When Andrea Geller got a job working in the mailroom at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda at age 21, she was ecstatic. For 31 years, the federal agency was her happy place.
“I loved the mailroom, and I loved making friends and getting to talk to them every day,” Geller, 52, told Bethesda Today in a recent interview at her apartment in Rockville.
But in April, she was one of thousands of NIH employees laid off by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. While Geller had some warning and assistance from her supervisors, there was nothing they could do to keep her job secure…