By MATT SEDENSKY, AP National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — HIRING: Park ranger. SEEKING: Nuclear submarine engineer. WANTED: Sled dog musher.

If they seem unlikely postings, they probably are. But a laid-off federal worker can dream.

Axed from jobs not easily found outside government, thousands of federal workers caught in President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting efforts now face a difficult search for work.

“If you’re doing, say, vegetation sampling and prescribed fire as your main work, there aren’t many jobs,” says Eric Anderson, 48, of Chicago, who was fired Feb. 14 from his job as a biological science technician at Indiana Dunes National Park.

All the years of work Anderson put in — the master’s degree, the urban forestry classes, the wildfire deployments — seemed to disappear in a single email dismissing him.

He’s hoping there’s a chance he’s called back, but if he isn’t, he’s not sure what he’ll do next. He was so consumed with his firing that he broke a molar from grinding his teeth. But he knows he’s caught in something larger than himself, as the new administration unfurls its chaotic cost-cutting agenda.

“This is someone coming in and tossing a hand grenade and seeing what will happen,” he says.

The federal job cuts are the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by billionaire Elon Musk, who has been tearing through agencies looking for suspected waste. No official tally of firings has been released, but the list stretches into the thousands and to nearly every part of the country. More than 80% of the federal government’s 2.4-million-person civilian workforce is based outside of the Washington area.

Cathy Nguyen, 51, of Honolulu, was laid off last month from her job at USAID, where she helped manage the PEPFAR program, which combats HIV/AIDS.

Her firing not only brought the turmoil of finding new health insurance, halting saving for retirement and her kids’ college education, and trimming spending for things like the family subscription to Disney Plus — it also has forced her to reconsider her career goals.

PEPFAR is a landmark effort that stretches across dozens of countries and is credited with saving some 26 million lives. Nothing rivals it. So where does a former PEPFAR worker go?

“It’s requiring me to rethink how I want to spend my professional life,” Nguyen says.

As specialized as Nguyen’s work has been, Mitch Flanigan may have her beat.

Flanigan, 40, was assigned to the sled dog kennels at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska until he was fired Feb. 14. It never brought a huge paycheck, but where else could he get to work as a dog musher against such a breathtaking panorama?

He has appealed his firing with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.

“I still kind of want to fight for the job that I lost,” he says. “I’m not really making much money, it’s just fun and it’s a unique thing to be a part of.”

A November report from the Federal Salary Council, which advises on government pay, found that federal salaries were one-fourth lower than those in the private sector.

A Congressional Budget Office report released last year found pay disparities depended on workers’ education. Federal workers with a high school diploma or less outearned their private-sector counterparts with 17% higher wages, the CBO found. That edge disappeared among better-educated workers. Workers with bachelor’s degrees had wages 10% lower than the private sector and those with professional degrees or doctorates earned 29% less. Federal benefits were vastly better than the private sector for the lowest-educated workers, the CBO found, and about even for the highest-educated workers.

Many laid off from federal positions were drawn by stability, benefits and, more than anything, the opportunity to do work they might not be able to do anywhere else. Now, everyone from diplomats to public health workers are flooding the job market looking for suitable positions.

Gracie Lynne, a 32-year-old fellow at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who lives in Eugene, Oregon, took a pay cut when she started her job four years ago.

Her parents lost their home during the Great Recession, which led to their divorce, years of financial angst, and Lynne’s own interest in financial regulation. She found herself following the nascent CFPB’s rulemaking and poring over 1,000-page bills on bank regulations. She wrote her master’s thesis on the bureau. She couldn’t pass up the job.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she told herself.

Plus, she thought, the benefits would come in handy when she and her husband decided to start a family. Now, six months pregnant, she finds herself jobless and scrambling to get insured.

She isn’t sure where she’ll land, or if she’ll find many employers rushing to hire someone about to become a mother. But she feels more committed than ever to the work she did.

“I feel even more compelled to stay in the public sector after this experience,” she says, noting the good work protecting consumers she was every day, “to stay in the fight.”

Luke Tobin, a 24-year-old forestry technician who worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest, who was fired from his job Feb. 14, finds the accusations of waste by Musk and others laughable. He sees extreme understaffing and threadbare budgets.

He earned about $19 an hour and was furloughed for about half of the year but still relished a job that had him backpacking in remote areas for days at a time.

Scrambling to find a replacement job, he’s put in dozens of applications. He has pursued openings on tree farms, at tree-trimming companies and at nurseries, but so far, has only heard back from two employers on two minimum-wage jobs: one as an Amazon delivery person and the other as a line cook at a fried chicken restaurant.

“I need a job,” he says, “any job.”

Associated Press writer Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.

Roberta Flack, the Grammy-winning singer and pianist whose intimate vocal and musical style made her one of the top recordings artists of the 1970s and an influential performer long after, died Monday. She was 88.

Singer Roberta Flack poses for a portrait in New York on Oct. 10, 2018. (Photo by Matt Licari/Invision/Associated Press)

She died at home surrounded by her family, publicist Elaine Schock said in a statement. Flack announced in 2022 she had ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and could no longer sing.

Little known before her early 30s, Flack became an overnight star after Clint Eastwood used “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” as the soundtrack for one of cinema’s more memorable and explicit love scenes, between the actor and Donna Mills in his 1971 film “Play Misty for Me.” The hushed, hymn-like ballad, with Flack’s graceful soprano afloat on a bed of soft strings and piano, topped the Billboard pop chart in 1972 and received a Grammy for record of the year.

“The record label wanted to have it re-recorded with a faster tempo, but he said he wanted it exactly as it was,” Flack told The Associated Press in 2018. “With the song as a theme song for his movie, it gained a lot of popularity and then took off.”

In 1973, she matched both achievements with “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” becoming the first artist to win consecutive Grammys for best record.

She was a classically trained pianist discovered in the late 1960s by jazz musician Les McCann, who later wrote that “her voice touched, tapped, trapped, and kicked every emotion I’ve ever known.” Versatile enough to summon the up-tempo gospel passion of Aretha Franklin, Flack often favored a more reflective and measured approach.

For Flack’s many admirers, she was a sophisticated and bold new presence in the music world and in the social and civil rights movements of the time, her friends including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Angela Davis, whom Flack visited in prison while Davis faced charges — for which she was acquitted — for murder and kidnapping. Flack sang at the funeral of Jackie Robinson, major league baseball’s first Black player, and was among the many guest performers on the feminist children’s entertainment project created by Marlo Thomas, “Free to Be … You and Me.”

Roberta Cleopatra Flack, the daughter of musicians, was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. A gospel fan as a child, she was so talented a piano player that at age 15 she received a full scholarship to Howard, the historically Black university.

Flack’s other hits from the 1970s included the cozy “Feel Like Makin’ Love” and two duets with her close friend and former Howard University classmate Donny Hathaway, “Where Is the Love” and ”The Closer I Get to You” — a partnership that ended in tragedy. In 1979, she and Hathaway were working on an album of duets when he suffered a breakdown during recording and later that night fell to his death from his hotel room in Manhattan.

“We were deeply connected creatively,” Flack told Vibe in 2022, upon the 50th anniversary of the million-selling “Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway” album. “He could play anything, sing anything. Our musical synergy was unlike (anything) I’d had before or since.”

She never matched her first run of success, although she did have a hit in the 1980s with the Peabo Bryson duet “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” and in the 1990s with the Maxi Priest duet “Set the Night to Music.” In the mid-90s, Flack received new attention after the Fugees recorded a Grammy-winning cover of “Killing Me Softly,” which she eventually performed on stage with the hip-hop group.

Overall, she won five Grammys (three for “Killing Me Softly”), was nominated eight other times and was given a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2020, with John Legend and Ariana Grande among those praising her.

“I love that connection to other artists because we understand music, we live music, it’s our language,” Flack told songwriteruniverse.com in 2020. “Through music we understand what we are thinking and feeling. No matter what challenge life presents, I am at home with my piano, on a stage, with my band, in the studio, listening to music. I can find my way when I hear music.”

In 2022, Beyoncé placed Flack, Franklin and Diana Ross among others in a special pantheon of heroines name-checked in the Grammy-nominated “Queens Remix” of “Break My Soul.”

Flack was briefly married to Stephen Novosel, an interracial relationship that led to tension with each of their families, and earlier had a son, the singer and keyboardist Bernard Wright. For years, she lived in Manhattan’s Dakota apartment building, on the same floor as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who became a close friend and provided liner notes for a Flack album of Beatles covers, “Let It Be Roberta.” She also devoted extensive time to the Roberta Flack School of Music, based in New York and attended mostly by students between ages 6 to 14.

Flack had taught music in D.C.-area junior high schools for several years in her 20s, while performing after hours in clubs. She sometimes backed other singers, but her own shows at Washington’s renowned Mr. Henry’s attracted such celebrity patrons as Burt Bacharach, Ramsey Lewis and Johnny Mathis. The club’s owner, Henry Yaffe, converted an apartment directly above into a private studio, the Roberta Flack Room.

“I wanted to be successful, a serious all-round musician,” she told The Telegraph in 2015. “I listened to a lot of Aretha, the Drifters, trying to do some of that myself, playing, teaching.”

Flack was signed to Atlantic Records and her debut album, “First Take,” a blend of gospel, soul, flamenco and jazz, came out in 1969. One track was a love song by the English folk artist Ewan MacColl: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written in 1957 for his future wife, singer Peggy Seeger. Flack not only knew of the ballad, but used it while working with a glee club during her years as an educator.

“I was teaching at Banneker Junior High in Washington, D.C. It was part of the city where kids weren’t that privileged, but they were privileged enough to have music education. I really wanted them to read music. First, I’d get their attention. (Flack starts singing a Supremes hit) ‘Stop, in the name of love.’ Then I could teach them!” she told the Tampa Bay Times in 2012.

“You have to do all sorts of things when you’re dealing with kids in the inner-city,” she said. “I knew they’d like the part where (‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’) goes ‘The first time ever I kissed your mouth.’ Ooh, ‘Kissed your mouth!’ Once the kids got past the giggles, we were good.”

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