After he applied to his 599th job, John Burg stopped counting. Burg was laid off as a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development in January 2025, after a decades-long career that took him to Thailand, Kosovo and El Salvador. He was one of more than 300,000 federal workers and contractors whose jobs were eliminated by the Department of Government Efficiency. One year, one massive spreadsheet of job leads and only a handful of interviews later, Burg has returned to the job he