Victoria Chege started her federal government job just seven weeks ago at the end of 2024. For much of that time, she's worried about being laid off.

Chege, 24, joined the Department of Health and Human Services as a program and management analyst in Washington, D.C., in December.

After taking office in January, President Donald Trump has worked quickly to slash the federal workforce. Many of those efforts are spearheaded by Senior Advisor Elon Musk and the new Department of Government Efficiency.

Chege's layoff fears were realized on Saturday. She says she received an email around 2 p.m. stating she had been let go due to performance reasons.

She hasn't been in her job long enough to have had a performance review, Chege says.

She's one of roughly 10,000 workers who have been fired from their federal government jobs since Trump took office. In addition, roughly 75,000 staffers took the Trump administration's buyout offer.

Even management was surprised: 'I'm pretty sure they were blindsided'

Chege had been checking her email all weekend after a frenzied Friday afternoon, when she says she and many of her colleagues were briefly locked out of their work accounts. Some of her peers began receiving termination notices that day, she says.

"It was really chaotic and frustrating," Chege says. "At that point, I hadn't heard from any of my managers or supervisors. I'm pretty sure they were blindsided, in the same way that the people who were actually terminated were blindsided."

Chege says she didn't hear from her own manager until Tuesday morning after the holiday weekend: "I think he was calling me to see why I wasn't logged on for the day, and I mentioned that I was terminated this weekend." She says she suspects he didn't know of her layoff until she told him.

Chege hasn't had much time to grieve the loss of her job. Instead, she says she has spent most of her time trying to track down answers to basic questions like whether she'll get severance pay or if the mass firings are even legal.

"We don't even know when or where to turn in our government-issued devices," she says.

She's part of the Pathways Program, a yearlong initiative that encourages young people to join the public sector. That makes her a probationary employee, which includes recent hires as well as long-time staffers who have moved to a new position within the federal government in the last one to two years.

These workers have fewer legal protections and job security while the government evaluates their "conduct and performance on the job to determine if an appointment to the civil service should become final."

Five unions sued the Trump administration last week hoping to block mass firings of what they fear could be hundreds of thousands of federal employees who did not accept buyouts.

As Chege applied to a few jobs over the weekend, she was reminded of her exhausting job search only a few months ago. "It's so frustrating right now — just going through the job search process again is really not something I envisioned myself doing anytime soon," she says. "I was really hoping to get into the federal government and stay working there for a long time."

'I chose to work in the federal government because the work we do helps people every day'

Chege has spent the last few weeks documenting her experience via TikTok, sharing information about what's happening in the federal workforce and correcting misconceptions about working in the public sector.

She often sees online comments from people confusing probationary workers as being low performers.

About 220,000 federal workers ‒ out of a workforce of some 2.3 million ‒ were probationary employees with less than one year of experience as of March 2024, USA Today reports citing the most recently publicly available data from OPM.

"A lot of people I've been seeing think that the probation-year period means we were already doing something wrong," Chege says. "That is not the case."

She also worries the public doesn't understand the size and scope of the federal workforce. "There's federal workers all over the country," she says, "not just those within proximity to D.C." More than 80% of the federal workforce lives and works outside of the D.C. area, according to the Partnership for Public Service, including across the U.S. and around the world.

Recent job cuts have hit people across the departments of Interior, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture and Health and Human Services. Federal government workers account for 1.5% of total civilian employment, according to Pew data.

TikTok comments Chege has seen describe federal workers as "lazy" and declare "that we can now go get a 'real job,'" she recalls. "I'm not really sure what that means," she says. "I chose to work in the federal government because the work we do helps people every day, and not just working to make a singular person or entity richer."

"The people I have met while working in the federal government have been extremely passionate about the work they do as a public servant," Chege adds. "They are some of the nicest people I've met. And so these are just really great people who are now being affected by this."

Want to earn some extra money on the side? Take CNBC's new online course How to Start a Side Hustle to learn tips to get started and strategies for success from top side hustle experts. Pre-register now and use coupon code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off $97 (+taxes and fees) through April 1, 2025.

Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It's newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.