“Prepare the best for the worst,” was the mantra of U.S. Air Force veteran Aileen Reneau and others employed by FEMA’s Center for Domestic Preparedness in Anniston.

But Reneau, 30, said one thing she never prepared for was the sudden loss of her job last month.

Once in charge of designing the curricula for FEMA first responder training, Reneau now spends her days donating plasma and looking for substitute teaching jobs after she was terminated in another round of cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

“My uncle reached out and asked, ‘Are you worried about losing your job?’” she said.

“And I was like, no, I’m not worried at all. I was just recognized for excellent service while deployed.”

“I had an excellent annual review,” she continued. “I was just promoted. We’re already understaffed, and there is no training facility like this in the entire nation. You know, we’re critical. There’s no way.”

“And then less than a week later, I was eating my words,” she said.

On President’s Day, Reneau was enjoying the day off with her husband and their two children when she received a text from a coworker in her department.

“I got a text message from (former coworker) Chase that said, have you seen the email yet?” she said.

“And that’s never good on a federal holiday, right?”

The email was from Reneau’s supervisor, asking if she had time to talk that day.

An hour later, Reneau was waiting for the termination letter to show up in her inbox.

When she was finally able to view it on a company device after being locked out, the letter stated that she was being terminated due to “poor performance.”

She said this was the last thing she expected after a glowing performance review earlier this year and after she was recognized by the federal government for her service in North Carolina, where she was deployed for six weeks after Hurricane Helene.

“We (she and her coworker Chase) had both been recognized for our excellent service,” she said.

“That’s what it says on the certificate, anyway.”

Chase, a Coast Guard veteran and father of two, was terminated the same day, according to Reneau.

She said that any projects the two were working on were not carried over after their termination.

“I know that morale is extremely low (at the center) and I know that it’s been very inefficient,” she said.

“One of the subject matter experts (for the courses) did reach out to me and say, ‘It is not the same without you, nothing is getting done.’”

“Communication has completely fallen apart,” she continued.

“I just don’t even know how they’re functioning, because myself and Chase were made team leads, and then another man that had been there was made a team lead. So, of your three recently promoted team leads, you only have one now.”

She added that the cuts and other DOGE policies had pushed her “chronically understaffed” department to its limit.

“It’s an absolute madhouse out there right now,” she said.

“They are really struggling to keep anything afloat, and they’re having to justify to DOGE literally everything they do, every little contract.”

One example she gave was the center now has to document and justify food services for first responders that come in from other states to train at the Anniston facility, the only one of its kind in the nation.

“That’s taking away from the actual mission, and the mission’s not getting done if they’re pulling their hair out over this,” she said.

Roughly two weeks before she was terminated, Reneau described a “mad dash scramble” by the center to remove any trace of DEI from their programming to comply with President Donald Trump’s Day 1 executive order.

“After that DEI executive order was signed there was a full panic,” she said.

“Like, oh, my gosh, we’ve got to make sure we don’t have anything about diversity in here. Which that was something that I was pushing back a little bit about.”

“Not in a way that would justify me being terminated,” she added.

“But, you know, they wanted to just control and remove any mention of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But then they were throwing the baby out with bath water and it’s like, okay, no, but look at how diversity is being used in this context.”

“Like diversity of leadership styles,” she said.

“Like, that is not what this is supposed to be targeting. We have to use some common sense here.”

Since Inauguration Day, over 200 employees at FEMA have been cut, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency.

Reneau said these cuts will have “devastating consequences” for American citizens, especially after en masse terminations of FEMA reservists, the people that immediately mobilize to disaster responses.

“We’re talking sheer manpower,” she said.

“Get rid of the conversation about other resources for a moment and let’s just talk about manpower.”

“If you are a small town and your entire town has been flooded and electricity is down, sure, you have responders in your community, but those responders are also affected in the same way all the other citizens are affected,” she continued.

“So, part of that is just replacing the manpower until they can be stabilized.”

She said the ramifications will be even greater than people realize “as disasters accelerate in frequency and intensity, which is a trend we’re seeing due to climate change.”

“There’s really no two ways about that,” she said.

“And I mean, I’m worried for people.”

As a hybrid worker, Reneau said that she wanted to push back on rhetoric she had seen that the government was terminating “lazy remote workers” who “were wasting taxpayer money” or “veterans who weren’t fit for a job,” as said by Alina Habba, counsel to President Donald Trump.

“We weren’t fighting the return to office orders at all,” she said.

“At least I wasn’t. I’ll speak for myself.”

“I didn’t go running to the union,” she added.

“I didn’t put in any grievances, any complaints. You want me to return to the office five days a week? Sure.”

She said that “working from home is a privilege, not a right.”

“So, the rhetoric of like, oh, they were firing lazy remote workers, that’s not accurate,” she continued.

“Oh, they were firing people with poor performance. That’s not accurate. Because the only people being terminated in this first and second wave were probationary employees.”

Reneau explained that probationary either means that someone has had their job for less than a year or they were recently moved to a new position, usually as a promotion for good performance.

“I can tell you, yes, there are some lazy bureaucrats in the federal workplace,” she said.

“I’ve met some of them. They’re not the ones being terminated.”

“They’re the ones that are tenured and they don’t move up the chain, they don’t get promoted,” she continued.

“The fraud, waste and abuse is not what was cut out. You cut out people in the flower of their careers or people that were doing the work and therefore were being recognized and being promoted. That’s all that that accomplished.”

“You skimmed the cream off the top and threw it out,” she said.

She said that the termination letters she and others received were an “outright lie.”

“They illegally terminated these employees under false pretenses,” she said.

“That’s unprecedented. There are policies and processes for reducing the force, but they include things like 60 days notice, going to early retirements, first preference in rehiring.”

“I don’t have preference in rehiring right now,” she continued.

“What I have is a black dot on my record because it said it was due to performance issues.”

After leaving their teaching jobs in Alabama ten years ago to pursue federal careers in an effort to better support their family, Reneau and her husband find themselves back at square one.

Reneau has been applying for substitute teacher positions in the area as she works to finish a law degree.

Her husband is still employed by the Department of Defense at Fort Benning, two and a half hours away from where they live.

But Reneau said he has been told to “prepare for the worst.”

And it’s not just DOGE cuts to FEMA that people should be worried about, Reneau said.

“Everyday people are going to suffer more than I think they realize,” she said.

“My grandparents moved from California a few years ago to St. Clair County and they are die hard Trumpers.”

“And honestly, they haven’t shown a whole lot of sympathy for my plight,” she said.

“I’m their favorite granddaughter. And they’re still trying to justify it. There’s still a lot of mental gymnastics going on there.”

“But when they can’t get their essential lifesaving medication in a timely manner through Medicaid or Medicare or they’re paying through the nose for it, I mean, I think they’re going to wake up a little bit,” she continued.

Reneau is one of many Alabama employees who have been impacted by DOGE cuts this year.

State representatives have opposed several of the department’s recent moves and continue to express concerns about the impact they will have on people’s lives.

“Elon Musk’s reckless power trip is directly threatening the livelihoods of my constituents,” wrote U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham in a post to X after cuts to Social Security offices impacted at least 100 federal employees across multiple states, including Alabama’s Birmingham office.