Tldr: dodged a bullet when 60% of my coworkers in the same category as me were suddenly dismissed just before Thanksgiving.

I'm a retired military guy and I work for a pretty big consulting firm for a pretty big federal client. Our contract was up for recompetition and the government decided that instead of recompeting they would just extend us by a couple of years but asked us to "reprice."

When I first was hired during the pandemic there was a lot of angst between us and the client. Several of the civil service people were pretty hostile towards the contract force, and this combined with the general difficulty of getting people to do in-office full-time work meant we had a lot of churn. Some positions went through three people in 2 years.

Eventually things settled down in part because my company and the client agreed to bring in more senior people who could work at the level they wanted (and, of course, the senior people are getting paid more than the originally envisioned mid-level folks).

Of the almost two dozen of us on the contract, five people including me are in elevated positions, where we were bumped up to a higher level than the contract originally specified. We ranged from 15 to 30 years of experience, with most people being over 20 years experience.

And this was working fine until time for the contract renewal. The government waited until the last minute (the contract expires the first of December, and then the day before Thanksgiving decided that they would approve it but that three of the five people in elevated positions needed to be removed because they didn't want to pay that much anymore.

So three people got "Happy Thanksgiving, turn in your stuff and don't bother coming back on Monday" speeches.

Two of us survived the culling. But both of us assume it's a matter of time before they decide to reprice our positions and boot us too.

Lesson learned: whether you are a junior employee or a senior employee, whether you are doing good work or not, whether you are liked or not doesn't really matter. You can be arbitrarily dropped at any moment. Act accordingly.

Edit: typo