The year Trump broke the federal government
How DOGE and the White House carried out a once-unthinkable transformation of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy.
A State Department worker watched on television as President Donald Trump, hours into his second term, signed executive orders that halted relocation flights for Afghan refugees — which her office existed to coordinate. She wondered: What would happen now?
A Veterans Affairs staffer in that agency’s equity office watched Trump sign another document, this one outlawing diversity programs, and thought, “It’s over.” And in a Social Security building, a woman wandered over to her co-worker’s desk worried about Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for budget director. Vought said he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma,” she pointed out, and would soon decide which agencies to cut and by how much.
“It isn’t easy to fire federal employees,” her co-worker told her. “We have all these protections. We’ll be okay.”
He was wrong. The United States’ 2.4 million federal employees were about to get caught up in a once-unthinkable overhaul of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy, carried out in less than a year by one of the most polarizing presidents in American history.
Missions have shifted or shattered. Entire agencies were deleted. Nearly 300,000 employees were forced out of the federal workforce. The Trump administration froze or shut off billions of dollars in scientific research, gutted or eliminated offices and programs devoted to civil rights and diversity, rewrote the federal hiring system to reward loyalty to the president, and shrank Social Security while installing Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents in hundreds of new offices across the country.
More changes are coming: Trump officials are planning to cut tens of thousands of open positions from the Department of Veterans Affairs, downgrade performance ratings across the government, and replace the State Department’s traditional condemnation of torture and the persecution of minorities worldwide with scrutiny of abortion and youth gender transitioning in other countries.
Reached for comment, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston wrote in an emailed statement: “President Trump was given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from federal government. In less than a year in office, he has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer.”
A White House official who declined to give their name also shared 19 bullet points listing Trump’s accomplishments transforming the government in 2025. These included processing a record 2.5 million ratings claims at Veterans Affairs; ending the Biden-era Digital Equity Act, which, the official wrote, “provided billions in handouts based on race”; allowing fossil fuels to be used in federal buildings again; halting operations at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; terminating “all federal Fake News media contracts”; requiring that agencies cut 10 existing rules or regulations for every new rule introduced; downsizing the federal bureaucracy; ordering staff back to the office five days a week; and shuttering “radical and wasteful government sponsored” diversity programs.
Several federal agencies did not respond to requests for comment, including Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
This account of what happened inside the U.S. government in 2025 is based on a year’s worth of messages and interviews with more than 1,200 current and former federal workers. More than 200 also agreed to fill out a Washington Post survey asking about their experiences. Thirty participated in nearly 60 hours of video and phone interviews, with many speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs or their families.
This is their story.
CHAPTER I
Winter
Jan. 20, 2025
“Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis.”
Executive OrderGoogle searches for “federal workers return to office” spiked by 600 percent as soon as Trump ended remote work. Then instructions began to go out.
A Department of Health and Human Services staffer in the Southwest was given five days to move to D.C. A Defense Department worker had two months to report to an office in another state. In Pahrump, Nevada, a Bureau of Land Management employee received an email with the address of the nearest federal building: more than 70 miles away. Edward Brandon Beckham looked at his wife, dying of cancer in home hospice, and knew he couldn’t leave her to commute for three hours a day.
Workers turned a conference room in a Veterans Affairs office in California into desk space for six nurses. Veterans who called to confess thoughts of suicide could hear people speaking in the background. In the Southwest, a woman who conducted background investigations into federal applicants showed up to her new office to find she could hear every word of her co-workers’ conversations — and they could hear hers. She moved into a musty closet, closing the door.
A Customs and Border Protection employee, unable to locate a federal office building, started driving to an international airport that ran flights only on weekends. He walked and shuttled through miles of empty terminals each morning to a desk where he sat, all day, without seeing a single human face. After six months, he quit.
Jan. 20, 2025
“The Director of the Office of Management and Budget … shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government.”
Executive OrderThe FBI instructed janitorial staff in Quantico, Virginia, to paint over a colorful mural bearing the words “FAIRNESS,” “COMPASSION” and “DIVERSITY.” Pete Hegseth, the newly confirmed defense secretary, ordered an end to Black History Month celebrations. IT workers at the Transportation Department scraped every mention of “DEI” from their website.
The Social Security Administration shuttered its Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity, where 150 people handled civil rights complaints and harassment cases, and made accommodations for those with disabilities, both SSA workers and members of the public. One disabled staffer learned of the closure by reading media reports and, fighting tears, called her supervisor on his personal number. He knew no more than she did, he said.
At NASA, a worker emailed her office’s equal employment contact with a request. But the automated reply said the recipient “wasn’t found at nasa.gov.”
“It was just mad chaos from the start. And so every new thing that happened became this mode where you were just waking up every morning and being like, so what crazy thing is going to come down today? And it just became clear that nobody actually cared about us being able to do the meaningful work that we were doing before. And the best we could was just sort of try to survive.”
Dozens of Education Department staffers checked their email to find they were on leave “pursuant to the President’s executive order on DEIA.” One of them, Donna Bussell, couldn’t understand why: Her job was helping administer grants to support Native American students. Then she remembered. She’d once served as president of an affinity group for Native Americans and Alaskans at the department.
A Veterans Affairs psychologist heard from a man who ran treatment groups for LGBTQ+ veterans. He was quitting, he said, because VA had become “hostile.” The psychologist’s LGBTQ+ patients stopped showing up to their appointments.
Jan. 28, 2025
“If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce … Type the word ‘Resign’ into the body of this reply email. Hit ‘Send’.”
EMAIL TITLED “FORK IN THE ROAD”A National Guard employee and former lawyer responded with questions — How could this possibly work? Will the government be bound by it? He was careful not to type the word “resign.” A Veterans Affairs worker texted his wife: “It’s 100% a ‘here’s your chance to get out paid, you might not get that later.’” In Colorado, a Forest Service staffer opened his diary and wrote: “I advised as many people as I could not to take it. … I am coming to the realization that I have to fight back.”
In D.C., an Education Department staffer waited three weeks, then replied “resign,” because he was sure he’d get fired anyway. In Minnesota, Agriculture Department loan assistant James Barnebee resigned, too. It was an easy decision, even with four children: He had voted for Trump, who campaigned on reducing the size of the government. The president, Barnebee thought, was just doing what he promised.
Feb. 3, 2025
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
ELON MUSK POST ON XErica Hagen, 48, hoped it didn’t mean anything when bosses told her not to wear USAID gear to an event with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was touring Latin America.
Hagen, a program officer in the Dominican Republic, listened as Rubio promised the audience that foreign aid wasn’t gone, just under review. She thought about all the frozen programs she had helped oversee: One treating and preventing HIV. Another educating children in rural areas. A third reducing plastic in the oceans.
Not long after Rubio’s visit, Hagen and her colleagues were sent home, dismissed from their jobs. Someone staged a goodbye ceremony. “Participants will paint rocks with positive images and messages to commemorate the presence and contributions” of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the invitation read. Hagen wrote “RIP USAID” in red and black on an oval rock. She left it on a picnic table with nearly 100 other rocks, which someone eventually nestled under a tree.
She flew to D.C. with her three children and husband to find a final set of off-boarding instructions: She had to cancel her diplomatic passport by punching a hole in it. Everything Hagen owned was wrapped in plastic on a cargo ship, so she drove to her local library to borrow a hole punch.
She closed her eyes as she pressed down, wondering if this was how it felt to dig your grave.
CHAPTER II
Spring
Feb. 13, 2025
“The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.”
LETTER TO FIRED WORKERSThousands of probationary workers found out they were fired from prerecorded videos. Some were instructed to leave the building in 30 minutes. The Office of Personnel Management’s acting director told probationary staff, “I understand that this may be unexpected and that this is difficult.” One worker asked, “Who is this guy?”
The Small Business Administration emailed terminated employees a number they could call to appeal. But when one woman phoned, an apartment building answered: “Thank you for calling Westbrooke Place.” A Veterans Affairs supervisor texted a fired subordinate: “It states it’s due to your performance which is not true. … You need to appeal it.”
“I have awards that I received that … in the past I have taken pride in. And they’re all now just kind of in a pile in my basement on one of the bookshelves, because they kind of make me mad now.”
More mistakes emerged. The Energy Department laid off hundreds of engineers, technicians and managers who maintain America’s nuclear weapons before scrambling to rehire them. Veterans Affairs had to bring back workers who staff the Veterans Crisis Line. The Department of Health and Human Services reinstated employees who oversee aid to survivors of 9/11 and regulate the nation’s food supply, including a neonatologist who helped oversee the quality of infant formula.
About 2 a.m., Elon Musk, the billionaire whom Trump had named to lead a cost-cutting team called the U.S. DOGE Service, shared a picture of himself in gladiator armor and wrote that he was destroying “the woke mind virus.” Later that morning, Forest Service worker Amanda Mae Downey drove to her office in Michigan to sign a letter accepting her firing, unsure how she’d support her three children, sick mother and newly unemployed husband. Above her signature, she wrote in blue: “Received and accepted under duress.”
Feb. 22, 2025
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
ELON MUSK POST ON XPuzzled workers spending their Saturdays at dog parks or breweries, or taking their children to Scouting America events, opened a message titled “What did you do last week?” It asked for five bullet points of accomplishments.
A worker at the Food and Drug Administration reported it as spam. An employee at the Department of Housing and Urban Development fed the instructions into ChatGPT, then responded with 20 pages of gibberish. At an airport in the Pacific Northwest, Transportation Security Administration employees who check for weapons were pulled away from their X-ray machines to compose bullet points. Lines swelled.
A Forest Service staffer copied the email verbatim into his diary. “Every week things come more and more into focus,” he wrote beneath it. “We are at war.”
In Virginia, the family of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services worker Caitlin Cross-Barnet checked her into a mental health facility. She was struggling with despair after a difficult hysterectomy, and because she felt Trump was unraveling the government. In daily calls to her husband, she asked about changes to the federal workforce. Six days after the “What did you do” email, she killed herself.
Within two months, as Musk fell out with Trump and prepared to leave the government, most agencies reversed course and told employees to ignore the emails.
March 4, 2025
“UPDATE: Working with the talented team @DOGE, I just cancelled an additional 21 grants, saving over $116 million for the American people.”
POST ON X BY EPA ADMINISTRATOR LEE ZELDINAcross the government, staff searched for words they hoped would save the work they believed in. NASA employees built a spreadsheet explaining why DOGE shouldn’t cancel the agency’s 13,000 contracts and grants: “Mission essential.” “Worthwhile scientific research.” “Taxpayer dollars … were already spent.”
At the Energy Department, one worker prepared memos arguing that his projects would cut costs for American homes and businesses. Someone decided to cancel many anyway. So he, like other employees, began deleting: Any mention of “carbon.” “Sustainability.” The word “green.”
“We were basically able to do very little real work for months. I remember in those early days, people kept saying this is temporary and things will settle down and things will get back to normal. At this point, we are 10 months in, 11 months in, and the pattern has not changed. The assault has not slowed. If anything, it has continued and gotten worse.”
State Department staffers scrubbed out the terms “diverse” and “inclusive.” One Environmental Protection Agency employee, tasked with eliminating information about race, gender and religion, confided to her diary: “It’s really difficult to have to erase someone’s existence from the federal government.”
At the National Institutes of Health, Elizabeth Ginexi was sent a list of grants to review for DOGE, along with words to watch for: “inclusion,” “race,” “ethnicity.” It felt unscientific. Had she really earned a Ph.D. to do this? Breaking the rules, she called one grantee from her personal phone and told them to revise their study abstract — removing the words “gender” and “minorities.”
Then DOGE arrived at her building. They were easy to spot: Silent young men in their 20s and 30s, always wearing backpacks. Some of her colleagues’ cars were searched in the parking lot. Other employees were stopped in the bathroom and asked for their ID cards. Ginexi began having nightmares about getting fired because she voted for Kamala Harris.
Not long before she decided to resign, she texted a friend: “NIH is being killed.”
April 1, 2025
“This overhaul is about realigning HHS with its core mission: to stop the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again. It’s a win-win for taxpayers, and for every American we serve.”
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. POST ON XTen thousand health staff, including biomedical scientists and researchers who studied patient safety, lost their jobs. Senior leaders at the NIH received letters offering new posts in remote areas such as Alaska or Billings, Montana. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those who oversaw chronic disease, HIV and tuberculosis programs were reassigned to the Indian Health Service.
When Tony Schlaff arrived at the Health Resources and Services Administration, he was astonished to see hundreds of people queued up outside. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Everybody is going through a full screening,” the person standing next to him said. Schlaff filed into line and, alongside hundreds of colleagues, waited for nearly two hours, shivering in the frigid wind.
Once indoors, Schlaff watched employees walk through a TSA-style screening machine and undergo badge checks. Some walked back outside, tearful. After half an hour, he got close enough to hear what was happening: “You do not have access to the building,” one security guard told a woman whose badge failed to swipe, which is how she found out she’d been fired. “Leave. Go home.”
“We were in a new world. We were being told by the administration to do things that were illegal and unethical. And yet the bureaucracy had no way of responding to that.”
In Texas, Shelley Bain awoke to her phone buzzing. Bain, a 66-year-old program specialist for the Administration for Children and Families, checked her email and saw she’d been fired at 4:30 a.m. She made a cup of coffee and calculated. She was losing half the retirement income she’d counted on. She is legally blind, so it would be hard to find another job.
At 6:24 a.m., she texted her children. Her daughter swore. When Bain’s grandchildren woke, she made breakfast and walked them to the bus stop. Before they boarded, she pulled the girls, 12 and 14, aside: “I just got fired, but it will be okay.” She watched the bus pull away, thinking about how she’d probably have to sell her home, a farm outside Dallas where she and her husband had hoped to die.
CHAPTER III
Summer
May 7, 2025
“Credit Card Update! The program to audit unused/unneeded credit cards has been expanded to 32 agencies. After 10 weeks, more than 500K cards have been de-activated.”
U.S. DOGE SERVICE POST ON XThe spending limits on federal credit cards shrank to $1. Government scientists studying food safety ran short of lab-cleaning fluid. Contractors who help identify U.S. soldiers killed in combat were told to pause their work.
A climate researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey found herself unable to travel for research conferences, restock hydrogen gas or buy Scotch tape. A Food and Drug Administration staffer couldn’t purchase dry ice or environmental swabs, nor pay the highway tolls that safety inspectors incurred driving for work. When colleagues asked what they were supposed to do, she told them to try HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Trump.
In a Colorado branch of the Forest Service, one man was designated purchaser for the entire office. Anyone who wanted to buy horse fodder or irrigation pipes had to wait until the man returned from weeks-long firefighting trips. The new system meant staff were a week late buying chainsaw fuel, delaying the thinning of flammable forest brush. “In 15 years, I have never seen us so unprepared for fire season,” the local fire management officer told staff at a meeting, according to one worker in attendance.
General Services Administration political appointees imposed a rule mandating they approve project requests, and more than 1,500 built up in an internal tracker, including executed leases and notices saying construction could begin. At NASA, a group of employees wrote several detailed paragraphs, across multiple emails, to justify buying fastening bolts.
Social Security started requiring that one of fewer than a dozen people sign off on expenses for all 1,300 field offices. Staff ran out of paper, printer cartridges and phone headsets, even as calls poured in from Americans asking what Trump might be doing to their benefits.
In one Northeastern office, the fridge broke. In late April, a staffer emailed the office seeking donations: “We are going to purchase a new fridge since the funds that would normally be available for Facilities to provide us with one are still frozen. Before we do, I would like to see if anyone else is interested in contributing.”
June 11, 2025
“Requests for approval of obligations above the $100,000 threshold must be submitted via memo through the Executive Secretary process.”
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY MEMOIt wasn’t Abby McIlraith’s primary job to take calls from survivors — until Texas flooded.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency had long contracted with phone centers to help handle the influx of calls after disasters. But the contracts cost more than $100,000, meaning Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem had to approve them, and she was slow to do so, letting some lapse for close to a week.
So McIlraith was assigned to the phones, taking back-to-back calls. She wrote down what people had lost: homes, cars, furniture, appliances. She asked if they had anywhere to stay, if FEMA could help. She listened to people scream about how long they’d been waiting, demand to know why the government was moving so slowly.
“Secretary Noem’s requirements also delayed urban search-and-rescue teams by 72 hours in the Kerrville floods, which is completely unacceptable. The bureaucracy that they’re talking about is coming directly from the top, and it risks lives and communities every day.”
Per her orders, she kept each call to a few minutes. Whenever a conversation ended, she had 40 seconds to finish her notes. She watched the timer on her screen count down to the next call.
A few months later, she heard that other employees were signing a letter of dissent, disagreeing with the direction of FEMA under Trump. She wondered if signing would cost her her job, then recalled her week answering phones. McIlraith signed her name — and was placed on leave.
Asked about McIlraith’s account, FEMA shared a written statement from acting press secretary Daniel Llargues asserting Noem’s tighter control over spending “strengthens oversight, safeguards against fraud, waste and abuse, and ensures funding decisions are well-documented and mission-focused.” Noem’s $100,000 rule has already “saved U.S. taxpayers … $10.7 billion,” Llargues added, stating without offering evidence that Noem reviews every contract within 24 hours.
July 31, 2025
“Ultimately, the deferred resignation program … delivered incredible relief to the American taxpayer. No previous administration has gotten even close to saving American taxpayers this amount of money in such a short time.”
OFFICE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT SPOKESWOMAN MCLAURINE PINOVERNew resignation offers rolled out, agency by agency. As the summer waned, people left.
The NIH lost six directors of institutes focused on infectious disease, child health and the human genome. The Federal Aviation Administration lost its chief air traffic officer, among nearly a dozen other top officials. The Internal Revenue Service lost its chief of staff, chief procurement officer and chief human capital officer — while the Treasury Department lost more than 200 technical experts and experienced managers who helped run the nation’s financial systems.
At a town hall, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy told staff: “We’re going to lose some knowledge, right? We’re going to lose some expertise as we go through this process.” He asked those staying “to get the best points from those who are leaving.”
In the Midwest, union leader Colin Smalley watched his Army Corps of Engineers unit dwindle. Among the departed: An employee so knowledgeable about rock blasting that the government brought him back the first time he tried to retire. A staffer who was spearheading a novel project to stun invasive carp with electric shocks. How, Smalley asked his wife, could they ever replace someone who knew how to electrify rivers?
A National Park Service staffer in Colorado tallied her park’s losses: Two people employed for 20 years each. One woman who’d been there even longer. A biologist who’d founded a key program the park ran. Soon, everyone was picking up new responsibilities. Bosses filled out time sheets, biologists signed travel authorizations and the staffer, a land surveyor, began leading park tours. Other days, she cleaned bathrooms.
Hearing about a protest against federal cuts, she drew up a poster to carry. “Where have all the rangers gone?” it asked.
In Lander, Wyoming, three Forest Service retirees noticed fences tilting over, docks slipping into lakes, mountain roads caving inward from water pressure. Barb Gustin, 69, began volunteering to keep open Lander’s Forest Service office. Bill Lee, 73, drove hundreds of miles through the forest weekly, fixing broken fences and fallen signs. And Del Nelson, 81, started wiping down five bathrooms a day. He knew money was short, so he used one paper towel per set of toilets.
CHAPTER IV
Fall
Oct. 1, 2025
“The Radical Left Democrats shutdown the government. This government website will be updated periodically during the funding lapse for mission critical functions.”
U.S. FOREST SERVICE WEBSITE UPDATEMore than 750,000 were sent home without pay as whole departments shuttered. Some National Park Service staffers left without being told if they could put up signs telling visitors their parks had closed. At the State Department, staffers who’d already been fired were surprised to see furlough notices hit their personal inboxes — a painful accident.
An Agriculture Department employee lined up a second job classifying soils, figuring the shutdown might last for a while. A State Department custodian required to keep working readied herself for another shift cleaning toilets and mopping floors. Education Department employees saw their out-of-office messages altered to blame “Democrat Senators” for the shutdown. On their sixth day working without pay, a skeleton crew of NIH researchers learned a well-liked animal health technician had been taken by ICE to a Louisiana detention center.
“We are going to have to lay some people off if the shutdown continues,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters, even as senior federal officials privately warned such firings would be illegal. An IRS worker wondered whether his disability, which necessitates working from home, meant he would be dismissed first.
Oct. 10, 2025
“The RIFs have begun.”
RUSSELL VOUGHT POST ON XIn a year when roughly 300,000 had already gone, 4,000 more lost their jobs — dismissals swiftly entangled in lawsuits. In the Oval Office, Trump said he’d fired “people that the Democrats want.” The reductions in force targeted staff who regulated hazardous waste, checked the quality of federal housing and assisted students with disabilities.
Nationwide, flights fell behind schedule. Taxpayer help lines shut down. The president ordered the Pentagon to use research funding to pay service members, while his top deputies claimed they or Trump had found unspecified ways to compensate immigration and law enforcement agents. Workers who’d missed two paychecks in a row, while showing up to the office, watched money flow into gun-carrying colleagues’ accounts.
In Philadelphia, staff at one of the largest food banks noticed shelves growing bare. In Colorado, service members and veterans flooded the Homefront Military Network, asking for help with mortgages, utilities, car payments. Federal workers paid their bills with credit cards and stocked their kitchens from food pantries. Cynthia Brown, of the Government Publishing Office, lost her car to repossession, sold two iPhones and began subsisting on coffee and protein shakes.
Just before the government reopened, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the shutdown would trim as much as $14 billion from the United States’ annual economic output.
Nov. 12, 2025
“With my signature, the federal government will now resume normal operations. … I think we really have a really great situation. We have a country that we love, and we have a country that’s in great shape.”
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP IN THE OVAL OFFICEFederal workers, grateful to pick up paychecks again, found other worries waiting. Some agencies privately warned staff to expect deep spending cuts in 2026, reflecting Trump’s desired bare-bones budget. Following guidance from a top administration official to stop giving “everyone … an A,” the National Park Service decided to give 80 percent of staff middling performance reviews, which help determine promotions and bonuses. The National Weather Service lagged in hiring hundreds of promised replacement forecasters. And Veterans Affair made plans to slice away as many as 35,000 open jobs.
At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, an attorney whose job used to be fighting housing discrimination told himself to stop thinking about things he couldn’t control — and dived into yet another internal personnel case. The Trump administration had stalled all his lawsuits and barred officials at his agency from speaking any language that wasn’t English. They’d even ripped down posters written in Spanish. Overnight, the attorney found himself unable to talk to many of his complainants, or even explain why.
He tried to focus on that day’s assignment — an ethics advisory opinion for a colleague who wanted to sell his house — but kept thinking about what he’d seen in the garage. Months ago, ICE had begun using his New York City federal building as a detention holding center. The evening before, walking to collect his bike, he’d witnessed a family in chains being led into an unmarked van. The attorney could still hear the sound their manacles made, dragging on concrete.
Thousands of miles away in Alaska, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biologist stopped by a bush outside her building. She wasn’t eager to start another day of “Section 7 consults”: 500-page reports assessing the environmental impact of docks, airports and cable lines. It wasn’t unimportant, but it wasn’t the science she was hired to do — monitoring beluga whales, analyzing samples of stranded ocean mammals for disease, testing the impacts of pollution on pregnant whales. And it meant hours formatting Word documents.
The biologist stared at the bush, delaying a few more seconds. There used to be rocks beneath it, and in the spring, she’d painted some with slogans: “Save the Whales.” “NOAA Saves Whales.” Children began adding their own hand-painted contributions. It felt like hope. Then one day she arrived at work to find all the rocks had been removed. “This is what we’re fighting against, and losing,” she told herself now, looking at the bare earth, and walked into the building.
“I just always thought, well, I am the only person that works in occupational health and safety at my location and because of the depth and breadth of challenges and different hazards our personnel can be exposed to, why would they ever cut the safety people?”
In D.C., a Defense Department worker looked up from a pile of congressional inquiries to check the clock. Two minutes to 11:30 — his lunch break. Another morning gone with no chance to turn to his studies of rising rates of mental illness among service members. Or his proposals, languishing for almost a year now, on how the government could drive those down.
This job was all he’d wanted to do since a close family member, a veteran, died by suicide. Then his office shrank by half under Trump. The staffers who were supposed to answer questions from Congress lost or left their jobs, and their work became his. Now, whenever the worker snatched time to resurface one of his ideas, he was told there was no money. He kept having the same thought driving to work, doing the dishes, just before he fell asleep: “You’re failing the American people.”
Rather than eat, the worker rose from his desk and walked until he found somewhere secluded. He knelt in prayer.
“If I am supposed to be here, then I am going to keep doing this,” he told God. “But if it’s time for me to go, please open the doors, so I can go.”
He repeats the prayer almost every day, waiting for a sign.
About this story
Reporting by Hannah Natanson and Meryl Kornfield. Additional reporting by Laura Meckler, William Wan, Jacob Bogage, Olivia George, Emily Davies, Rachel Roubein, Lena H. Sun, Brianna Sacks and Aaron Wiener. Portraits by Marvin Joseph. Photo illustrations by Kathleen Rudell-Brooks.
Design and development by Tucker Harris. Design editing by Betty Chavarria. Photo editing by Haley Hamblin. Edited by Mike Madden. Additional editing by Wendy Galietta and Kim Chapman.