Coastal Georgia IRS worker voted for Trump. Then he lost his job.

Back in March, Glynn County resident Ryan Amick found himself at a fork in the road. He had received an email from the Department of the Treasury offering deferred resignation from his job at the Internal Revenue Service. He could get paid through Oct. 1 if he agreed to step down immediately from a job that he loved. 

He consulted with his wife and finally decided that, given the chaos wrought by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency in the federal workforce, he should take the offer. “Either I take this now, it’s a deferred resignation to where I go on administrative leave and they pay me all the way up until the end of September, or I stay, continue to look for a job, and I risk getting cut and lose everything,” he told his wife. 

His emotions were all over the place. He felt angry about potentially losing his job, but also betrayed by the man he elected in 2024 to run the country. Above all, he was uneasy about what could happen to the country’s ability to pay for the budget if the officers he trained at the IRS Criminal Investigation Training Academy in Glynn County were weakened or also forced out. 

“We’re going after the guys that are doing tax evasion, tax fraud, crypto, you know, all that stuff. We’re going to go after the guys that are doing millions of dollars of money laundering and tax evasion, like moving your money from crypto to different accounts or or people scamming the elderly,” said Amick about his now former colleagues. ”That’s who the CI agents are going after.”

Amick is one of the thousands of federal workers who have retired early or lost their jobs in the name of government efficiency. Many of them worked at divisions located at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), which is one of three such centers in the United States.

Amick’s former IRS division plays a vital role in fighting both domestic and international financial corruption. In 2024, the criminal investigative unit recovered $9.1 billion in fraudulent proceeds while costing U.S. taxpayers less than $800 million, according to Forbes magazine.

Neither FLETC nor the IRS Training Academy responded to multiple requests for comment. 

A veteran who found life outside the service to be alien

Amick was born in Brunswick but left when he was 18 for a two-decade career in the Air Force working on fighter jets during the Global War on Terror.

Now 41, Amick returned to the Golden Isles after retiring from military duty, looking for stability during an unsettling time. 

“When I first got into the private sector working, it was stressful. I mean, it was a culture shock,” Amick shared.

His first job out of the military was as the general manager at Chick-fil-A. The workplace culture shocks, however, were too great for him to continue with the fast-food company.

For a while, he lived off his veteran’s benefits and military retirement pay. Then he landed a job at FLETC, the place that he had heard of his whole life as an employer that local folks aspired to. 

His first position was training the uniformed police, including the U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Capitol Police, Federal Air Marshals, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

He oversaw approximately a dozen classes, each with 40 students. He handled administrative tasks such as managing reports, overseeing academics, proctoring exams, organizing graduations and orientations and resolving any administrative issues that arose. He was the liaison between the students and the agencies that trained their prospective recruits at FLETC. 

After nine months, he applied for a training position at the IRS Criminal Investigation division, which supported critical efforts against drug and human trafficking, terrorism financing, tax crimes, financial crimes and money laundering.

He transferred to that position in December 2023 and worked with officers to improve their skills to conduct federal tax investigations.

‘Not the way I expected it to be handled’

Amick was one of the 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in November 2024. He was angry at the way former President Biden’s administration had handled the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and he said he couldn’t vote for Kamala Harris. 

Then, on Jan 20, on his first day in the White House, Trump ordered a freeze on hiring civilian federal government employees and directed the Office of Management and Budget and Elon Musk’s so-called efficiency experts to reduce the size of the federal government’s workforce. 

The work of DOGE and the so-called fork in the road email from the agency that oversees the federal workforce was what upended Amick’s life, he said.

“I’m a firm believer in cutting wasteful spending. I’m all for it. But in my personal opinion, I think the way they went about it, as far as basically taking a hatchet and just cutting things out without really understanding what people do, was the wrong way to do it,” Amick said. 

From there, the turmoil accelerated, he said. 

Emails from the Office of Personnel Management kept coming, while the leaders of the IRS appeared helpless to defend their staff.

Amick received the email demanding that he list five things he accomplished every week — a demand that didn’t bother him much, since he was used to writing reports from his time in the military.

But soon, the lack of clarity over his or anyone’s future got to be too much.

The mental toll of the uncertainty got to Amick. His training position was classified as temporary, and he did not see a way to make his employment permanent with the budget cuts looming. FLETC had already cut back on the overall number of classes as well as the number of people attending them for the year.

When the Department of the Treasury’s email came with the offer of resignation, he was worn down.  

“I told my wife that after 22 years total in the federal government, you get used to being, for lack of a better term, jerked around, and you just kind of go with it at no notice, and you get used to that lifestyle. I’m like, I don’t want to deal with that no more,” he said. 

Full circle moment 

Amick was the only person in his agency to accept the deferred resignation. Another colleague, however, was let go three weeks before her probationary period ended, leaving her with no legal recourse to fight against dismissal.

During the spring, Amick was determined to find new work. It was tougher than he was expecting, however.

He sent his resume to job sites like Indeed and applied for approximately 200 job listings.

In May, he landed a job at ATI Inc., a contractor that works with FLETC. The development, Amick says, is full of irony.

His new job is much like his old one: He manages a training contract for IRS officers, except now he does it as a private contractor, rather than a public servant. 

His salary is more than he was earning as a federal employee. In addition to his military and deferred resignation payments, his current salary reaches six figures with all income sources. 

Although Amick has landed a new job, he remains frustrated and worried about the scores of military veterans like him whose lives have been upended through the federal government upheaval. These public servants, he said, deserve more respect.

“A good percentage of all these federal workers are veterans. And you got an administration that states that, ‘Oh, we want to take care of our veterans. ’ Well, you’re not taking care of them if you’re just blindly cutting them all,” said Amick. “You’re basically painting the picture that these federal workers are lazy. These guys did anywhere between four to six to 20 years serving their country, and they go into the federal government because they’re accustomed to that lifestyle.”