I am truly sorry for the loss of wife and mother this family has experienced and pray God comforts and strengthens them. The rest of their trials and tribulations are not from God but from Brandon's voluntary ignorance about drumpf / trump-vance, the gop / greed over people-republican party and the heritage foundation. All I can say to his continued support of those causing him and millions of others harm is DUH!!! And I have to wonder how he feels now that he has seen the reaction and actions of NOT MY pres drumpf / trump, NOT MY vp vance, the fascist heritage foundation, the drumpf/trump-vance administration, the gop / greed over people-republican party over charlie kirk's murder. It should be very clear to this man and his family how they are viewed by this administration and party in power. From the Washington Post.....
His wife was dying, his federal job crumbling. It tested his faith — in God and Trump
One federal worker was rejected three times from the administration’s early resignation offer. Would he blame the president he voted for?
PAHRUMP, Nev. — When the government’s resignation offer arrived, Edward Brandon Beckham had no way of knowing.
He was on leave caring for Mikel, his wife of 21 years, who was dying of colon cancer. Under the terms of Brandon’s absence from the federal Bureau of Land Management, he wasn’t expected to check his work email.
So Brandon, who goes by his middle name, had to learn from the news that the Trump administration was offering to let federal workers like him resign and get paid through September. In mid-April, he decided to accept.
Now, staring at his computer, Brandon, 45, read that he was too late. The offer had closed three days before.
Brandon looked at Mikel, across the living room in her hospital bed. She was asleep. Surely, he told himself, the new government run by President Donald Trump — the man Brandon voted for — wouldn’t penalize him for missing a message. He composed an email to his bosses just after 5 p.m.
“As my wife is continuing in Hospice and I am her continuing caretaker, at this time, I am formally requesting that I be placed on Administrative Leave until a deferred resignation date of Sept. 30, 2025,” Brandon wrote. “Considering my circumstances, I respectfully request that I be allowed to participate.”
That spring, Brandon was among hundreds of thousands of federal workers weighing whether to abandon public service. Trump had taken office vowing to slash the federal bureaucracy, then entrusted the task to billionaire Elon Musk and a newly created cost-cutting team called the Department of Government Efficiency. In a matter of months, Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service wiped out hundreds of thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in spending and the job security that once distinguished government work.
Of America’s 2.4 million federal workers, nearly 4 in 10 registered to vote had, like Brandon, cast ballots for Trump, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll. Brandon liked Trump’s vision for the country, which he thought reflected his own conservative values, and believed the president had a good shot at ending the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
But as the days passed, Brandon was becoming convinced that the Trump administration’s treatment of government employees — large-scale firings, emails he saw as harassing, and strict return-to-office mandates — was wrongheaded and cruel. If he was unable to resign, Brandon would be required to report to a federal building in Las Vegas more than 70 miles away. Round-trip, it would cost him three hours a day with his three children, for whom he would soon be the only parent and sole provider.
Brandon felt like he was witnessing two painful deaths: his wife’s, of course, but also that of his career. In his darkest moments, Brandon turned to his Bible — and next to it, his leather-bound diary.
“God is in control; … nothing we experience escapes His attention,” Brandon wrote in early March, citing the writings of Christian missionary Elisabeth Elliot. “I believe this,” he added, underlining “believe” twice, “which scares me all the more.”
Why was God doing this to him? Why was Trump doing this to him?
“I think He is going to let me fall & break,” Brandon wrote.
Four days after Brandon submitted his request to resign, a human resources officer responded.
“Per the department, you cannot be considered for this,” the email read, “since you missed the application window.”
ntil January, Brandon had felt hopeful about his professional future. After a decade bouncing between agencies, from lawyering at the Small Business Administration to handling contracts for the Defense Department, he’d found stability at the Bureau of Land Management. He loved his remote job, distributing funds to fix farm fences, clear hiking trails and remove rural brush. He saw chances to rise: In December, he’d been accepted into a graduate program in resource management at the University of Idaho. His supervisor had suggested he apply for a congressional leadership course.
Pahrump, where the family moved in 2021 after stints in Idaho and Maryland, was working out well. The children — Elias, 21; Hannah, 18; and Gabriel, 14 — liked school and their new friends. Brandon and Mikel owned a home mortgage-free. They joined a local church whose pastor and congregants they adored.
Mikel’s cancer meant it couldn’t last. Still, the doctors were astonished by her resilience. Mikel was feeling good, she told Brandon. Her appetite was strong. At times, she felt so healthy she’d turn to him and ask, “Are you sure God hasn’t cured me?”
For a while, Trump’s victory in November seemed another blessing. Brandon, a lifelong Republican who had voted twice for Trump — after writing in Rick Santorum in 2016 — didn’t always like how the president spoke, but he believed what he said.
Trump would stabilize and strengthen the American economy, Brandon thought. He would be a dominant leader on the world stage, forcing countries into peace agreements and trade deals. Brandon liked the president’s plan to streamline government and eliminate “waste, fraud and abuse,” too.
Then the Trump administration fired tens of thousands of probationary employees without justification. Musk instituted a weekly email requirement he said was necessary to see if lazy federal workers “had a pulse.” Federal employees’ mental health declined precipitously; a few died under stress or by suicide. Trump removed protections for public lands, leaving Brandon convinced that the president cared little about his agency or its mission. And every day, Brandon felt as if he read another article about DOGE culling more jobs in a bid to automate the workforce.
In February, Brandon applied for a clerkship at a local courthouse. He was rejected without an interview, which stung. His pastor told him to pray about joining the staff of Calvary Chapel Pahrump Valley, so he did. The ministry had always been his ultimate goal — but now, it didn’t feel right.
Brandon couldn’t save other people’s souls, he told himself. He couldn’t even save his career. And he couldn’t save Mikel.
One night in early April, he guided Mikel to the bathroom to empty her colostomy bag. She watched, shivering. Her face looked gray. Brandon took off his denim jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders.
Mikel caught his hand, brought it to her lips and kissed it. “Today I was thinking, and I remember going on walks with you,” she said, referring to strolls the couple took at Boise State University, where they met. “I realized: We’re not going to have those walks anymore.”
Brandon hid his tears. The next morning, he pulled out his journal and wrote down Mikel’s words, as best he could remember.
He hated watching Mikel slip toward death. But it would be worse, he knew, to miss it because he was driving to and from an office in Las Vegas. So when the government rejected his first resignation attempt, he took less than two hours to try again.
Brandon tapped out the email on his phone, sitting on the couch next to Mikel. This time, he applied both for the April resignation program and an earlier one, offered in January. He attached a screenshot of Trump administration guidance saying agencies could offer “reasonable extensions” to workers who “missed the ... deadline due to approved absence.”
“Please note, I am not seeking to be adversarial,” Brandon wrote in one message. That night, he sent another: “My request for extension is based on my being on approved leave because my wife of 21 years is dying.”
“This is exactly the type of request,” he added, “that objectively would fall within the characterization of reasonable.”
One morning in late April, Brandon’s daughter Hannah walked over to Mikel’s hospital bed to help feed her the first of 32 daily pills, cut in half for easy swallowing.
But Mikel wouldn’t wake. Still warm, she was gone.
That evening, after funeral home personnel had taken his wife’s body from the house, Brandon opened his laptop. He planned to tell his bosses about the death and request bereavement leave.
He saw an email waiting.
“You are expected to return to work in-person at BLM, Southern Nevada District Office,” the message said. It gave a Las Vegas address where Brandon would have to report “on a full-time basis starting on your first scheduled workday the week of June 15.”
Two days later, his phone rang with an unknown number. When he picked up, the caller introduced himself as a human resources officer at BLM.
“I just wanted to let you know they’re denying it,” Brandon remembered the officer saying about his request to resign.
“Do they know my wife passed?” Brandon recalled asking.
“No, I told them that,” the officer said.
“Dude,” Brandon said. “That’s, like, sick cold.”
“I know,” the officer said. “I’m just the middle man.”
That evening, Brandon tried to apply for deferred resignation for a third time. He emailed a handful of the most senior people he could think of, including the BLM chief of staff and a top human capital officer. Brandon asked to be let into the first offer, or the second; he didn’t mind which.
Over the next several days, Brandon’s request was forwarded through layers of management. Reading the chain later, Brandon noticed one administrator’s signature, its words colored neon red and blue: “Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, for all the people you can, while you can!”
A week after Mikel’s death, still waiting for an answer, Brandon opened his laptop again. He had received little sympathy, but perhaps it would help to show some.
“I understand this to be an issue far above everyone’s pay-grades,” he wrote. “I don’t view this as having anything to do with the BLM.”
He bolded the sentence, then typed another: “I understand it to be an issue of policy and discretionary decisions being made at a much higher level.”
“I have 10 years of service with the Federal government,” Brandon wrote. “This is a very cold response. … I just want to focus on caring for my 3 kids right now, focus on the details for my wife’s memorial service.”
Recently, he’d been wondering: how high?
Much of Trump’s presidency wasn’t working out as Brandon had hoped.
Trump’s immigration policies were scaring Gabriel, who came home from school talking about Hispanic classmates who expected to be deported. The president’s tariffs had also upset the 14-year-old: He’d planned to launch a website selling his own line of clothing — sweatpants, tees and sweatshirts branded Love Inspo. But Trump’s trade war meant Gabriel couldn’t calculate prices and shipping rates, so he’d had to delay.
Brandon didn’t like Trump’s attitude toward the Supreme Court, either. The court had ordered the president to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran man living in Maryland who was wrongly deported to El Salvador. But Trump had declined to do so.
Brandon, who earned a law degree from the University of the District of Columbia, found this disrespectful. Trump was ignoring both the court and the man’s due process rights, he felt. (Abrego was returned to the United States in June, then arrested again, and now faces new deportation proceedings.)
Maybe, Brandon thought for the first time, he had made a mistake in voting for Trump. But he wanted to believe the results would justify some temporary pain.
On May 1, the government rejected his third attempt to resign in a two-sentence email: “The request for consideration of … acceptance at this time has been denied by the Department.”
The next day, Brandon pulled out his journal.
“I have serious concerns about the Pres. Trump’s commitment to en,” he wrote, then broke off.
Three lines lower, he started again: “I’m see” — but crossed it out.
“I’m begin,” he wrote two lines beneath that.
Near the bottom of the page, he finished the thought.
“I’m disappointed in this administration, specifically Pres. Trump’s failure as a leader,” he wrote. Trump, Brandon scrawled, was “abandoning his commitment to ensuring that the common person is protected.”
Fifteen days after Mikel’s death, Brandon’s phone buzzed with a call from the funeral home director. Finally, he thought: It was time to pick up his wife’s remains.
But that wasn’t why the woman was calling.
“We haven’t been able to verify Mikel’s insurance,” Brandon remembered her saying, stumbling slightly over the words. “So we haven’t cremated her.”
Brandon almost dropped the phone. He told himself not to picture his wife’s body lying in storage. When he could speak again, he asked: “Why not?”
“Well, I’ve called two to three times a day,” the director said, “but we haven’t been able to get a hold of OPM.”
OPM was the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm. Mikel had been a federal worker, too, employed by the same agency as Brandon. Because of that, Brandon had told the funeral home staff, her government life insurance could cover the cost of cremation. But the funeral home’s policies required hearing directly from OPM to verify the coverage — and OPM wasn’t picking up the phone, the director told him.
Brandon hung up and tried OPM himself. Nine times, he said, a robotic recording suggested he try again later. On the 10th ring, another automated voice said Brandon should expect to wait 10 minutes. Forty-five minutes later, a human being answered.
Brandon thought about the time he’d called OPM during the Biden administration, when his wife first became too sick to work. Someone had picked up immediately, he remembered, and helped him negotiate Mikel’s early retirement and disability benefits.
Now the woman on the line sounded tired, Brandon thought. She promised someone would look into the matter and reply to the funeral home. But no one did. So on May 8, 16 days after Mikel died, Brandon charged $1,729.60 for her cremation to his credit card.
It was more than he made in a week.
Funeral home personnel confirmed Brandon’s recollection of the phone call, and his cremation purchase, and said they never heard back from OPM despite repeated attempts to reach the agency. Asked about the incident, an OPM official who would not provide their name to The Washington Post said the government paid “all life insurance benefits” due to Brandon following Mikel’s death. (OPM does not pay for expenses like cremation directly, the official said, although family members of the deceased can use federal life insurance payments to cover such costs.)
The OPM official added in a written statement that “call wait times ... is unfortunately an issue we’re frustrated with and predates this administration,” noting the agency is “working to create a more efficient system.”
A few days later, Brandon got ready to drive by himself through the desert at sunset. On Spotify, he clicked to a list of speeches from President John F. Kennedy, whose eloquence he found soothing. Scrolling, Brandon pressed play on “The President and the Press,” an address Kennedy gave to newspaper publishers 64 years ago.
Brandon backed the car out of his gravel driveway and started driving, the mountains looming purple over his shoulder. As he passed a gas station, then a casino, Kennedy declared no president should fear scrutiny from the press. Brandon recalled a clip he’d seen recently, in which Trump called an NBC News journalist a “jerk.”
“This administration intends to be candid about its errors,” Kennedy said. “For as a wise man once said: ‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’”
Brandon hit pause. Trump’s treatment of the federal workforce was clearly an error, he thought. The president had delegated authority to bad people, especially Musk and the young engineers running DOGE, who didn’t understand or care about the government and the people who made it function. But Trump had a lot to manage, Brandon thought. He probably didn’t know about everything Musk and DOGE were doing.
Suddenly, Brandon thought he knew why God was testing him: It was his job to help Trump correct the error, before it became a mistake.
As soon as he got home, he sat down to resign a fourth time. He addressed this email to the secretary of the interior and to Stephanie Holmes, the department’s acting chief human capital officer, who, he’d read, had run human resources for DOGE itself. These people had power, Brandon believed. So he asked them to use it.
“Please have some compassion on my situation,” he wrote, attaching a copy of his wife’s statement of death.
Almost two weeks later, the day before Gabriel’s graduation from eighth grade, Holmes replied to say he could resign. “Please find attached an agreement for your review and signature,” she wrote, signing off with “kind regards.”
Brandon’s prayers were answered, he thought.
He opened the PDF.
He had been accepted into the second resignation offer, which placed most employees on paid leave starting in late April, as Brandon understood it. He sat back, relieved. Under that schedule, he would receive what amounted to four weeks of badly needed back pay.
Brandon had run out of paid leave a few weeks earlier, so he was barely due to make any money in May. It was a blow, given his family was almost wholly reliant on his roughly $80,000-a-year income. But the pay provided under the resignation program would cover the missing month — signaling financial salvation.
As he kept reading the document, though, he felt his chest tighten.
Even though Brandon had been asking to resign since April 12, the department would count his resignation as taking effect more than four weeks later, meaning his paid leave wouldn’t start until May 21 at the earliest. He was out a full month’s pay after all.
Asked about Brandon’s resignation attempts and the details reported in this story, the Bureau of Land Management declined to comment. The White House referred comment to OPM. Holmes did not respond to a request for comment.
Around the same time, Brandon’s oldest son, Elias, finished his shift as a part-time janitor at Walmart and walked to the cereal section, where he picked out six 32-ounce bags of Colossal Crunch and Dyno-Bites. He crossed to another aisle and grabbed three 24-packs of ramen.
It’d be enough, he figured, to feed his family for two weeks.
A few days before, Brandon had pulled him aside to tell him he’d run out of paid leave. “I only got paid $900,” Brandon had said. “You’re probably going to have to help pay for some things.”
They never talked more about it. But checking their pantry, Elias saw Brandon had purchased a $10 bag of food for the family’s three dogs, instead of the usual $50 container. And four rolls of single-ply toilet paper instead of the typical 36-pack of Cottonelle.
Now, looking at his own grocery cart piled with cereal and ramen, Elias — the liberal in the family, and the only one who didn’t believe in God — wondered again about Brandon’s admiration for Trump. The president’s policies were hurting them, Elias thought. Why couldn’t his father see it?
Brandon had begun taking Elias on drives recently, to run errands or just ride through the desert, talking. Elias suspected his father missed driving with Mikel. Elias missed her, too. But in her absence, Elias was opening up more to Brandon. And his father was listening.
Elias wanted to become a firefighter, he’d recently confided. Brandon promised to take him to the gym so he could get in shape for the job. Brandon shared how discouraged he felt by the government’s repeated refusals to let him take the deferred resignation offer. Elias told him to keep trying.
Most conversations eventually turned to politics. Brandon brought up whatever the president had done that day, seeking his son’s opinion. Elias often responded by asking questions: “Do you still believe that?” “Do you see Donald Trump any differently now?” And, again and again: “If you could do it over again, would you still vote for Trump?”
Discourse was the way to change his father’s mind, Elias had decided. His dad, Elias realized, was like him: He didn’t want to be told what to think.
Elias was making progress, he thought. Brandon kept saying it was unfair to revisit the election with the benefit of hindsight. But he also said that, if he’d known Trump would do illegal things, he wouldn’t have voted for him.
he day of Mikel’s memorial service dawned hot and dry. Inside the chapel, decorated with flowers from Home Depot and a handmade quilt, her three children made it through their speeches without tears.
But Brandon, reading from a piece of paper, couldn’t get past the sentence that started: “Love never fails.”
When his father broke down for a third time, Elias rose and walked onto the stage. He held Brandon in an embrace that lasted almost a minute. He stayed there, one hand on his father’s shoulder, until he finished.
After both men sat down, Calvary Chapel’s lead pastor, John Gundacker, took the lectern. Mikel was a fighter, he said, who had finished her race. He’d been thinking about what she would have said today, if she could have spoken. Then he addressed Mikel’s husband and children one by one.
“We haven’t finished our race, our course isn’t complete,” the pastor told Brandon. “So we continue to fight the good fight, because that’s the exhortation that I believe Mikel would give us.”
Brandon nodded. He thought about all his attempts to resign. He’d sent another email the morning before Mikel’s service, accepting the government’s offer but urging Stephanie Holmes to do what he saw as the right thing and grant him the April back pay. He’d quoted Kennedy’s speech about errors and mistakes.
“If my case is any reflection of the general way some Federal employees are being treated by this Administration’s Leadership,” Brandon had written, “then I pray the Administration learns from what I’ve endured and properly correct errors that are being made, so that these errors do not become willful mistakes that tarnish the legacy and leadership of this Administration.”
Brandon was fighting, he thought. Just like Mikel would have wanted.
The pastor looked at Elias. “Your mom’s prayer, in her heart,” he said, “was that you would come into a personal relationship with Jesus.”
Elias kept his face blank. He had expected this. He didn’t like the pressure, but he was used to it.
A few hours after the service, Brandon got in the car, asking Elias to ride with him. As they drove past fast-food chains and mobile homes, interspersed with stretches of desert, Brandon started talking about Trump. On the campaign trail, he said, the president seemed controlled and statesmanlike. But now, back in office, he was “attacking” people.
“He needs to adjust in some significant ways,” Brandon said, “like how he leads.”
They reached the outskirts of town, passing a sign listing the distance to Las Vegas.
Elias thought about what the pastor said that morning. It was true that his mother wanted him to believe Jesus Christ died for mankind’s sins. But it was also true, Elias thought, that she liked her son the way he was. She liked how he treated other people with dignity. She liked that Elias accepted those from different backgrounds and ethnicities. That, he thought, was another way of being Christian.
He considered a moment. Then Elias said something he hoped would make his mother proud.
“Donald Trump is really good at finding what people want, and, like, sticking to that, which is obviously why he won,” he told his father. “But I almost feel like that’s a little bit dangerous. Don’t you think? Someone who’s willing to just say what’s popular?”
Brandon paused. He guided the car onto a mostly empty highway. He said again that Trump needed to make changes — to “temper himself,” which would help not only his reputation, but the country. Still, Brandon said, the president’s fundamental approach to everything wasn’t wrong.
“I think what I’m saying, the point I’m making about how he’s bringing in his business mentality — that is who he is,” Brandon told his son. “You know what I mean? He is who he is. … There’s a genuineness to that.”
It was too soon, Brandon felt, to give up on Trump’s vision for America. The president was a strong leader, making difficult decisions as he fought for a better future. Some people were going to suffer along the way. It was okay, Brandon decided, if he and his family were among those hurt.
Trump, he told Elias, still had his support.
The next morning brought a final email from Holmes: The government would not grant Brandon’s plea for back pay.
About this story
Audio by Bishop Sand. Animations by Daron Taylor. Story editing by Mike Madden. Photo editing by Max Becherer. Design by Tyler Remmel. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Project editing by Ana Carano. Copy editing by Anne Kenderdine and Phil Lueck.
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