Michaela’s husband is away 14 hours a day amid Trump’s ban on remote work, the threat of layoffs is ever-present and their health premiums are set to multiply

Michaela felt a sharp pain shoot from her hip while she bent over to water some plants in early May 2025. Then she fell over and couldn’t get back up.

Her husband called an ambulance and she spent the night in a hospital, where, at 57, she found out she had a mass on her spine. It was metastatic breast cancer.

“I had no warning that that was going to happen, and I was devastated. At first, I didn’t clearly understand that it was part of my breast cancer that had metastasized to my spine, which I learned was a common place for it to go,” she said.

“If I were to die prematurely, I could not imagine leaving [my husband] here. We really don’t have any family. We don’t have any children.”

When Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Michaela’s husband prepared to be forced back into the office at the Department of Transportation in Washington DC. He had worked remotely since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, from their home outside Baltimore.

On Trump’s first day in office on 20 January, he issued an executive order demanding all federal agencies terminate all remote work arrangements. The office of personnel management directed federal agencies to enact the order despite collective bargaining contracts with federal unions.

“My husband’s a veteran with the administration, and he’s an expert in his field. He’s been doing this for 20 years more now, so it’s exhausting for him. We’re in our 50s. He was leaving the house at five o’clock in the morning and getting home at seven at night,” Michaela said. The Guardian is not using Michaela’s real name since her husband still works in the Department of Transportation and fears retaliation.

In July, Michaela had surgery, a laminectomy. A few weeks after that, she had stereotactic radiation, and is currently on an oncology regimen called Kisqali and hormone therapy.

She had stage one breast cancer in 2014, but was able to treat it, as it was caught early, with a partial lumpectomy, radiation, chemotherapy and tamoxifen, a hormonal therapy. Through regular checkups, she stayed on top of it, before her recent diagnosis of stage four metastatic breast cancer.