The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
There’s been a whole lot happening in recent months as Donald Trump has returned to office as president, and Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has begun to take a wrecking ball to various federal agencies, making drastic cuts to the federal workforce.
We’re beginning to see the effects of this at the state level here in Wisconsin, and recent reports have indicated that mass layoffs are happening at agencies within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which has a significant presence in the state.
Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes is helping tell the stories of real people directly impacted by these layoffs.
“The moment calls for important conversations with people who’ve been impacted by devastating cuts by the Trump administration, aided by Elon Musk,” said Barnes. “I just wanted you to hear what is going on in the lives of everyday folks who are taking this challenge head on, but are not taking it lying down.”
One of those Wisconsinites impacted by these cuts is Katia Wanish, who until recently was a wetlands engineer at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which is part of the USDA. She shared her story with Barnes in this special edition of The Recombobulation Area podcast.
“I really feel like there's a lack of dignity,” she said of the experience. “I just felt like I was completely erased from the system one day. I essentially received a blank email — nothing written in the message, nothing saying “Hi Katia” or anything like that — a blank email with an attachment telling me that I was terminated. Just that shock of not even feeling like I was a person in that moment, that they couldn’t take a second to write something in the body of that email really stunk. And I was terminated for performance. Which, I’m still trying to figure out why exactly. I received multiple awards in my time as an engineer; I was nominated for junior engineer of the year. It’s just kind of confusing why I was terminated for performance.”
She was treated, as Barnes put it, as a “pawn in a billionaire’s game.”
Wanish had been hired to the position at the beginning of 2025, and was part of the round of DOGE firings on “probationary employees,” which included both new hires and people recently promoted — the latter, essentially, in her case.
In her conversation with Barnes, she talked about how this role she was hired for was a “dream job,” and that this experience has made her feel “helpless.”
Barnes said that’s the purpose of the way DOGE and the Trump administration are carrying out these actions, saying he “fundamentally disagrees” that there’s nothing you can do in these moments.
“I know you can feel like you're powerless, but that's the purpose of this all,” said Barnes. “It is to make you feel powerless. And if you submit — as many people feel that leaders in Congress are doing right now, submitting to the will — then there's no hope for anybody. And so I just want you to understand that there is still power that you do have even if it seems like you don’t.”
Watch the full video above, or listen to the episode as a podcast here on Civic Media, or embedded below.
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Follow Dan Shafer on Twitter at @DanRShafer and at BlueSky at @danshafer.bsky.social.
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