Dominic Bossey is spending a lot of time in his Washington, D.C. studio apartment searching online job listings. The options are few in a city where 100,000 people have been laid off over the past two months.
“It’s a rough market,” he says.
The 23-year-old Aquebogue native is still processing the upheaval in his life since Jan. 20, when newly inaugurated President Donald Trump began signing executive orders.
He’d been working in a job he loved in the communications office in the Office of Personnel Management, an independent agency that functions as the human resources and personnel policy manager for the federal government. It also manages more than $1 trillion in assets and federal retirement, health and life insurance benefits for millions of current and former federal employees and their spouses, as well as sensitive data on millions of government employees.
Bossey was working with a team at OPM developing a modern, more efficient website to serve and manage the more than 2 million federal employees, in everything from vetting and credentialing, to workforce and benefits management. He was one of the people responsible for writing new content to replace old information that had not been updated for more than a decade on the agency’s “clunky old website.”
As the presidential transition drew to a close and Inauguration Day approached, Bossey and his colleagues were unaware that OPM was about to become the victim of what’s been described as a “hostile takeover” by DOGE, which gained full access to the agency’s massive database of restricted information about federal employees and anyone who’s ever applied for jobs in the federal government.
Back in their offices in the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building on Jan. 21 — Inauguration Day was the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday — OPM staff found that “the air changed overnight,” Bossey said.
An executive order signed Jan. 20 mandated a performance audit of all probationary employees.
Even though Bossey was a probationary employee — he’d been hired as a full-time employee about six months earlier, following his graduation with a master’s degree in public administration from Binghamton University — Bossey thought his job would be safe, since he was working on a team tasked with making OPM functions more efficient by utilizing updated technology and a faster, easier-to-use web platform.
About a week before Jan. 20, his team had launched a preview of the new OPM site they’d been working on for months.
On Jan. 21, he found that the new website had been turned off, without explanation. From conversations with his supervisors, Bossey said, he learned that the new administration wanted to “review every single thing on the new website to see if it had any ‘woke’ things on it.”
Very quickly, the office of the director was “moved down, kicked off that floor because he was a career position and not a political appointee, and they didn’t want him around the political appointees,” Bossey said.
“It was a very quick change into, kind of just like a fear mode,” he said. People were wondering, “like, what’s going to happen next?”
People at first thought some of the executive orders were “scare tactics,” Bossey said. They have since proven to be real tactics to remove people from the federal government, he said.
Every day, OPM employees would walk past protesters to enter their building, because DOGE was “more or less headquartered there” early on. “It was a very, very — I don’t know if I have the word for it, honestly, but toxic doesn’t feel like it explains it enough. It was a sad and on-edge workplace,” Bossey said.
After a few days went by, federal employees got the now-infamous “fork in the road” email from DOGE, informing them they could take a buyout and get paid until Sept. 30 or risk being terminated.
A federal district court judge on Feb. 6 paused the administration’s deferred resignation program and extended the pause on Feb. 10.
“I don’t actually know anyone who took the deferral,” Bossey said. “No one in the Office of Communications took it because we had thought we would just go right back to making the website. There was a lot of work ahead and we thought the business case for making a new, efficient website was quite strong, and we wouldn’t really encounter any bumps in the road, other than, you know, gutting the DEI stuff that might have been on the new website.”
He has since learned the administration has “completely cut the contracts for the new website” and doesn’t intend to put the new website back online.
On Feb. 12, the federal judge lifted the pause, ruling that the unions that brought the lawsuit alleging that the administration’s deferred resignation offer violated federal law lacked standing to bring the case because the unions were not directly harmed by the action.
The next day, Feb. 13, the deputy director of the communications office “pulled us all into a meeting to say, ‘in 20 minutes, you will get a letter to leave the office and leave all of your equipment and turn in your badge,’ because the entire Office of Communications was reduced in force and dissolved,” he said.
“And that was the day we all had to leave.”
Bossey snapped a photo of his cubicle before he left the office for the last time. “I turned in my badge, I said goodbye to my favorite security officers… and walked out of the building… with tears streaming down my face,” he said.
The dissolution left not only probationary employees unemployed but also veteran staffers, at least one of whom had nearly two decades of employment there.
Bossey remains stunned by the events of the past two months, trying to make sense of it all.
“It was demoralizing, to say the least… to understand my position as a public servant meant nothing more than a waste of taxpayer dollars to half of this country,” he said.
Bossey has always had a different view of public service. His mother Christine is a volunteer firefighter in the Riverhead Fire Department. His father served on the board of trustees of Riverhead Free Library and is a volunteer at the family’s church helping in the Maureen’s Haven Homeless Outreach sheltering program. His parents instilled in him and his two siblings the value of giving back to the community and serving others.
“Serving the community was always my goal,” he said.
At Riverhead High School, he was a member of the Key Club and involved in planning the school district’s first “Safe Halloween” program. He served on the State Board for Key Club.
Bossey was awarded a public service scholarship from the Rotary Club of Riverhead in 2019. He graduated third in his class from Riverhead High School that year. He went on to Binghamton thinking he would pursue a degree in biochemistry. He wanted to work in the field of cancer research because he had a friend who died of leukemia. He ended up as a double-major in political science and human development. After graduating in 2023, he returned the following year to pursue a master’s degree in public administration.
In the summer between graduation and the start of his master’s program he got an internship in the office of the director of the Office of Personnel Management in Washington D.C., working mostly in international affairs programs.
“The office of the director on the career side was very, very small,” he said. “It was me, another intern, my boss and then my boss’s boss. It was a pretty understaffed team. In any other world, my boss would have had a real team of experienced individuals, not just two interns,” Bossey mused.
“I feel very blessed for it, but he threw his full faith behind me and the other intern, and kind of gave us really big tasks. I was managing — myself — the international affairs program.” He was the liaison with the Department of State, Homeland Security and USAID in a workforce development program focused on “how we can best position pay, leave, workplace flexibilities and make working in public service a real career, and competitive in terms of private sector careers as well.”
After earning his master’s, he said, his boss tried to work out a way to hire him as a full-time employee, but it wasn’t in the budget for the office of the director, he said. “The Office of communications had an open position, so I applied, and that’s how I became a full-time employee in the Office of Communications.”
Bossey said he is proud of the work he did at OPM. “The old website basically can’t be used half the time. Everything has to be manually archived and changed. So what we were doing was just building a completely new site, so we would have a technologically usable website for all of the 2.2 million federal employees that use it daily.”
Some people may not value that work, he said, but “I really do think that having a website that works is much less wasteful than paying for a website that doesn’t.”
Bossey is at the beginning of a career he hopes to continue in public service. He still believes in public service, he says.
“I’ve been keeping my search for a job very, very broad,” he said. “Public service can mean a lot of things. I had wanted to serve at the federal level, but I’ve been looking at serving at universities to work with students,” he said. “To me, it’s important to work with people and help them in any way I can.”
Read guest column by Dominic Bossey: “I still believe in serving my community”
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