Washington — Last month, Katie Sandlin uprooted her life in Carbon Hill, Alabama, a town of 2,000, to work at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, outside Washington, D.C.
“I wiped out my savings account, I maxed out my credit card, I had to take out a loan,” Sandlin told CBS News.
But she called her job as an education outreach specialist an opportunity of a lifetime, educating communities about NIH research.
“People like me, where I’m from, rural Alabama, like, these kind of jobs don’t happen to people like me,” Sandlin said. “You know, my entire town, they were all rooting for me.”
Three weeks later, before she even unpacked her D.C. apartment, Sandlin became one of the thousands of federal probationary workers to be fired as part of President Trump’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal government.
Probationary workers usually have less than one year experience, and in some cases less than two years….
