Goodbye to all that

I was never twenty or twenty-one or even twenty-three here, and the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary, has ever happened to anyone before had long since dissipated when I arrived in the federal government at thirty. I hadn’t expected to stay long. Two years at most — the length of the fellowship that I applied for coming out of grad school because that’s what all my classmates did. I had lived in D.C. for about a year as a fourth-grader, and I didn’t like it. Clearly it was because I was the new kid and friendless, but I had nursed my resentments about it for all those years. I’d be in and out, coming back hastily to the little theater company under the El tracks that was at that time my refuge and home.

(Yes, we have come to the point where I don’t mind saying I’m in D.C. Absurdly, I had been trying to maintain the fiction that I could be anywhere.)

By the end of those two years, though, I was running with a crowd of big, exciting personalities who made me feel useful and commanded an atmosphere of crusading, consequential creativity and urgency. It was all delightful. It was all glitter and pop. A feeling that had certainly never been foreshadowed in contemplating federal service from the outside. It would be pushing it much too far to call it a cabaret, but given the way they’re both ending, the parallels stand out. Even when a movie I wrote premiered at Sundance that year, I didn’t dive into capitalizing on that opportunity, because I liked where I was (I still haven’t capitalized on that opportunity). I’ve already written about how those years were simultaneously a long decline, a slow sinking into addiction and numbness. Life can occupy both currents at the same time. Maybe it only ever does. A cruising, ravenous acceleration toward the future and the barely perceived undertow of dissolution.

It is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair. I’ve resigned.

The indecision had become agonizing: endless tangles of loops and rationalizations, barely contained rage, commuting to the office with all those thousands of others being shuttled around out of spite. We’ve all been telling ourselves stories about ourselves, trying to find a narrative that fits the person-shaped vessel we want to inhabit. Quit, get fired, stay; sabotage, collaborate, leak; lash out; huddle up; run away. Week after week, we enter new data into the matrix of potential outcomes, recalculating, buffering, optimizing. It has been exhausting. It has made us utterly sick of ourselves, our own thoughts a fetid taste in our mouths.

I’ve lost sleep obsessing about whether it’s better to show solidarity with the people who will stay or with the ones who’ve already been exiled. Red rover, red rover. I’ve had to quiet that macho inner voice that says standing up straight and waiting for them to fire me is the far, far better thing to do. In fact, from the standpoint of compensation, getting fired as part of a reduction in force is more advantageous than leaving now under the terms of the resurrected deferred resignation program. But of course I don’t control the lists. I was in the perverse position of angling to jump the line at the guillotine, and every day I waited to make a decision was one that diminished the consolations of voluntarily resignation. It appears that, perhaps, enough people in my agency are gone now that it will forestall any reductions in force here.

As I danced around the edges of the game board, I knew that the worst outcome was remaining beyond the RIF. The Schedule F rulemaking has been published, and it is chilling. Popping off one day when they push the wrong button also leaves me with nothing. I am 85 percent sure I would never hit one of the DOGE ultras in the middle of a meeting, but… only 85 percent sure. Then I’d get the pleasure of sharing a cot with KSM.

Much more acutely, I understand that I will rot here. I don’t think I have the fortitude to remain myself after four years, and I’m afraid of the person who emerges at the other end.

There’s a guilty sense that I should be loitering outside rooms from which evidence of wrongdoing will waft like the breath of the minotaur. I’m astonished by the courage of the whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board who uncovered appalling breaches of the public trust by DOGE for NPR reporter Jenna McLaughlin. His name is Daniel Berulis. I hope when the dust clears, we remember his name and what he did for the people of this country, including the ones who hate him for being a public servant. What drives us is the protection of a carefully constructed public policy regime, reflecting input from any faction that has scratched out at least a degree of power and influence. That includes the two major parties, but also all the other interests that muscle their way into the sandbox. Some of those interests are the old exploitative powers of capital and resource extraction, but many are the upstarts of democratic pluralism, groups that have kicked open the doors that the American Constitution left ajar. What we civil servants understand is that we are not smarter or savvier than this messy conglomeration. That we do not override it. When someone comes along who has such ungodly sums of money in the bank that it bewitches him into believing his own brilliance and correctness does override it, it’s our job to oppose him. I know people who will bravely remain at their posts to do just that, but I don’t have enough access to the core systems that DOGE and their cult want to destroy to make it a very worthwhile proposition.

So it’s the streets for me.

None of this was necessary. None of this made anything more efficient. None of this helped anyone breathe a little easier or feel a little more confident about making it through the day.

This chronicle was conceived as a channel for describing the destruction of the administrative state from the inside. From this point forward, it no longer comes from within the walls of the castle compound. Maintaining anonymity here will shield anyone else who might use this space in the months ahead. For that and a few other reasons, I’ll maintain it for the time being. Maybe the lack of access to internal deliberation will render this account useless. But I think not. The putsch, after all, goes on.