Trump tried to fire Michigan workers. For now, he’s paying them to sit at home

• Tens of thousands of federal employees, including some in Michigan, are on administrative leave
• The administration of President Donald Trump hopes to fire the workers to trim the government payroll
• For now, those employees are getting full pay and benefits while not allowed to go to their offices

Leslie Desmond is a financial analyst for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, with an office in Detroit’s McNamara Federal Building.

Or at least she used to.

Or maybe she still does.

Desmond, who makes $75,000 a year, is still getting paid to assure compliance of federal spending on subsidized housing, though her desk is collecting dust while she instead works as a bartender in Livonia.

Desmond is on administrative leave while the new administration of President Donald Trump fights in court to have her and an estimated tens of thousands of federal employees around the country fired. 

The goal, according to Trump and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is to slash government workers to save money.

Those firings are in legal limbo, as are the lives of workers like Desmond, who are getting full pay and benefits for an indefinite period of time while not allowed to return to their offices

“The irony is, in my job, I’m the first line of defense on fraud, misuse and waste,” Dempsey said. 

And though the government is still paying her, “I can’t do that. Instead, I’m literally drinking a coffee instead of protecting tax dollars.”

Trump made trimming the federal government workforce a pillar of his campaign and his administration has fired or attempted to fire tens of thousands of workers since he took office in January.

And while court orders at least temporarily reinstated many of those workers, the administration has opted to keep many of those employees out of the office, arguing it would be too chaotic to place them back into the workplace when new court orders could change their status at any time.

Returning would “impose substantial burdens” on the agencies and cause “turmoil for the terminated employees,” according to filings by the government. 

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The employees “would have to be onboarded again, including going through any applicable training, filling out human resources paperwork, obtaining new security badges, reinstituting applicable security clearance actions, receiving government furnished equipment, and other requisite administrative actions,” wrote Reesha Trznadel, acting chief human capital officer at the United States Department of Energy, in a court filing.”

There are roughly 79,000 federal civilian employees in Michigan, according to the U.S. Census, about 4% more than the 76,000 average between 2019 and 2023. Those workers are spread across the state, with northern Michigan having the highest proportion of federal employees in the workforce.

Those workers earn, on average, about $62,000 a year. That’s 36% more than the median earnings of all Michigan workers, and comparable to the earnings of a typical Michigander with a bachelor’s degree ($63,000).

Trump is moving to cut a federal workforce that has grown to 3 million from 2.8 million since 2019. Since the pandemic, the federal deficit has doubled to nearly $1.8 trillion, while debt has grown 121% in 10 years. Interest payments alone on it cost $881 billion this fiscal year — more than the government spends on veterans or children.

It’s not clear how many federal workers are currently on administrative leave in Michigan or the nation as a whole.

In March, the government reported in a court filing that more than 24,000 employees at 18 federal agencies — many of them with probationary status — who were fired in an effort to shrink the size of government would be rehired, pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by 19 Democratic state attorneys general, including Michigan’s Dana Nessel.

Many of those for-now rehired workers never came back to their offices, but were placed on administrative leave.

Deborah Gordon, an employment attorney based in Bloomfield Hills, said administrative leave is most commonly used to remove an employee from a workplace while an investigation that could lead to their termination is conducted.

“There’s no advantage to the taxpayer” for the Trump administration to place tens of thousands of people on administrative leave, Gordon said. “I have to assume they don’t want these people working there anymore, but they aren’t in a position to fire them yet.”

Another employment lawyer, Sam Bagenstos, echoed Gordon’s assessment.

“There are times when you’d put someone on administrative leave pending termination if they are being investigated for something,” said Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor who was the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2018 for state Supreme Court.

“But in this circumstance … If you’re saying we don’t need to be paying your salary because it isn’t efficient, it’s even worse to pay their salary and not have them do their work,” Bagenstos said. “That doesn’t make sense at all.”

Andrew Lennox was terminated and then placed on administrative leave from his job at the VA Medical Center in Ann Arbor. Collecting a paycheck to not work didn’t sit well with the Marine veteran who served tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

“It pisses me off as a vet to know money and resources that could be supporting veterans are being wasted” on workers being paid to stay home, Lennox told Bridge Michigan.

Lennox started at the VA in December, serving as administrative officer for primary care, a position he says involved a lot of paperwork to help the center keep running.

He was fired by email Feb. 13, reinstated by a court order March 18 and immediately placed on administrative leave, including back pay for the month he’d been fired.

The Livingston County resident has since been allowed to return to work.

He recognizes that the government, like private businesses, should be allowed to shrink its workforce. But he said the firings, re-hirings, administrative leaves and, in his case, an order to return to work while still facing possible termination isn’t an example of government efficiency.

“They’re actively still trying to fire people who just want to work,” Lennox said. “Getting my job back is awesome, but this has been done haphazardly.”

Dempsey, the HUD employee, was fired in mid-February and then, after a temporary restraining order forced her and thousands of other federal employees to be rehired in March, was immediately placed on administrative leave “until further notice.”

The Dearborn mother said she checks her email every evening to see if “I’m to report to work the next day or if I’ve been fired again.”

“I’m a real planner,” she said. “I haven’t reenrolled my son in school yet because I don’t know where we're going to be yet.

“I don’t know what the future is going to look like, except to wait.”

Trump isn’t the first president to try to save money by cutting workers. Bill Clinton’s administration eliminated 377,000 federal jobs, though most of those losses were through attrition and a $25,000 departure incentive approved by Congress rather than involuntary layoffs.

Those job cuts took place over a six-year period from 1993 to 1999 as opposed to the rapid pace of cuts by the Trump administration, and didn’t involve placing thousands of workers on paid administrative leave.