She has stage four cancer. Her husband is a federal worker. Will she survive the Trump administration?

Michaela felt a sharp pain shoot from her hip while she bent over to water some plants in early May 2025. Then she fell over and couldn’t get back up.

Her husband called an ambulance and she spent the night in a hospital, where, at 57, she found out she had a mass on her spine. It was metastatic breast cancer.

“I had no warning that that was going to happen, and I was devastated. At first, I didn’t clearly understand that it was part of my breast cancer that had metastasized to my spine, which I learned was a common place for it to go,” she said.

“If I were to die prematurely, I could not imagine leaving [my husband] here. We really don’t have any family. We don’t have any children.”

When Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Michaela’s husband prepared to be forced back into the office at the Department of Transportation in Washington DC. He had worked remotely since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, from their home outside Baltimore.

Kisqali tablets, part of Michaela’s oncology regimen, at her home in Maryland, on 8 December. Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian

On Trump’s first day in office on 20 January, he issued an executive order demanding all federal agencies terminate all remote work arrangements. The office of personnel management directed federal agencies to enact the order despite collective bargaining contracts with federal unions.

“My husband’s a veteran with the administration, and he’s an expert in his field. He’s been doing this for 20 years more now, so it’s exhausting for him. We’re in our 50s. He was leaving the house at five o’clock in the morning and getting home at seven at night,” Michaela said. The Guardian is not using Michaela’s real name since her husband still works in the Department of Transportation and fears retaliation.

In July, Michaela had surgery, a laminectomy. A few weeks after that, she had stereotactic radiation, and is currently on an oncology regimen called Kisqali and hormone therapy.

She had stage one breast cancer in 2014, but was able to treat it, as it was caught early, with a partial lumpectomy, radiation, chemotherapy and tamoxifen, a hormonal therapy. Through regular checkups, she stayed on top of it, before her recent diagnosis of stage four metastatic breast cancer.

Throughout this year, Michaela’s husband survived reductions in force at the Department of Transportation. By May, nearly 2,800 employees had left the agency, due to those reductions as well as retirements and voluntary resignations.

According to the Department of Transportation’s memo to the office of personnel management on its plan for reductions in force and reorganization, “overall, we now estimate that by December 31, 2025, our workforce will be reduced by approximately 20 percent from our February 2025 levels”.

This would correlate to more than 10,000 fewer employees at the Department of Transportation. The office of personnel management said in a blog post in late November that federal employee cuts have exceeded goals, with 317,000 workers leaving the federal government, and only 68,000 new hires.

“We were concerned about RIFs. We understand based on the way this administration functions, that this is always on the table because they ignore the law,” Michaela explained. “In his group, a few colleagues took the early deferred leave retirement offer where they could take leave through September and then they are done. One colleague kept in touch and he found another job at half his salary. This seems to be a trend. He took this option because of the rumors flying around early on about RIFs. His colleague indicated he regretted taking the leave offer now.”

She noted jobs for specializations at the agency are difficult to find and contractors often want to pay lower salaries.

As the Department of Transportation was shedding employees, on 1 October a shutdown of the federal government began, lasting for 43 days, the longest in US history.

Michaela and her husband celebrated their 18th wedding anniversary in early November, while the shutdown continued, but stayed at home because they couldn’t afford to go out to eat due to her husband not being paid for several weeks.

She is thankful the government shutdown ended as she was worried about medical bills, but rues the increases in healthcare premiums she and her husband have experienced through his federal healthcare, and for those who rely on healthcare through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

“I felt desperate. I felt destitute. I felt flabbergasted, scared, and I watched my husband and there were a few times where he was sitting at his desk and he was just staring out the window. He was getting depressed,” she said.

Michaela at home.

“We’re just one drop in a bucket of millions of people who work so hard to get where they are, who try to do the right thing, and the people who are making all the decisions are just ransacking and leading the government and treating federal workers like they are enemies, that they are not citizens, and that they should be attacked. And I take personal offense to that,” she said.

She is now worried about another possible looming government shutdown on 30 January 2026, with the vast majority of federal funds set to lapse again without a long-term deal.

“The continuing resolution comes up for a vote again on the 30th of January and I am thinking this is going to happen all over again. We’ve been through several shutdowns. This by far was the worst,” she said. “I’m already battling a life-threatening illness, and I don’t know where it’s going to take me. I could be here for another year or two. I could be here for 10 years.”