the largest federal employer in the Greater Peoria area as of last year. Other federal employers in the area include the Farm Service Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Social Security Administration.
“Whenever there is job loss, in either the private sector or public sector, there is an economic impact,” Setti said in a statement to WCBU. “First and foremost, it impacts the individual who might suddenly have their life upended. In the case of permanent layoffs, we are hopeful we can retain that talent in the region and help people find other jobs. But some people might have specialized skills that won’t find a match within the region.”
Klein-Gordon and Walker say they didn’t take a civil service job for the paycheck, noting that similar roles in commercial industries pay higher on average.
“I just hope that folks remember that the people who work for the federal government work in that position for the most part because they care about their communities and the people around them,” said Walker.
Klein-Gordon says the direct impact she had on farmers in her role was important to her.
“I have fulfilled, more than fulfilled, what I was minimally expected to do, and I put what I felt was my heart and soul into my job and serving stakeholders, serving our growers and their best interests and their needs,” she said. “And it is a slap in the face to be treated this way.”
As legal challenges mount against the mass firings, the Trump administration is preparing to layoff thousands of Internal Revenue Service employees later this week.
