The Livingston Interviews: Hannah Natason
Introduction here…started out as a temporary stint, filling in on the business desk in the fall of 2020, when a lot of office workers were working from home. Their offices had closed, and many schools were also closed. Working parents were figuring out what to do with their children.
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Lynette Clemetson:
You started as a labor and workplace reporter during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the job was shaped by the pandemic. What was the focus of your beat when you started?
Andrea Hsu:
It started out as a temporary stint, filling in on the business desk in the fall of 2020, when a lot of office
workers were working from home. Their offices had closed, and many schools were also closed. Working parents were figuring out what to do with their children. At the same time, there were the essential workers who had to keep things going — people working in grocery stores, hospitals, nursing homes and factories. It was a period of upheaval for all different types of workers.
Clemetson:
When did it shift from being pandemic-driven to being focused on the federal workforce?
Hsu:
Not until this year. In fact, covering the federal workforce had never been part of my beat. Before January of this year, I think I had done maybe three stories on the federal workforce: one about the rollback of telework in the government, and two about federal employee unions. But sometime between the election and the inauguration, a memo went out to staff announcing that I would be covering the federal workforce. This was a surprise to me! And then, as soon as Trump took office on January 20, he began signing executive orders that laid out huge changes for the federal workforce, and that took over my beat.
Clemetson:
So were federal workers expecting change?
Hsu:
There were ideas from Trump’s first term that he reintroduced. Some of them were in Project 2025. Still, it was the speed at which this all happened that was surprising to people. On January 28, eight days after the inauguration, an email went out inviting almost the entire federal workforce to resign. More than 2 million people got this email. There was a lot of confusion over whether the offer was legal or if it was even real. Shortly after that, in the middle of February, federal agencies started firing probationary employees en masse. Those were mostly people in their first or second year on the job, fired supposedly for performance reasons, even though many had stellar performance reviews.