It was Inauguration Day. We had the day off, but work found me anyway. By mid-afternoon, the news started flooding in:

An Executive Order dropped. 

We were no longer U.S. Digital Service. 

We were now DOGE… er.. US DOGE Service. 

We were going to report to the White House Chief of Staff, instead of the Office of Management and Budget. 

The new DOGE teams were going to be made up of an HR person, a lawyer, an engineer, and a team lead focused on slashing jobs.

And the new unnamed leadership and team wanted to meet us.

First, they were only interested in DC-based engineers, and the discussions would start on Tuesday morning. Within hours of that statement, every single legacy USDSer was on the list for 15-minute “meet and greet” discussions on Tuesday.

It was framed as a getting to know you chat. But it wasn’t that at all.

Quickly after the first engineering discussions started taking place, we got reports from our colleagues of what went down: Aggressive loyalty test questions and code exercises from extremely young interviewers who in some cases refused to provide their full names. No one knew if these folks were government employees, or if they had security clearances, but we were asked by our leadership to attend the calls, so we did.

The hours between the start of the day and my 15-minute call were a blur. I remember feeling in community with my fellow USDSers, but otherwise completely alone. DOGE had not yet reached other parts of the government, including in my case, the folks we were working with at the Social Security Administration (SSA). So, in the midst of all of this, and the panicked messages from friends and former colleagues coming in from all directions, we tried our best to put a smile on and push the work forward.

Around lunchtime on Tuesday, I logged on for my “meet and greet” chat. I wasn’t told that I was interviewing for a position at DOGE, but the first question about them only hiring “exceptional people” and to please tell them something exceptional I’ve done in my life made that clear immediately.

Unlike the engineers and data scientists who had people in their respective disciplines interviewing them, I was not joined by two designers or researchers. Nor was I asked a single substantive question about design or research. And unlike remote engineers and data scientists who were asked if they’d be willing to relocate to DC, I was asked nothing of the sort.

Most of my 15 minutes were spent talking about “fraud, waste, and abuse” in my agency. I don’t think my answer of beltway bandit contractors who have been fleecing them for decades and delivering subpar technology was well-received, but I stopped caring about their opinion of me after the first 30 seconds of the call.

Then I was asked a really pointed, specific question about address verification and benefit payments at SSA. I have no idea where the interviewer heard this alleged problem, but he expected me to speak to it. I didn’t know the answer to his question. But I did know a thing or two about the problem of customer addresses at SSA, and tried to explain that the issue was likely far more complex than the soundbite he was trying to reduce it down to.

“This is far more complex than you think,” should be the title of my eventual memoir about working in government. I don’t say it to justify the mess; but rather, to emphasize the level of skill and systems thinking needed to untangle and fix things without causing harm. 

The last question I was asked was what I thought about DOGE. I told them that I agreed that there were efficiencies to be gained in government. After all, it’s why I was there in the first place. But what I would not stand for was the vilification of civil servants. Most of the people I had met in my work were doing the best they could to serve the public, despite having to operate in a deeply flawed environment without the tools they really needed to do their jobs well. 

I got a quick thank you, and we were done.

I had no idea what the outcome would be of those discussions, but a fellow designer who interviewed in-person later in the day saw big sheets of paper in the room with all of our names and scores of 1-3 on them. Some folks were asked in their interviews who they’d cut if they had to cut 30% of the team. We were all asked to name the most exceptional person we worked with, as a way of culling the list I suppose.

Despite asking our leadership and later, a DOGE HR representative, what would come of the interviews, we were never told. We found out a few weeks later though, when roughly 30% of the remaining USDSers were illegally fired. Those fired overwhelmingly came from the design and product management teams, so I’m certain if I hadn’t resigned of my own accord, I would’ve been fired, too.

The rest of that week was a whirlwind. We could feel the ground shifting beneath us, but were also very purposefully being ignored by whoever was running the DOGE effort, despite them sleeping in our office buildings. A “return to office in DC” notification was sent to our entire team via the OMB email list, even though we were allegedly no longer a part of OMB. We were told to expect a similar requirement soon.

I was being messaged by more national news reporters than I could keep track of, but was terrified to say anything that could put a target on my or any of my colleagues’ backs, so I didn’t. The fear was justified, it turns out, because within a day or two, right-wing media outlets were writing inflammatory pieces about USDS and our sister organization in another agency, Technology Transformation Services (TTS), doxxing friends and colleagues whose only offenses seemed to be existing and working in the government while lesbian, transgender, non-binary, or black.

That week, we also received a message to report anyone who had worked on or attended anything related to DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Accessibility). It was Orwellian, with a special email address to turn people in and a threat that we’d be fired if we didn’t. They clearly weren’t aware that accessibility in particular was written into federal law. But laws didn’t seem to matter anymore.

Then we found out a right-wing group had created their own DEIA hit list of federal employees they felt should be targeted and fired. I didn’t see the list, but was told one of the people on it helped our team set up a research program to recruit folks with disabilities for usability testing: A standard part of design and product development that was suddenly being vilified as discriminatory.

I watched as our friends at TTS took down content in their handbook about psychological safety, and content in the United States Web Design System about inclusive design patterns. I watched guidance from OMB hit my inbox asking agencies to pause all federal funding so that it could be reviewed to ensure it didn’t violate the new anti-DEIA policies. Within hours of that order coming through, all 50 state Medicaid payment portals went down. Head Start centers had to close because they couldn’t access their funding.

A few days later, the government’s HR agency, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) started sending weird spam-looking emails to all 2.3 million federal employees asking us to respond “yes” to confirm we’d received the communication. It’s important to know that HR operates differently in government: OPM sets policy, issues guidance, and manages large-scale processes like benefit administration and retirement, but your day-to-day HR communication always comes from your agency. So it was odd to hear directly from OPM as an employee. We weren’t offered any explanation of what these emails were for, but we’d soon find out.

Rumors started flying internally that there would be layoffs at the end of the week and that they’d be targeting folks in their first term (me). I was shocked, but then felt comforted by the possibility of being done with it all. I told my partner Andrew, who had been watching me run myself ragged for four straight days, that I was probably going to get fired on Friday. It would all be over soon.

I woke up Friday morning and picked up my work phone expecting to be locked out of my account. I wasn’t, but I didn’t feel any relief.

Later that day, we had a full-team meeting with the legacy USDS crew. Everyone had questions. What was going on? What were we doing? Were our projects continuing? How were we supposed to talk to our agency partners about this? Would they even trust us anymore? Would we have jobs?

What we heard: “U.S. Digital Service is no more. It is now the U.S. DOGE Service and we are not driving the train. We do not know what they are planning, we do not know what they’re thinking, we have no influence, and are fully under their control now.” Oh, and everyone in the DC-area was required to report to the office five days a week, starting Monday. For some of my colleagues, it was going to mean a 2-hour commute each way, with little notice to figure out logistics or childcare. 

I cried after leaving that call. It’s one thing to watch something you care about being dismantled from the outside; it’s something else entirely to experience it from the inside. I remember someone sharing this piece with me, and then a thread by the same author on Bluesky. It resonated deeply.

I spent the entire weekend agonizing over what to do next. I was told I’d have “return to office” plans for remote employees in my inbox before Monday. It didn’t happen. I had danced around conversations with our SSA teammates who wanted to know what the deal was and if we’d be continuing our project. I felt like I wasted an entire week of work playing the hurry up and wait game, learning more about our fate via leaks in the press than through the people allegedly running the show. I wanted to continue the work I started, but I did not want any part of this destructive force that was purposefully hurting so many people I cared about. Being associated with the DOGE name was a non-starter for me. I had to go.

I decided at the start of week two to resign. While some people find solace and comfort in work when times are tough, I’m the opposite. I found it incredibly difficult to focus. I wasn’t sleeping, I was barely eating, and my body was showing the stress in scary ways. I had been in this position before, over a decade ago. I only let work make me physically ill once. I promised to never make that mistake again.

So I told my design director that I was out and that I wanted to be done by the end of the week. It was a big financial risk to walk away, but it was a bigger health risk for me to stay. Thankfully, our legacy USDS Talent and Operations teams were still in place and kindly ushered me through an accelerated process with an end date of Friday.

At the start of the week, I also started hearing from former USDSers who had recently transitioned over to career roles in other agencies that they were being targeted for the first wave of firings. “Probationary” employees, as you’ve probably heard in the news, are just folks who are in their first year or two of a new government job. And I knew dozens of them.

It was a point of immense pride for USDS (and our friends in TTS) to have brought senior technologists into government and helped them into career positions in agencies. After decades of outsourcing technology to exploitative beltway contractors, the government was finally starting to invest in having this expertise in-house. I was thrilled to see so many friends and former colleagues move to full-time positions in places like IRS, CMS, HRSA, and SSA. And now, just because they were the last in, they were going to be the first out. The folks that DOGE most needed to make government more efficient were on the immediate chopping block and they didn’t give a damn.

The day after I submitted my notice, I went out for happy hour with a few colleagues. I felt happy and rejuvenated heading home that evening. And then I opened my phone to over 300 messages: The now-infamous Fork Email from OPM had dropped. The tone of the writing was childish and insulting, and folks quickly clocked that Musk was employing the same resignation process he used at Twitter. The same process that former Twitter employees were still in an active lawsuit over, years later.

While I was suspicious that it was a viable offer, I still broke down in tears in front of Andrew when I got home. I felt frustrated that I took a huge financial risk in leaving, and not 24 hours later, an offer was made to pay folks for months to step away. I remember Andrew saying, “I feel bad. I pressured you to quit.” The truth was, he was right to push me to leave, and there was no guarantee I’d be paid out what was promised from this Fork situation. But in the moment, it was just another crushing development in what felt like an endless stream of them.

The remaining three days were a blur of offboarding tasks and ethics briefings, goodbye emails, and a sprint to document and hand off all of my design work to my team and folks inside SSA. I felt horrible that I encouraged SSA to take on this work and was walking away. I felt a lot of shame in being the first person at USDS to resign after the administration change. Was I abandoning ship too quickly? Could I have made things work? Should I have stayed to try and fight this mess from the inside? I still feel that shame today, even after dozens of others have left behind me.

It’s hard to accurately relay how it felt being on the inside for those two weeks. I was glued to my phone 18+ hours a day, waiting for the next shoe to drop. The slew of executive orders, which seemed to come on an hourly basis, was overwhelming. With each executive order came another email from OMB with guidance on how to implement it. After the guidance email came instructions from team leadership. You hardly had time to absorb one devastating change before the next one began.

Once the Fork Email dropped, there were a series of daily updates to clarify the offer, update the FAQ, and pressure folks into taking it via increasingly more insulting language. Have you ever been publicly antagonized by your own employer? Because that’s what this was. I’ve never seen anything like it. Whatever decency our government used to stand for was gone, that much was clear.

Just as we were reeling from our own strange, aggressive DOGE interviews and trying to figure out what it all meant, our friends in TTS were getting thrown into their own. As we were trying to help them through the chaos, the DOGE kids were breaking into USAID and Treasury systems. Group chats with my colleagues and project teams were moving faster than I could read them. The reporter outreach was relentless. My incredible friends and family were texting me constantly to check in. I couldn’t escape it. I still can’t escape it. Except now, the messages are less, “Are you doing okay?” and more, “Did you hear about [xyz horrific thing] happening at [insert agency here]?”

Speaking of which, I’ve already seen DOGE push out demonstrably false stats about Social Security paying tons of money to what they thought were dead people. I learned this week that the only thing that stood between them and living retirees losing their benefits was a heroic SSA employee who took the time to calmly point out the errors in their data analysis. We are losing those kinds of employees in droves right now. I wish I could tell you we’ve only lost people due to firings and resignations. I wish I could tell you that civil servants haven’t died as a result of the stress and trauma this administration has put on them.

The reason DOGE can move so fast is because they don’t care who they hurt in the process. It’s not unlike the old startup mantra of “move fast and break things.” Except the things they’re going to break will be your parent’s retirement check, your spouse’s VA healthcare, or your neighbor’s SNAP benefits.

In the month since I’ve left, dozens of people I know personally have lost their jobs and livelihoods. Some of them have been illegally fired “for cause,” even though they’ve done nothing wrong. Being fired for cause means they’re not eligible for severance and they may not be eligible to return to a job in the federal government ever again. People who have dedicated their careers to public service may never be able to come back because of a lie. It’s a bleak outlook and one that I hope gets reversed by the courts. Even if it does, it will probably take years. By then, we will have likely lost a lot of this talent forever.

I’m overwhelmed by the damage done in just the first few weeks. I wrote most of this post on Friday. Before I could even finish it, an entire team of 90 fellow technologists and friends were illegally fired via a midnight email and their organization shut down. I spent the whole day on Saturday just crushed with sadness for everyone at 18F who worked so damn hard, often right alongside us at USDS, to make government actually efficient. This devastation is happening everywhere. And it’s just begun.

It feels silly to mourn a job when so much else is being lost right now, but I’m definitely grieving. I lost a job that I felt purpose in, even when it was maddening and difficult. I lost a steady income. I lost that small part of my identity when someone asks, “What do you do?” 

My one comfort is the way the larger civic tech community has banded together to help people through this. USDS and 18F have a deep bench of fresh alumni and an even deeper bench of people who came in the years before us. As a wise person in the community recently said, “The opportunity still exists. The need is still there. The spores have been released.” 

I hope they’re right.