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PARKERSBURG — When federal scientist and educator Beth Tuck turned 40 this year, she expected to be settling into a long-term government career.

Instead, she was couch surfing, scooping ice cream to make ends meet and trying to salvage a two-decade path in science education.

“I’ve been working for 20 years in this career path, and I finally got to the point where I was like, ‘Yes, this is it. I’ve made it,'” Tuck said. “And at 40, I was homeless, unemployed and living with my parents.”

Tuck is one of thousands of federal workers whose jobs were eliminated this year as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, pushed aggressive cuts across agencies, including the National Institutes of Health.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, where NIH is housed, roughly 20,000 positions have been eliminated as part of a broader restructuring, according to federal estimates. According to the Associated Press, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has said the changes are intended to shift focus from what he calls “ideological research” toward major diseases and to streamline operations in a tighter budget environment.

For workers like Tuck, the result has been months of unemployment, underemployment and cross-country moves in an already competitive job market.

Tuck, who grew up in Parkersburg and later moved to Washington, D.C., describes herself as “a scientist by training” whose specialty is getting young people excited about science and helping teachers bring current research into the classroom.

She first joined the federal government in 2014 as a fellow, then spent several years working in science education at a genomics-focused institute. She returned to the government in 2022 after a stint in the nonprofit sector.

Tuck said she spent more than a year and a half navigating federal hiring rules to build what she called her “dream team” — staff with backgrounds in education, curriculum design and teacher training.

Because several of those employees were still in their probationary period, she said, three were fired on Feb. 14 under early DOGE-related cuts.

“One of them had just moved to the Washington, D.C., area from her home in Alabama, where she had had a very stable and consistent job, but this was her dream job,” Tuck said. “It was the worst phone call I’ve ever had to have.”

On April 1, Tuck said, colleagues across her institute began receiving formal termination letters. Her team members got theirs; Tuck did not — at least not right away.

“Everyone around me knew that my name was on the termination list,” she said. “They told me, ‘You are terminated, but you don’t have a letter.’ It was just an extraordinarily frustrating experience, top to bottom.”

Her unit handled education and outreach related to genetics and the Human Genome Project. Tuck said she viewed the work as the bridge between taxpayer-funded research and the students, teachers and families it was meant to benefit.

After her termination, she said she did what many career counselors recommend: file for unemployment, cut expenses, lean on family and friends and start applying.

“I had to give up my apartment. I was couch surfing,” she said. “I applied for probably like 15, 20 crappy entry-level part-time jobs, and I got one.”

That first part-time position, scooping ice cream, covered little more than the storage unit where she kept her belongings.

“I was scooping ice cream this summer, and I have a graduate degree in science,” Tuck said. “We were doing whatever we could to pay bills.”

She estimates it took about five to six months to land that initial part-time role and nine to 10 months to secure a second part-time job. She still does not have a single full-time position.

Meanwhile, she said, the local job market in Washington, D.C., was flooded.

“In one fell swoop, there were 10,000 of us unemployed, and you’re all in the same area, all looking for jobs,” she said, referring to colleagues across NIH and other health agencies. “There were no jobs in Washington, D.C., so I’m relocating to New York City where I could find work.”

Tuck said she encountered “ghost job postings” — listings that remained online but never advanced to interviews — along with positions that offered wages far below what midcareer professionals typically earn, even as they contended with student loan and housing costs.

“It’s awkward and painful,” she said. “When you get a job, you’re obviously happy, but then it’s so painful to watch your friends not be able to find work in their areas.”

In the first weeks after the terminations, employees formed Signal chat groups to swap information on unemployment benefits, legal advice and job leads.

“There was this kind of lovely ‘we’re here for each other’ thing that was happening,” Tuck said. “But watching all of my colleagues lose their jobs and the impacts on their lives and their family — people were worried about paying their mortgages, taking their kids out of schools, selling cars. There were all these repercussions.”

Today, Tuck is juggling two part-time jobs and preparing to move to New York City, leaning on what she calls “a weird mix of gratitude and anger.”

“I have a job, I am moving forward, I have family, I have community, we have a future,” she said. “But it’s extremely difficult to not feel angry and bitter about what happened, and to know that this is not the end of the damage that they’re doing and causing.”

Gwen Sour can be reached at gsour@newsandsentinel.com