The job opening for a project manager sounded like a dream promotion to Katie Stahl.

The 27-year-old Baltimore resident had worked nearly six years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, assessing drainage culverts and monitoring the salinity of marshes to help farmers. Stahl studied wetlands at night for her graduate degree. She said she had perfect performance evaluations and liked her co-workers.

In October, she celebrated her promotion on a sunny day in the park with friends and her favorite carryout.

“I was just so elated,” she said. ”It felt really validating. This thing I had worked hard for was working out."

Like all new hires, transfers and promotions, Stahl would spend her first year on routine probation. She didn’t think much of it — not until what’s become known as the “Valentine’s Day massacre.” She and thousands of probationary federal workers were abruptly laid off as the Trump administration slashes government spending.

She is set to travel to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday for Trump’s first address of his second term to a joint session of Congress. Democrats are inviting laid-off federal workers and their supporters to the Capitol to call attention to what they say have been indiscriminate job cuts.

“She was on probationary status only because she was promoted. So she was doing everything right,” said Rep. Johnny Olszewski Jr., a Baltimore County Democrat who invited Stahl. “It’s important for President Trump and members of Congress to see people like Katie, who aren’t just faceless individuals.”

The layoffs have swept across federal agencies in the first months of the Trump administration, from about 1,000 newly hired workers with the National Park Service to another 1,000 or so Department of Veterans Affairs employees. Some 220,000 federal employees had less than one year on the job as of March 2024, according to the Office of Personnel Management. The number of people laid off at the smaller U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been put at 420.

One of them was Stahl.

Even though she could make more money with a private firm, she enjoyed the sense of purpose that came with her federal government job.

The work was a natural fit for a young woman who grew up as a summer farm worker, picking strawberries, raspberries and peaches on orchards along the banks of the Conestoga River in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She saw the tension between farmers along the river and the families who played there. She saw infections from dirty water. She saw fingers pointed, and farmers blamed.

“I really saw how much the farmers cared about the land and how thin the profit margins were,” she said.

With a degree in biology from William & Mary, she moved to Baltimore and started work in land conservation. A fellowship with the Chesapeake Bay field office of Fish and Wildlife turned into a full-time job. She helped farmers plant conservation projects, such as a buffer of trees to filter manure runoff from a pasture before it reaches a stream.

Then she was traveling from Southern Maryland to Carroll County to assess hundreds of drainage culverts for the risk of flooding. The culverts were on private land, but stormwater, vegetation and fish don’t follow paper boundaries. What happens upstream affects everyone downstream.

She was promoted from a biological technician to assistant biologist.

Now, she was driving to the Eastern Shore to help restore marshes along farmland. Marshes slow erosion, also trapping and filtering saltwater that would otherwise leech into the fields and kill the crops. Nearly a century ago, the federal Civilian Conservation Corps had hired young men to dig up the marshes as mosquito ditches. Her work was to fix their mistake.

The job required the trust of farmers. She was asking them to allow her to oversee work on their land. She visited them at home. They talked about the growing seasons and droughts.

Nights, she attended graduate school at the University of Maryland, studying wetlands and earning her degree two years ago. Weekends, she played bluegrass music in an old-time fiddle band.

She wasn’t getting rich, but she had found a sense of purpose. She figured she’d stay at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for years.

Her bosses encouraged her to apply for project manager, she said. The new job was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She was still helping farmers by restoring marshland, but also planting pollinator meadows and restoring quail habitats in Southern Maryland.

When Trump came into the White House, he tasked Elon Musk with leading a new office to ferret out government waste. It was called the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE.

Stahl worried a little and cut back her personal spending, but she tried to tune out the noise. That is, until the morning of Feb. 14.

“When I woke up, I had texts from my co-workers at USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture]. ‘Hey, did you get terminated yet? We got terminated yesterday.’ Which is a very stressful text to wake up to,” she said. “So I immediately called my boss.”

Her boss had no answers, Stahl said. Hours went by.

“She called me around noon, crying,” Stahl said. “She didn’t even have to say anything, really.”

All probationary workers were being let go. The decision came from the top. There was nothing she could do. There wasn’t even time to send co-workers plans for her unfinished projects.

“To just abandon the projects, that felt really hard,” she said.

She was told there was no severance pay, that she would lose health insurance in 31 days. She had to turn in her cellphone and computer. The dizzying abruptness of it all left her crushed and confused.

Days passed and the loss settled in. That’s when she called Olszewski’s office for help. She wanted to apply for unemployment in Maryland, but her federal paperwork had not arrived.

Nearly 100 laid-off workers shared their experiences with the congressman’s office, he said. The stories left him frustrated, too.

“I led efficiency work as an executive in Baltimore County,” he said. “We did find efficiencies and reductions in costs and services, but we did it the right way.”

Now, Stahl is trying to find new work, though she still thinks about the farmers who had trusted her.

“I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye. That really sucks,” she said. “That’s the difference between two weeks and two hours.”

There are lawsuits working through the courts to reverse the layoffs. There are also private firms around Baltimore that do conservation work. Her commute might be shorter, her pay better.

She’s watching and waiting, though a government job now scares her.