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With every passing day of the government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal employees furloughed or working without pay face mounting financial strain. And now they are confronting new uncertainty with the Trump administration’s promised layoffs. Little progress has been made to end the shutdown as it enters its third week, with Republicans and Democrats digging in and convinced their messaging is resonating with voters. The fate of the federal workers is among several pressure points that could eventually push the sides to agree to resolve the stalemate. Luckily, I was able to pay rent this month, said Peter Farruggia, a furloughed federal worker. But for sure I am going to have bills that are going to go unpaid this month, and I really dont have many options. The shutdown has a familiar feel for many federal employees who endured past stalemates including during President Donald Trumps first term but this time, the stakes are higher. The Republican White House is leveraging federal workers jobs to pressure Democrats to soften their demands. The shutdown began on Oct. 1 after Democrats rejected a short-term funding fix and demanded that the bill include an extension of federal subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Trump and other Republican leaders have said the government must reopen before they will negotiate with Democrats on the health subsidies. Trump administration launches wave of layoffs Farruggia is the executive committee chair of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2883, representing employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency that faced a wave of layoffs over the weekend. Like 8,000 other CDC employees who have been furloughed from the agency, he was already living paycheck to paycheck, and the partial pay that arrived Friday was his last until the government comes back online. With the agency’s leadership in turmoil and still rattled from a shooting, the shutdown and new firings mean people are scared, nervous, anxious, but also really just exasperated, Farruggia said. After Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said last week on social media that the RIFs have begun, referring to reduction-in-force plans aimed at reducing the size of the federal government, Vice President JD Vance doubled down on the threat Sunday, saying the longer this goes on, the deeper the cuts are going to be.” The layoffs have begun across federal agencies. Labor unions have already filed a lawsuit to stop the move by Trumps budget office. In a court filing on Friday, the Office of Management and Budget said well over 4,000 federal employees from eight departments and agencies would be fired in conjunction with the shutdown. Jessica Sweet, an Albany, New York, Social Security claims specialist who is a union steward of AFGE Local 3343 in New York, said, I, myself, have a backup plan in case she is fired during the shutdown, but I know most people don’t. She says the Social Security Administration is already so short-staffed from layoffs earlier this year brought on by the Department of Government Efficiency, she doesn’t fear a massive layoff during the shutdown. The one thing this administration has taught me is that nothing is ever for certain, even if it’s codified into law,” she said. Having received a partial payment in her last paycheck, Sweet has begun reaching out to her local power companies to request that she not get charged late fees, since my bills won’t wait for me to eventually get paid. Shutdown drags on, and frustration grows For some federal workers, this isnt their first shutdown the last one, during Trumps first term in 2019, stretched a record 34 days. But this time, federal employees are being used more directly as leverage in the political fight over government funding. The Republican administration last week warned that there would be no guaranteed back pay for federal workers during a shutdowna reversal of long-standing policy affecting roughly 750,000 furloughed employees, according to a White House memo. The move, which Trump later backtracked on, was widely seen as a strong-arm tactic. Adam Pelletier, a National Labor Relations Board field examiner whose agency furloughed nearly all of its workforce on Oct. 1, going from roughly 1,100 workers to fewer than a dozen people, said he wouldn’t mind if the shutdown continued if it meant meaningful progress toward gaining health care protections for Americans across the country a key demand by Democrats for ending the stalemate. Pelletier, a union leader for NLRB local 3, said, Right now, nothing is being investigated at the NLRB. Theres no elections for unions or elections for decertifications. Basically, nothing is happening. As for the financial strain on workers, he said workers can’t even find alternate employment to weather the shutdown because “the ethics office that would approve of those requests is not staffed now.” Workers used as political pawns National Treasury Employees Union President Doreen Greenwald, which represents workers across dozens of federal agencies, said several of the union’s members had been laid off as of Friday. The Treasury Department would lose 1,446 workers, according to the filing. Greenwald said it was unfortunate that the Trump administration was using federal employees as political pawns by furloughing and proposing to fire them all to try to cuse pressure in a political game of chicken. This isnt about one party or the other. Its about real people, said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. The correction officer worrying about his next paycheck. The TSA officer who still shows up to work because he or she loves their country, even though theyre not getting paid. No American should ever have to choose between serving their country and feeding their family, Kelley said. Kelley and other major federal worker union leaders gathered blocks from the Capitol last week, urging congressional leaders to find a solution and put people over politics. The event grew emotional at times, with union heads outlining the difficulties facing their members and the stakes growing daily. Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, which represents 110,000 workers nationwide, called on both sides of Congress to find a resolution. He said Trump appeared to aim to degrade, frighten, antagonize hardworking federal employees. Chris Bartley, political program coordinator for the International Association of Fire Fighters, said thousands of firefighters were showing up for work without pay out of a sense of devotion but stressed that could have broader consequences. Families go without income,” Bartley said. Morale and retention suffer. Public safety is compromised. Fatima Hussein, Joey Cappelletti, Jesse Bedayn, and Safiyah Riddle, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
When you type a question into an AI search engine like ChatGPT or Google AI Mode and it comes up with an answer, that information comes from somewhere. Scouring the web for content thats contextually relevant to the asker, it typically assembles an answer based on several different sources, interpreted through the lens of its training data and system prompt. The fight over being one of those sources is the new game of online discovery thats replacing SEO. Typically called GEO or AEO for generative/answer engine optimization, the field is nascent, and the rules, best practices, and even the benefits arent entirely clear. Theres one thing everyone agrees on, though: Its growing rapidly. Growth markets are opportunities, so even if the rewards of appearing in AI search havent been fully established, both media companies and marketers want to understand GEO and potentially crack the code on being the answer, or at least fuel for the answer. The precise methodshow content optimization differs from SEO, how to leverage social and PR to improve your chances of appearing, how to build a system for understanding AI queriesare promising, but still being worked out. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Also being worked out? What to do when you win. The AI search rewards system The rewards for winning at search were clear. Earning a high rank in search results means people click to your site, interact with your content, and either give you ad impressions or convert into some kind of paying customer. As Ive written before, being cited in AI answers is more akin to advertising your brand than a viable business strategy. A win in GEO means successful reputation management. This of course is why many publishers prefer to block AI crawlers from indexing their sites at all. They may want to understand GEO, but theyre not interested in having their content serving as raw material for an AI layer they feel they have no stake in (licensing deals notwithstanding). For sites that do appear in AI search, willingly or unwillingly, a win means readers perceive your publication to be more authoritative. So what happens when you losesay, your competition gets cited instead of you? For both media and marketers, its a missed opportunity for your brand to appear in front of someone interested in your area of expertise. What is the value of that? Its easy to point at ChatGPTs 800+ million users and think its a lot, and it might be, but remember: queries arent the same as search terms. Theyre much more specific, and the tools for analyzing them are in the very early stages. Its difficult to understand if youre optimizing for an audience of one or one million. When the answer is wrong Theres another kind of loss that brands are finding intolerable: incorrect or damaging information in AI answers. This is becoming a more serious problem than when it happens in traditional search because its difficult to fix. An AI answer is amalgamated from several different sources, so the precise ranking of those sourcesranking is a huge deal in SEOdoesnt matter as much as the bad information simply being present. Worse, that information may be on Wikipedia or Reddit, two sites that are based on user-generated content, have byzantine systems for how content is created and promoted, and are newly influential in the age of AI. Since they are both huge repositories of human-created text on myriad topics, theyre extremely valuable to data-hungry large language models, and the big AI companies have awarded them a kind of favored status. Reddit, notably, has used this as leverage to negotiate deals with Google and OpenAI worth tens of millions every year. All of which is to say that dealing with a reputational problem in AI search is a new kind of difficult-to-crack crisis. At the recent MarCom Summit in Washington, D.C., marketers who specialize in dealing with problematic content on Wikipedia or Reddit told me theyre newly busy this past year. Who will benefit from ads in AI search? So at least one kind of business is making money from GEO. For everyone else, theyll likely have to wait until AI answers begin to incorporate ads in a meaningful way. This is inevitableChatGPT may have almost a billion users, but most arent paying a dime. Thats a massive untapped revenue stream. Perplexity has been experimenting with ads in answers for a year, and Google is slowly stapling ads into its AI experiences, too. Skeptics roll their eyes at AI answers adopting an advertising business model, criticizing the companies for being less interested in solving societal problems than making money from user attentionthe same old Silicon Valley playbook. However, there’s another perspective: You know how AI summaries provide links to sources? That same attribution can be used to apportion the revenue from any ads in the summary to those same sources. The AI media tech startup Dappier is building such a system, splitting revenue from ads in the answer with everyone who contributed to it. So while I understand the cynicism about advertising coming to AI engines, I cant help but be a little bit hopeful about it. Yes, ads are certainly coming to AI search, but the search engines might not necessarily hog all the rewards. Will there be enough money to go around? Not yet. But like I said, its a growth market. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing meda? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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The Trump administration has escalated its campaign to fire federal workers during the government shutdown, seizing the opportunity to further slash the already diminished Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Tuesday, the union that represents workers at the CDC said that the agencys workforce has already been reduced by a quarter since the beginning of the year. During the shutdown, the public health agency, which steered U.S. health policy through the pandemic, has found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration once again. Over the weekend, around 1,300 CDC employees received layoff notices. By Saturday, the agency rescinded roughly 700 of the planned terminations, saying that the additional unintended layoffs were due to a coding error. The CDC layoffs are part of a new round of mass layoffs that have reduced core parts of the federal government, including the Treasury Department, the Education Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which houses the CDC. In August, CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired after refusing to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives or fire health experts on her team, according to her legal team. Many of the CDCs top leaders followed her departure, resigning in protest and deepening the chaos roiling the nations public health agency. Life-and-death stakes Dismantling the CDC is clearly a top priority during Trumps second term, but the risks are huge. The agency, which was largely regarded as uncontroversial and essential until the COVID-19 pandemic, is tasked with protecting Americans from infectious diseases and other public health threats, both domestic and global. CDC employees involved in the response to the domestic measles outbreaks and an Ebola outbreak in central Africa were among those who were fired during the shutdown, but they have since had their layoff notices reversed. Other CDC workers werent so lucky, including analysts working to monitor biological and chemical threats, and members of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response who work with U.S. intelligence agencies on biodefense issues such as pandemics and weaponized pathogens, The Washington Post reported. Other employees in the same department ran biodefense drills and monitored natural disasters, infectious disease outbreaks, and cyberattacks on health facilities. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said late last week that all fired CDC employees were designated as nonessential, defending the decision to further diminish the agency. HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administrations Make America Healthy Again agenda, Nixon said. In a joint letter from the Infectious Diseases Society of America and other organizations focused on epidemiology, public health experts condemned the firings as a completely reckless act that may compromise the health of all Americans. For nearly eight decades, CDC has worked around the clock to protect Americans from a growing range of health threats, from rabies to food safety to Ebola, the organizations wrote. The agencys support of state and local health departments and healthcare professionals is the backbone of our nations public health response. Fighting the layoffs Two unions representing federal workers, the AFGE and AFSCME, filed a lawsuit to halt the layoffs and will await a San Francisco district judges decision after preliminary arguments on Wednesday. The unions argue that the Trump administration is “using federal employees as pawns to put political pressure on its political opposition, and they have asked for a temporary pause on the most recent firings. In previous government shutdowns, employees faced furloughs but were never fired en masse. “These illegal firings of our union members during a federal government shutdown are a callous attack on hardworking Americans and put the livelihoods, health, and safety of our members and communities at great risk,” AFGE Local 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs said in a call with reporters. Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance defended the mass firings on NBCs Meet the Press and blamed Democrats for the layoffs and the government shutdown. Vance misleadingly characterized the layoffs as necessary to keep other parts of the government funded and running, but many federal workers arent being paid during the shutdown. We have to lay off some federal workers in the midst of this shutdown to preserve the essential benefits for the American people that the government does provide, Vance said. That story conflicts with Trumps own. The president has hailed the shutdown as a golden opportunity to slash departments and programs that he doesnt agree with. “We’re ending some programs that we don’t want, Trump told reporters over the weekend. They happen to be Democrat-sponsored programs. But we’re ending some programs that we never wanted, and we’re probably not going to allow them to come back.
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