‘Will I lose my job?’ Federal workers in US flock to Reddit for answers

WASHINGTON – On March 4, a Trump appointee at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) circulated a memo to senior leadership. The agency, it said, would “move out aggressively” to improve efficiency, with an “initial objective” of cutting the workforce to 2019 levels.

The next morning, someone posted a copy of this “reduction in force” memo to a Reddit group called VeteransAffairs, an online community of 19,000 members.

The copy was difficult to follow, a sequence of photos taken of the memo on a screen, but the message was clear enough: S

ome 80,000 jobs would be cut

.

Questions and comments poured in, some bewildered, some frantic.

The agency had half a million employees at hospitals, clinics, call lines and regional benefit offices that served veterans. Who would be fired? Was this the end of the VA’s medical research? How would this affect wait times for medical appointments?

No one had solid answers, just informed speculation. Livelihoods and veterans’ well-being were at stake, so the vibe was sombre. But there was still room for dark humour.

“We gotta pay for Greenland somehow,” one person joked.

Reddit, a bare-bones social media site that organised more than 100,000 niche communities called subreddits, has long catered to people with quirky shared interests, whether bitcoin, fly-fishing or photos of Keanu Reeves being awesome.

It is unlike other social media platforms. Instagram and TikTok offer videos and influencers; Reddit is text-heavy and aggressively unsuited to building star power. Facebook and LinkedIn require real names; anonymity reigns on Reddit, minimising egos and consequences.

The Atlantic recently deemed Reddit possibly “the best platform on a junky web”.

As other social media sites have fallen prey to artificial intelligence slop and incessant pleas to “like and subscribe”, Reddit has become one of the last places on the internet with authentically human information, community and advice.

For government workers, it has been a lifeline in recent months.

With the

Trump administration’s rapid downsizing of the federal bureaucracy

, subreddits where government workers previously posted the occasional tale about a Zoom meeting mishap or health plan question have become crowded forums for fears, anxieties and tidbits of intra-agency observation.

On one subreddit, FedNews, government employees have been relaying updates about layoffs, a new US$1 (S$1.33) limit on government credit cards and “what did you accomplish last week” e-mails.

It has drawn an influx of millions of visitors since January, according to internal statistics shared by the subreddit’s creator.

“These individual subreddits let people find niches that work really well for them,” said Ms Sarah Gilbert, a researcher at Cornell University who focuses on online communities.

“That’s happening on FedNews, where people are using that space to come together and talk to other people who are experiencing similar trauma.”

A participant on FedNews recently wrote a post saying a supervisor told employees to stop “leaking” information on Reddit.

“DON’T STOP, the people deserve to know,” added the author who, like almost all Reddit users, employed a pseudonymous online handle.

Not using your real name makes it easier to share information or vent frustrations without further imperiling one’s career prospects.

But anonymity can also breed misinformation, misbehaviour and vitriol.

That is where people like Mr David Carson, 53, come in. An Army veteran and former employee of the VA who lives in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, he is one of Reddit’s more than 60,000 moderators.

These volunteers do a tremendous amount of content moderation work that other social media giants contract out.

The work of unpaid moderators like Mr Carson has made it possible for Reddit to shine in this moment of political tumult.

“Reddit is a community run by people like me focused on people like me,” he said.

The front page of the internet

Reddit is 20 years old, which makes it ancient in internet years. It started out as a place to share interesting information and has remained essentially that ever since.

Anyone can create a subreddit, becoming its first moderator. Anyone can visit or join it, unless it is made private.

“Each community on Reddit has its own topic, its own rules, its own moderators and, in many cases, its own in-jokes and culture,” said Mr Galen Weld, a doctoral student at the University of Washington. He has conducted research on Reddit, and done consulting work for the company.

What people want to share can sometimes be distasteful.

Reddit earned notoriety in the past for communities devoted to revenge porn, videos of people’s deaths and other toxic content.

But the site has tamed its worst impulses, and most devious moderators, by disbanding subreddits that consistently violate rules the company established in 2015 against harassment and inappropriate behaviour.

Reddit, which went public in 2024, is now one of the most visited sites on the internet, with more than 100 million daily active users and US$1.3 billion in revenue, according to the company’s most recent financial filing.

It may seem chaotic to a first-time visitor, sent there by a search engine.

Its home page is a random collection of news articles, funny photos and unfamiliar shorthand like AIO (“Am I Overreacting?”). But the individual subreddits can feel intimate and welcoming.

Each of these subreddits, whether about home repair, romantasy or Dungeons and Dragons maps, is unique, and each has distinct rules, decided by its moderators.

Want to chat with people who have decided life is better without kids? Join ChildFree. Parents are welcome, but only if they regret their choices.

Enjoy schadenfreude? Try LeopardsAteMyFace. That community has been sharing anecdotes about Trump voters who immediately suffered from his policy decisions, but it forbids stories about actual animal attacks.

A new rule: No politics

On the VeteransAffairs subreddit, there are two overriding rules: Stay on topic, and be respectful. That means no personal attacks and no politics.

When the subreddit’s creator tapped Mr Carson to take over the channel a decade ago, politics were allowed.

But in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, he and his co-moderator instituted a ban on partisan political talk after commenters began getting too heated.

“People were pointing fingers and name-calling and being abrasive and insulting,” Mr Carson said. “We’re trying to create a community that embraces people.”

Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after serving in combat, he receives disability benefits from the VA.

He also teaches English literature part time at a community college outside Nashville, Tennessee. He enjoys seeing his students’ reaction when he shows up on the first day wearing motorcycle leathers and a “goatee that comes down to my belly”.

His schedule is flexible, allowing him time to moderate the VeteransAffairs subreddit.

For many years, that amounted to an hour or two a day. But in recent months, the daily commitment ballooned to six or more hours.

“Every spare minute, I have Reddit pulled up on my phone,” Mr Carson noted. “If I’m in the car with my wife, I’m sitting in the passenger seat and moderating the subreddit. After my wife goes to bed, I’ll sit down and watch TV, and while I’m watching TV, I’m moderating the subreddit.”

The constant time spent on his phone was “irritating”, said his wife Stacey, who is also a veteran, “until I realised exactly what he was doing”.

To help with the surge in activity, Mr Carson and his co-moderator, whose real name he does not know, recently recruited two new moderators: one a veteran and the other a clinical pharmacist employed by the VA.

On a recent weekday morning, Mr Carson logged into Reddit and checked his moderator queue, which had a list of more than 1,000 posts and comments.

He started reading each one, removing any not directly related to the Veterans Affairs Department.

It is time-consuming. Some people write “dissertations”, Mr Carson said, and if the post includes a link, he clicks through to make sure the information is pertinent. “Then you got to research the website to say, OK, is this website reliable?”.

If the site has extreme partisan leanings or unclear provenance, he will remove the post.

Said Mr Eshwar Chandrasekharan, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has studied Reddit: “The moderator’s job is not just about preventing abuse or removing the bad behaviour.”

“They also make it easy to find the good stuff.”

Mr Carson always starts with content flagged for review, either by the community’s users or by an automated filtering tool.

The tool, AutoModerator, looks for inappropriate language, problem users who have been flagged by other moderators and words that violate the subreddit’s “no politics” rule, including “Musk” and “Trump”.

Mr Carson himself has strong political feelings. Expressing them has got him into trouble in the past.

He lost his job as a claims examiner at the VA in 2017 in part because of a Facebook post he had written with the hashtag #AssassinateTrump, according to an administrative judge’s ruling.

He was angry with the government at the time. The VA had transferred him from Tennessee to Colorado, and living apart from his wife and children for two years exacerbated his PTSD.

Writing about his frustration with the agency on social media was cathartic, he said. But his colleagues found the posts threatening.

Containing obscenities and ominous hypotheticals, they were a tenor of post he would quickly remove from his subreddit now.

After he was fired, Mr Carson moved back to Tennessee and continued moderating the subreddit, grateful to still be able to share his expertise.

He had come to think of helping veterans with their benefits as more than a job. It was his purpose.

“We’re trying to create a safe, helpful and respectful community,” Mr Carson said. He is always on the lookout for mentions of suicidal thoughts – which he, too, has experienced – and prioritises reaching out to those people to offer help.

On this morning, AutoModerator had flagged a comment: It claimed that spyware had been installed on all computers tapped into by the Department of Government Efficiency, the group led by Mr Elon Musk to cut the federal bureaucracy.

Mr Carson removed the comment.

“We allow conversations that focus on facts and provide evidence,” he said. “But even then, it still has to be relevant to the VA.” The spyware comment, he added, was a “supposition”.

‘You’re not alone’

When federal workers received an e-mail in February telling them to list five things they had accomplished in the previous week, someone posted a poll on the VeteransAffairs subreddit for VA colleagues: “Did you reply to the e-mail?”

A majority of respondents said they had not.

That kind of information is “helpful and enlightening”, said Mr Bruce, a VA employee in Salt Lake City who has been checking the subreddit every day.

Mr Bruce, who asked not to use his full name to protect his employment, said there had been little official communication from his regional office, and that Reddit had helped to fill the information vacuum.

“It just gives you an idea of what other people at the VA are going through, that you’re not alone,” said Mr Bruce, who until now had thought of Reddit mainly as a place to go to for sports news. NYTIMES