Mary Glantz was in her room at a Hampton Inn in Columbia, South Carolina, last Friday night during a trip visiting friends when her phone began pinging furiously with messages at 9:30 p.m.
They were from panicked colleagues at the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent, congressionally funded organization in Washington that had found itself in the crosshairs of billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency.
DOGE employees had forced their way into the building, past protesting USIP staffers, with the aid of local police on March 17. Now Glantz, who had been a senior adviser at the institute, was being told that mass layoffs had begun.
At 10:09 p.m., Glantz’s own termination notice arrived in an email telling her she was being fired, effective immediately. Most of USIP’s 300 staff were laid off that night.
“I wasn’t expecting it,” said Glantz, who shared her termination notice with Reuters. “It was shocking,” she said, because she had just been told her leadership was working on a briefing to DOGE justifying their work.
Glantz and her colleagues are not the only government workers who have been fired late on a Friday night since U.S. President Donald Trump and Musk launched their fast-moving effort to cut the size and cost of the federal bureaucracy.
While thousands of workers have been fired in the overhaul throughout the work week, Friday nights have become some of the most nerve-racking times for civil servants.
Mass firings have taken place on seven of the 10 Fridays that Trump has been in office since being sworn in on January 20, affecting hundreds of government workers, a Reuters review of the pattern of dismissals found.
April 4 marks his 11th Friday in office, but it was not immediately clear if he would fire any more government workers after nightfall.
The majority of these bureaucrats include people Trump has deemed opponents or potential impediments to his agenda. The frequency and scale of the Friday night layoffs are unprecedented, say legal experts and historians.
Previous Republican and Democratic administrations have used Friday nights to bury bad news or announce controversial policies but rarely to fire someone.
Targeting federal employees for termination late on a Friday appears designed to minimize media coverage and make it more difficult for them to get immediate legal help, because law offices and the courts are shut, said Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington.
