WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he feels "very badly" for the thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs in recent weeks but that "many of them don't work at all."

After mass firings at the General Services Administration, DOGE issued remaining staff an app to take up the excess work — but severely limited its use to a handful of repetitive tasks.

NBC Washington asked government workers and contractors to weigh in on the impact of the cuts. Some feel "a punch in the gut."

Many federal workers are unable to get unemployment benefits because of the wording of their firings, and others are uncertain whether they can seek new jobs.

Departing officials, including disabled veterans, defend themselves and thousands of fired federal colleagues' work with defiant, indignant letters, creating a written record of a tumultuous time.

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has deployed a proprietary chatbot called GSAi to 1,500 federal workers at the General Services Administration, WIRED has confirmed. The move to automate tasks previously done by humans comes as DOGE continues its purge of the federal workforce.

To billionaire Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team at the Department of Government Efficiency, Karen Ortiz may just be one of many faceless bureaucrats representative of federal waste.

Karen Ortiz, an administrative judge at the EEOC, went public with her concerns about mass firings and adminstration efforts to pause all LGBTQ discrimination cases, achieving an unusual moment of celebrity.