Being a mom in the federal government wasn’t easy. Trump made it “impossible.”

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When Gabrielle was home on a recent Saturday morning, her older child sadly asked her if she had to go to work. During the week she’s gone by 5am and doesn’t get to see her kids before they start their day. “He’s become much more clingy with me since I’m absent more,” she said. Gabrielle is still breastfeeding her baby, so she has to pump and cart her supplies back and forth on the train five days a week, and she still wakes up for night feedings. Typically she runs on five hours of sleep. By the end of the day, she’s spent.

Gabrielle is a federal worker, and like nearly everyone else working for the government, is now required to be in the office full time as a result of the Trump administration’s mandate. The radical change from fully remote or hybrid schedules, along with mass layoffs at federal agencies, has been seismic for all federal employees—but it’s hit parents even harder, and especially moms. What were once stable jobs with a healthy work/life balance have morphed into unnecessarily logistically grueling roles that not only keep moms away from their families, but from tending to their own physical and mental health. And while White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is celebrated for bringing her baby to work, this administration has created a working environment for moms that is downright hostile.

I spoke to a bunch of moms in the federal government to see what life has been like since January 20th. Names have been changed to protect their identities. 

The day Christina brought home her newborn twins from the NICU, she was told she’d been put on administrative leave by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “Absolutely incredible timing,” she told me. While caring for her babies in the hospital in February, she heard via Reddit that HHS was planning mass layoffs. And soon she’d find out that while she wasn’t fired, she was on that path.

Despite the fact that she may soon lose her livelihood and the health insurance her family is on, she’s tried to find a silver lining. “I guess the thing that kind of helped the most (and still does) is that if I lose my job now, I can provide childcare full time while I figure out the next thing.” 

Sandra works for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and has an infant at home. The combination of knowing she’d have to return to office (RTO) full time and the psychological toll of wondering whether or not she’ll be out of a job has weighed heavily on her.

“The last three months have been miserable,” she said. “I was probationary due to promotion so my entire last month of pregnancy I was afraid of being let go every day, and eventually had to take off before the birth so stress didn’t put me in early labor.”

FEMA also recently made its policy that all personnel must deploy to a disaster zone for 45 or 90 days each year—an impossible ask for a breastfeeding mother like Sandra.

“It’s just infuriating to see Leavitt and Musk bringing their kids to work and them talking about incentives for having more kids when they are taking time and money away from parents,” Sandra said.

I asked her if she sees these news policies as a way to get moms out of the federal workforce. “I think so,” she said. “Pretty much everything they are doing disproportionately impacts mothers. Between the RTO, now the loss of any flexibility at all, I don’t know how people can do it.” She estimates her family will be spending an additional $1,000 per month on child care, parking, and gas as a result of the Trump administration’s manufactured crisis. 

Catherine now has to stay overnight in another state once a week in order to comply with RTO requirements while also being able to fulfill her duties at home. She works for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and had worked remotely for five years prior to the mandate. Catherine moved with her family more than two hours away from the office because the arrangement was working well and she didn’t see a reason it would change. The new requirements have forced her to make painful calculations.

“I elected to work two longer days so that I would just do the commute once and stay over one night,” she told me. “That way I only miss two mornings and two evenings with my kids/family.”

Similarly for Lauren, RTO has been a logistical nightmare. Her agency recently had its office lease canceled by the para-governmental agency DOGE, and as a result she’s been forced to work out of a different office. The problem? Her child’s daycare is located near her old office where she was previously going in three times per week. And as many parents know, switching daycare is no easy feat. As a result, Lauren has to tack on two more hours every workday to get her kid to daycare and get to her office as required.

“Many parents are already dealing with an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine-esque schedule to balance their professional obligations and goals with parenting and childcare,” Lauren said. “It feels like we have less resilience/tolerance to absorb random unexplained changes with very little notice.”

The impact has also been felt by the children of Fed moms, many of whom went from having a present, available parent to one who has to sneak calls from the office between meetings to make sure they’re ok.

“Two of my kids had behavior issues pop up at school/daycare again when I had to RTO,” Jane, a current Fed mom, told me. “My youngest got separation anxiety back. It got better, but it took a while before she stopped crying at daycare after drop off.”

Like Gabrielle, Jane is gone each workday before her kids wake up in order to accommodate this taxing new schedule.

For some, there was just no way to make it work as both a mom and a federal worker. Since the earliest days of the administration, most federal workers were invited to participate in the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP)—or the “fork in the road,” as it became informally known. Participants would cease working immediately and still receive a few months pay before having their jobs formally terminated. Tanya was one of them.

The former federal worker from the DC area tried to make it work with hours wasted commuting and time missed with her kids, but as the threat of more layoffs continually loomed, she made the difficult decision to take the DRP. 

“It was exhausting,” Tanya said. “Instead of being able to use my 30 minute lunch break to fold laundry or throw stuff in a slow cooker, I lost time to commuting, and always felt behind on chores, and had less time to connect with the kids or take care of myself.”

Of course these issues extend to Fed dads and non-fed partners as well, with increased constraints on time and money squeezing everyone to the point of intolerability. 

“My husband is also a federal employee, which isn’t uncommon in this area, and we both had to RTO 100% at around the same time,” Tanya said. “We used to alternate telework days when we could so each of us had a chance to be there for the school bus and other midday activities. It was a game changer for both of us to be able to be so much more present and less rushed.”

But, as Tanya also pointed out, pushing working moms to the brink is literally part of the conservative blueprint. 

“I am aware of Project 2025 and their goals of getting women out of the workforce, and this really feels like part of it,” she said. 

Many of the women I spoke to feel duped. While the demands of being a working parent in a country without guaranteed paid family leave, universal childcare and universal health care are already oppressive, they at least expected a job with reliable hours and pay. And in the years since the COVID pandemic, they found the flexibility afforded by telework only made them better parents. But that understanding of their jobs has been shattered by the past few months.

“RTO has affected quality family time due to the long days,” Gina, a single mom who works as an attorney for a federal agency, told me. “The whole reason I took a federal job was to have quality family time.” When I asked her if she thinks she’ll be able to sustain this, she said “No way.”

Gabrielle expressed the same. “It’s not sustainable and I’m looking to leave the federal government because I can’t do this for years,” she said. “I have 15 years in the government and always thought it would be my career.”

At this point nearly 60,000 federal employees have been fired from their jobs. That’s 60,000 lives turned upside down, often with their families as collateral damage. But even for those fortunate enough to still be employed, pain, suffering and stress have followed. Aside from the small portion of true believers who back the current president’s agenda, this all feels like an elaborate test; or perhaps for moms trying to raise kids and support their families, a sick joke.

“They hate all of us and have put things in place to make everyone miserable,” Sandra said. “But for parents they’ve made it impossible.”