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Nothing could have prepared Americans for what the first 50-ish days of the second Trump administration have been like. Even some Cabinet members and Republican members of Congress seem caught off guard. But if you took time to look closely at Project 2025, the effort from the conservative Heritage Foundation to prepare for a new Republican administration, you’re probably a little less shocked than other people.

I’m not the first to point out that many of the actions the White House and other departments have taken since the inauguration are pulled directly from Project 2025. Even though Donald Trump vociferously denied any connection to the work during the campaign, that was always transparent bunk. For example, Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, led the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump White House, was the policy director for the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform, and is now leading OMB again.

There are some useful resources online that seek to track which Project 2025 goals have already been achieved, but for all that Trump has done so far, some of Project 2025’s most radical ideas for transforming the power of the president have yet to unfold. What is still in store?

The authors of Project 2025 believe that far too much of the executive branch is not functionally under the control of the president. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Vought told The New York Times in 2023. One example is what are called “independent regulatory agencies”—entitites such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The laws that authorize these agencies give the president the power to appoint leaders, but not generally to remove them or direct policy. That’s different from, for example, a Cabinet department such as State and Treasury, whose secretaries can be fired at will.

“The Trump team came in determined to expand the scope of presidential power,” Don Kettl, the former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, told me in an email. “Their goal is to stretch the limits of Article II of the Constitution, by using the beginning of the article—that executive power is located in the president of the U.S.—and the take-care clause, to assert that the president has power over all things executive. Congress might pass a law, but once the law is passed, they believe the president ought to have complete control over how it’s implemented.”

Many of the moves that Trump has taken so far appear to be of dubious legality. This week, Vought’s OMB issued a memo laying out plans for mass layoffs of federal employees subject to civil-service protections. Such a reduction in force almost certainly violates civil-service protections and bargaining agreements. Similarly, last week, the administration issued a little-noticed but potentially very important executive order asserting unprecedented power over independent regulatory agencies, cutting against decades of precedent and understanding of existing laws.

These are only the latest examples of the Trump administration’s apparent defiance of Congress’s intent. As Jonathan Rauch noted this week, Trump has fired inspectors general without giving the legally required 30-day notice, even though he could have easily just followed the law. The president also tried to fire Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which protects whistleblowers; Dellinger promptly sued, and his firing is currently temporarily blocked by courts. Last week, the administration asserted a right to fire administrative-law judges, who oversee hearings inside executive-branch agencies, even though the law says they can be removed only for cause.

The statutes that govern these matters are not especially ambiguous: Congress intended for these bodies to have some independence. Trump’s aides don’t disagree; they just think that the laws are an unconstitutional infringement on the powers of the executive branch. “There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such—SEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup—but that is not something that the Constitution understands,” Vought told Tucker Carlson in November. Unfortunately for Trump, the Supreme Court has disagreed. In a 1935 case called Humphrey’s Executor, the justices unanimously slapped down President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission.

As Trump takes so many steps, some observers have expressed concern that Trump intends to just ignore courts. This isn’t a crazy fear. Trump has shown that he has no personal respect for the rule of law, and many of his aides—including Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance—have floated the idea of defying judicial rulings. But I think the more likely interpretation (at least for now) is that many of these law-defying, or at least law-bending, actions are ways of getting cases before the Supreme Court in the hopes of eliciting favorable decisions.

“The Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey’s Executor upholding agency independence seems ripe for revisiting—and perhaps sooner than later,” the law professor Adam Candeub writes in “Mandate for Leadership,” the main document produced by Project 2025. (He’s since been appointed general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission.) Elsewhere in “Mandate,” Gene Hamilton, who helped design the family-separation policy in Trump’s first term, writes that a conservative administration should seek “the overruling of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States … The next conservative Administration should formally take the position that Humphrey’s Executor violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

How the Court would handle such a case is anyone’s guess. Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have already said they’d overturn Humphrey’s Executor; Republicans have long pushed for the “unitary executive theory,” which seeks an expansion of the president’s power over the executive branch; and the justices have shown a willingness to bend precedents to help Trump in the past.

The impact of striking down Humphrey’s Executor would be enormous. Agency independence is designed to provide regulatory predictability and consistency and to avoid political interference, but Project 2025 proposes systematically politicizing independent agencies, seeking to use federal power to attack climate-focused investing, compel private corporations’ business decisions, and more. This is especially dangerous with a president who has already begun following through on his campaign promises to use the government to punish his critics, but it would be destabilizing under other circumstances. Any future Democratic president would at least try to return things to the status quo ante, which would mean a wild seesaw in regulation every four or eight years.

Alternatively, the Supreme Court might blanch before such a shift of power from Congress to the executive branch. In 2024’s Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision, it struck down Chevron deference, which accorded executive-branch agencies broad discretion in interpreting laws, saying that Congress needed to make those decisions. If Trump’s test cases fail, what comes next?

“I always abide by the courts, always abide by them,” Trump said earlier this month. Yesterday, his nominees for top Justice Department roles told senators that they believed the administration could at times ignore judicial orders. We may soon find out which of them is telling the truth.

Related:

What will happen if the Trump administration defies a court order? There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Inside the collapse at the NIH Grad school is in trouble. What Trump is really after in the Middle East Radio Atlantic: The Five Eyes have noticed.

Today’s News

Donald Trump hosted U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House to discuss issues including trade and Ukraine’s future. The Trump administration notified most USAID staffers this week that they have been placed on leave or fired and announced that 90 percent of the agency’s foreign-aid contracts worldwide will be canceled. Trump announced that 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico will go into effect on March 4, and that China will face an additional 10 percent tariff.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Who counts as a hillbilly—and who gets to decide? Andrew Aoyama examines the complicated history of Appalachia and J. D. Vance’s ties.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

My Mom’s Guide to the Art of Living

By Arthur C. Brooks

My late mother was an artist of some renown in the Pacific Northwest. Over her many-decades career, her paintings evolved from highly representational watercolors into mixed-media abstracts. One constant in her work, however, was excellent technique: If she decided to paint a naked guy holding a guitar, much to the mortification of her adolescent son, that’s exactly what it looked like.

Growing up, I could draw a little myself and enjoyed doing so, but I never had her talent. Once, I asked her how I could improve. I suppose I expected her to say something like “Practice 10,000 hours.” Instead, she told me to look at what I wanted to draw.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Gene Hackman redefined the leading man. Jeff Bezos’s hypocritical assertion of power It’s weird that eggs were ever cheap. The public-health brain drain is here. The problem with optimism in a crisis

Culture Break

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: CSA-Printstock / Getty.

Read (or skip). The columnist Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe, argues for religion from a rational perspective. “It won’t make a believer out of me,” George Packer writes.

Debate. Here’s who will win at the 2025 Oscars—and who should win, according to David Sims.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you understandably haven’t read all 922 pages of “Mandate for Leadership,” then allow me to recommend a book—specifically, my own. The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America is out from Random House on April 22. I wrote it as a layperson’s guide to both what Project 2025 wants to do, broken down by subject area, and how the authors propose achieving it. The book is available for preorder now.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

If you have tips about the Trump administration’s efforts to remake American science, you can contact Katherine on Signal at @katherinejwu.12.

For decades, the National Institutes of Health has had one core function: support health research in the United States. But for the past month, the agency has been doing very little of that, despite multiple separate orders from multiple federal judges blocking the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding. For weeks on end, as other parts of the government have restarted funding, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, have pressed staff at the agency to ignore court orders, according to nearly a dozen former and current NIH officials I spoke with. Even advice from NIH lawyers to resume business as usual was dismissed by the agency’s acting director, those officials said. When NIH officials have fought back, they have been told to heed the administration’s wishes—or, in some cases, have simply been pushed out.

The lights at the NIH are on; staff are at their desks. But since late January, the agency has issued only a fraction of its usual awards—many in haphazard spurts, as officials rushed grants through the pipeline in whatever limited windows they could manage. As of this week, some of the agency’s 27 institutes and centers are still issuing no new grants at all, one NIH official told me. Grant-management officers, who sign their name to awards, are too afraid, the official said, that violating the president’s wishes will mean losing their livelihood. (Most of the officials I spoke with requested anonymity, out of fear for their job at the agency, or—for those who have left—further professional consequences.)

[Read: The erasing of American science]

NIH lawyers have told officials at the agency that to comply with court orders, they must restart grant awards and payments. But HHS officials have handed down messages too, several current and former NIH officials told me: Hold off. Maintain the pause on grants. And the NIH’s acting director, Matthew Memoli, who until January was a relatively low-ranking flu researcher at the agency, has instructed leadership to stick to what HHS says. Memoli, HHS, and the NIH did not respond to requests for comment.

NIH officials are used to following cues from their director and from HHS. But they were also used to their own sense of the NIH’s mission—to advance the health of the American people—being aligned with their leaders’. For weeks now, though, they have been operating under an administration ready to dismantle their agency’s normal operations, and to flout court orders to achieve its own ends.

As the freeze wore on, one former NIH official told me, some people at the agency recalled a mantra that Lawrence Tabak, the NIH’s longtime principal deputy director, often repeated to colleagues: As civil servants, your role is not to call the policies, but to implement them. That is your duty, as long as you’re not doing something illegal or immoral. The NIH’s expert staff might have their own ideas about how to allocate the agency’s funds, but if political leaders chose to pour money into a pet project, that was the leaders’ right. This time, though, many at the NIH have started wondering if, in implementing the policies they were told to, they were crossing Tabak’s line. Over and over, the former NIH official told me, “We were asking ourselves: Are we there yet?”

Without the ability to issue research grants, the NIH effectively had its gas line cut. The agency employs thousands of in-house scientists, but a good 80 to 85 percent of its $47 billion budget funds outside research. Each year, researchers across the country submit grant proposals that panels of experts scrutinize over the course of months, until they agree on which are most promising and scientifically sound. The NIH funds more than 60,000 of those proposals annually, supporting more than 300,000 scientists at more than 2,500 institutions, spread across every state. This system backed the creation of mRNA-based COVID vaccines and the gene-editing technology CRISPR; it supported 99 percent of the drugs approved in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. The agency has had a hand in “nearly all of our major medical breakthroughs over the past several decades,” Taison Bell, a critical-care specialist at UVA Health, told me.

That system ground to a halt by late January, after the Trump administration paused communications across HHS on January 21, and a memo released from the Office of Management and Budget just days later froze funding from federal agencies. The NIH stopped issuing new awards and began withholding funds from grants that had already been awarded—money that researchers had budgeted to pay staff, run experiments, and monitor study participants, including, in some cases, critically ill patients enrolled in drug trials.

Several of the agency’s top officials immediately sought advice from Tabak, who served as interim director from December 2021 to November 2023, and had long been a liaison between the agency and HHS. But Tabak openly admitted, several officials told me, that his power in this moment was limited. Although he had been the obvious choice to act as the NIH’s interim leader after Monica Bertagnolli, the most recent director, stepped down, the Trump administration hadn’t tapped him for the position. In fact, several officials said, the administration had ceased communicating with Tabak altogether. (Tabak declined to comment for this story.)

The role of acting director had instead gone to Memoli, who had no experience overseeing awards of external grants or running a large agency. But, officials said, Memoli had expressed beliefs that seemed to align with the administration’s. In 2021, he had called COVID vaccine mandates “extraordinarily problematic” in an email to Anthony Fauci (then director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and reportedly refused the shot himself; last spring, Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH, praised Memoli on social media as “a brave man who stood up when it was hard.” And last year, Memoli had been deemed noncompliant with an internal review, two officials said, after he submitted a DEI statement calling the term “offensive and demeaning.”

[Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities]

From the moment of his appointment, Memoli became, as far as other NIH staff could tell, “the only person the department or the White House was speaking directly to” on a regular basis, one former official said. And the message he passed along to the rest of the agency was clear: All NIH grants were to remain on pause.

That position was at odds with a growing number of court orders that directed the federal government to resume distributing federal funds. Some of those orders included painstaking, insistent language usually reserved for defendants who seem unlikely to comply, Samuel Bagenstos, who until December served as general counsel to HHS, told me. In written correspondence with senior NIH leadership in early February, current HHS lawyers, too, interpreted the court’s instructions unambiguously: “All stop work orders or pauses should be lifted so contract or grant work can continue” and contractors and grantees could be paid. In other words, put everything back the way it was.

Government lawyers aren’t the final arbiters on what’s legal. But the National Science Foundation, for instance, unfroze its funding on February 2. And the independent lawyers I spoke with agreed with what HHS counsel advised. The continuation of the NIH freeze “is unambiguously unlawful,” David Super, an administrative law expert at Yale University and Georgetown University, told me. The money that Congress appropriates to federal agencies each year is intended to be spent. “If they’re holding it back for policy reasons,” Super said, “they’re violating the law.”

At a meeting on February 6, several of the agency’s institute and center directors demanded that Memoli explain the NIH’s continued freeze. David Lankford, the NIH’s top lawyer, said that the position of the general counsel’s office aligned with that of the courts: Grants should be “awarded as intended.”

But Memoli called for patience, officials with knowledge of the meeting told me. He was waiting for one thing in particular to restart grant funding: He had tasked Michael Lauer, the deputy director of the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, which oversees grants, to draft a formal plan to make the agency’s funding practices consistent with Trump’s executive orders on gender, DEI, foreign aid, and environmental justice. (Lauer declined to comment for this story.)

Squaring those orders with the NIH’s mission, though, wasn’t straightforward. One sticking point, officials said, was funding for research into health disparities: If the administration’s definition of DEI included studies that acknowledged that many diseases disproportionately affect Americans from underrepresented backgrounds, complying with Trump’s orders could mean ignoring important health trends—and broad cuts in funding across many sectors of research. Cancer, for instance, disproportionately affects and kills Black Americans; men who have sex with men are the population most affected by HIV. “To pretend that entire communities don’t exist—in health, that doesn’t make sense,” Bertagnolli, the former NIH director, told me.

In several discussions that followed, officials with knowledge of those conversations said, Memoli assured NIH officials that health-disparity research could continue, as long as the inclusion of diverse populations in studies was “scientifically justifiable.” But given the administration’s disregard of scientific norms up until this point, “nobody was particularly satisfied by that explanation,” one former official told me.

Still, on February 7, Memoli yielded a bit of ground: He green-lighted the NIH to start issuing a small subset of grants for clinical trials. That allowance fell far short of Lankford and other lawyers’ recommendation to resume grant funding in full—but some officials wondered if the ice had begun to thaw.

That afternoon, Memoli acknowledged to other NIH officials that he understood what the agency’s lawyers were telling him, an official with knowledge of the meeting told me. But then, he offered an alternative justification for holding back the agency’s funds. What if, he said, the halt was continuing, not because the agency was adhering to the president’s executive orders, but because it was pursuing a new agenda—a new way of thinking about how it wanted to fund research? Such shifts take time; surely, the agency couldn’t continue its work until it had reoriented itself.

The lawyers were unmoved. At best, they said, that argument came off as a thinly veiled attempt to disregard court orders. Memoli contemplated this. He had no choice, he insisted: He was following the directions of three HHS officials—Dorothy Fink, then the acting secretary; Heather Flick Melanson, chief of staff; and Hannah Anderson, deputy chief of staff of policy—who had told him, in no uncertain terms, that the pause was to continue, save for the few award subtypes he’d already okayed. In other words, the Trump administration’s political leadership at HHS wanted funding to stay frozen, and that overruled any legal concerns.

And, as officials learned later that day, HHS officials had been planning new ways to limit NIH funding. That afternoon, they foisted a new policy on the NIH that would abruptly cap the amount of funding that could be allocated to cover researchers’ and universities’ overhead. The first Trump administration had tried to cut those “indirect cost” rates in 2017; in response, Congress had made clear that altering them requires legislative approval. And so within days, yet another temporary restraining order had blocked the cap.

[Read: The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials]

By this point, NIH lawyers were grim in their prognosis. If the agency moved forward with slashing indirect cost rates, they explained, individual staff members could be prosecuted for failing to comply with a congressional directive. On February 10, Sean R. Keveney, HHS’s acting general counsel, sent a memo to Flick Melanson that included a directive in bold, italicized font: All payments that are due under existing grants and contracts should be un-paused immediately.

Two days later, Lauer, the extramural-research director, issued a memo authorizing his colleagues to resume issuing awards—what should have been the agency’s final all-clear to return to normalcy.

Even then, the staff remained divided on how to proceed. Some institutes immediately began sending out awards: Lauer’s email spurred one institute, a current official told me, to process 100 grants in a single afternoon. Others, though, still held back. “They’re scared out of their minds,” the official told me. Some worry that, despite what Memoli has said, they’ll be held accountable for somehow violating the president’s wishes, and be terminated.

So far, at least 1,200 federal workers—many of them on probationary status—have been fired from the NIH; a new OMB memo released yesterday indicates that more layoffs are ahead. On February 11, HHS also attempted to unceremoniously reassign Tabak, the deputy director, to an essentially meaningless senior advisory position to the acting HHS secretary, with an office in another city, far from the laboratory he ran at the agency—a demotion that several NIH officials described to me as an insult. Tabak chose instead to retire that same day, abruptly ending his 25-year stint at the agency; Lauer, who had worked closely with Tabak for years, announced his own resignation that same week.

Their departures left many at the agency shocked and unmoored, several former and current officials told me: If Tabak and Lauer were out, was anyone’s position safe? And because Lauer left immediately after clearing his colleagues to issue grants, who would ensure that the agency’s core business would continue? “We’re all still terrified for our jobs,” one current official told me. Agency hallways, where colleagues once chatted and laughed, have sunk under an uncomfortable silence: “No one knows who they can trust.”

The administration has also kept up its attempts to block NIH grants. Even after Lauer’s memo went out, HHS continued to bar agency officials from posting to the Federal Register, the government journal that publishes, among other things, the public notices required by law for meetings in which experts review NIH grant applications and issue funds, one official told me. The NIH might have been allowed to award grants, but logistically, it was still unable to. Finally, on Monday, Memoli announced in a leadership meeting that the agency could resume submitting to the Federal Register. But there were limits: Although officials could post notice of some meetings to review grant proposals, meetings to finalize funding recommendations were still off the table—meaning the NIH would still be in a grant backlog. “We can’t go crazy and put all our meetings on,” Memoli told his colleagues. But if agency personnel responded to this new allowance reasonably, he said, they’d be granted more liberty.

[Read: Grad school is in trouble ]

To Super, the administrative lawyer, curtailing posting to the Federal Register constituted yet another strategy intended to circumvent court orders. “These aren’t legitimate workarounds,” he said. “This is contempt of court.” The NIH’s developing plan to align the agency’s strategies with the president’s executive orders—which, officials told me, is still awaiting formal HHS approval—may end up being a legal battleground too: On Friday, a federal judge declared Trump’s executive order attacking DEI programming a potential violation of the First Amendment.

The longer the pause on NIH funding has dragged on, the more the American research community has descended into disarray. Universities have considered pausing graduate-student admissions; leaders of laboratories have mulled firing staff. Diane Simeone, who directs UC San Diego’s cancer center, told me that, should the pause continue for just a few more weeks, dozens of clinical trials for cancer patients—sometimes “a patient’s best chance for cure, and long-term survival,” she told me—could be at risk of shutting down.

Even if courts ultimately nullify every action that the Trump administration has taken, the NIH—at least in its current form—may remain in jeopardy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the leader of HHS, has said that he wants to shift the agency’s focus away from infectious disease and downsize the staff. Some Republicans have been pressing for years to slash the number of institutes and centers at the agency, which depends on Congress for its budget, or to disburse its funding to the states as block grants—a change, Bertagnolli told me, that could mean biomedical research in America “as we know it would end.”

At a meeting with NIH leadership on February 13, Memoli explained to officials that “we are going to have to accept priorities are changing.” He didn’t say what those changing priorities might be, but previewed an era of “radical transparency,” language that would headline an executive order from Trump just days later. In this moment, federal judges were “hampering us” from moving forward, into the agency’s future, Memoli said. But the path before them remained the same: The NIH would do as the nation’s leaders wished.

Federal workers are scared. They don’t know who to trust. As President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have hacked away at federal agencies over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen workers who have outlined how the administration is pushing a new ideology and stoking paranoia within the government’s remaining ranks. My sources work, or until recently worked, across six different agencies, including the State, Commerce, and Defense Departments and USAID; most requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or they feared being targeted. “People are terrified,” one worker told me, “not for losing their jobs but for losing democracy.”

The workers described a fundamental transformation in the character of the government: Many workers say they live in a constant state of fear, unable to trust their colleagues, unable to speak freely, reflexively engaging in self-censorship even on matters they view as crucial to national security. One team that works on issues related to climate change has gone so far as to seal itself off in a completely technology-sanitized room for in-person meetings—no phones, watches, computers, or other connected devices. (Representatives for the Commerce and Defense Departments, USAID, DOGE, and the White House did not respond to my requests for comment.)

[Read: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

The widespread paralysis has been driven not just by the terminations and the crippling of entire agencies—which workers say has followed no apparent logic or process—but by executive orders and internal communications. Take the first diplomatic cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on January 21, the day after the inauguration. The message, which was sent to all members of the State Department, and which outlined various priorities, takes an “Orwellian” tone, as one State Department employee described it to me. Next to a priority labeled “Stopping Censorship and Prioritizing Truth,” Rubio wrote that although the State Department has been “combatting malign propaganda from hostile states” since the Cold War, the agency has also recently worked to promote “censorship, suppression, and misinformation” targeting Americans—perhaps motivated by “an excess of zeal or misguided attempts to control discourse.” The email, a copy of which I obtained, goes on:

This Department will forever stand in support and defense of Americans’ natural and First Amendment rights to free speech. We will combat genuine enemy propaganda, but always and only with the truth: that America is a great and good and just country, whose people are generous, and whose leaders now prioritize our core interests while respecting the rights and interests of other nations. Above all, programs that lead or in any way open the door to the censorship of the American people will be terminated.

My sources were disturbed by the idea that the administration would dictate “the truth” and accuse workers of censoring Americans. (What censorship Rubio is referring to is unclear, and a State Department spokesperson, who replied to my email inquiry without giving their name, said only, “As a general matter, we do not comment on internal personnel matters.”) Those working on behalf of Trump have already hidden information and engaged in censorship themselves, deleting scientific data and prompting researchers to scrub terms related to gender and sexuality from their work, in addition to purging information related to climate change and more. Because of this, one worker said, colleagues at his agency have considered replacing the generic word including with such as in reports, given the word’s proximity to inclusion, or excising terms like vulnerable groups, which are often used to refer to children, out of concern that they could be flagged under the administration’s sweeps to eradicate anything pertaining to diversity.

Transitions of power always lead to changes in priorities, but that is not what the workers say they are witnessing. Instead, the new Trump administration is engineering what some feel could be described only as ideological obedience.

Secretary Rubio’s message is just one example of the many ways the Trump administration has made these red lines apparent. Many Republicans have spoken out against any group or agency that could be perceived as censoring conservative voices. Shortly after the election, for instance, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an operation for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda established by President Barack Obama, shut down after a Republican-controlled House didn’t re-up its funding. Federal workers I spoke with now say that neither they nor their colleagues want to be associated in any way with working on or promoting disinformation research—even as they are aware that the U.S. government’s lack of visibility into such networks could create a serious national vulnerability, especially as AI gives state-backed operations powerful upgrades. Some are even discussing whether they should revise existing technical documents to scrub references to “misinformation” and “disinformation.” As one source told me, “If this administration is dictating the truth and dismantling disinformation efforts, you can’t bring it up anymore. You just don’t want to put a target on your back. Whether it’s intended or not, self-censorship emerges.”

Federal workers told me that this self-censorship started with issues related to DEI. On the third day of the Trump administration, the Office of Personnel Management instructed agency heads to email their employees a notice asking them to report one another for violations of President Trump’s executive order. Both the fear of being reported by colleagues and the fear of being punished for not reporting colleagues quickly led to a pervasive loss of trust and communication, my sources told me. Many employees stopped speaking openly in meetings in front of unfamiliar co-workers. Pronouns were dropped from emails; pride flags were taken off desks; references to Black History Month and promoting women in STEM were excised from office discussions, they said. Several workers told me they believed this was the intention: “Make people question what is safe—Where can I speak? Who can I speak to? How can I speak? You create a culture of chaos, fear, and confusion,” Stephie-Anne Duliepre, a former Science for Development fellow at USAID, told me. “I think that was the strategy because it was effective: wearing people out, stripping people’s will or faith that if they ever speak up they would be safe.”

This feeling may be by design. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of Project 2025, said in private speeches obtained by ProPublica that “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Some federal workers who collect health and medical data from Americans to support a wide array of downstream research, including cancer-drug discovery, are discussing whether to continue recording if patients are transgender, or information about pregnancies and abortions, an employee told me. The absence of that information will limit the kind of research that scientists can do, like studying how a drug affects pregnant women, or gender-based health disparities. But the workers are wrestling with whether having these data will put Americans in danger of being targeted by their own government, the employee said. Although workers have often asked patients about illegal behavior in the past, including illicit drug use, this time feels different: “It’s not just because it’s illegal in some places,” the employee said, referring to abortions. “It’s because it’s political.”

[Read: DOGE has God-mode access to government data]

Climate change has become another perceived taboo, sources told me. At the Department of Defense, the direction has been explicit. On January 27, several staffers received an email from superiors, according to a copy I reviewed, stating that the director of Army staff was working to suspend any activities “associated with, but not limited to the following areas: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory, Climate and climate change, Transgender, and Abortion policies." In other cases, workers are drawing their own conclusions. Some are discussing how to reframe climate-related policy documents, or even research on issues that could have downstream climate implications, into other kinds of energy and environmental issues that are more in line with the Trump administration’s priorities. (Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to pay “particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources,” for example.)

For any communications related to climate and other sensitive topics, the team that has stopped bringing internet-connecting devices to in-person meetings has also shifted from email to Signal messages, a worker in the group told me. “All I have ever wanted to do was help the American people become more resilient to climate change,” the worker told me. “Now I am being treated like a criminal.”

During my conversations, many workers referred to George Orwell’s 1984, and its portrayal of a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a minor government bureaucrat, to explain the scope and scale of their experience. They referenced the Ministry of Truth, doublethink, and Newspeak as they described what was happening. Six terminated workers at USAID conveyed to me how the agency’s rapid dismantlement represented an example of the worst of what could happen in this environment: DOGE swept in, Trump froze virtually all aid spending, and Musk began blasting USAID publicly as a “criminal organization.” Agency staff were slow to grasp the full scope of what was happening and to react—they told me that they wish they’d organized protests or sounded the alarm to the outside world more quickly. Under the new regime, the staff became more afraid to talk to one another in large groups and stopped connecting their personal devices to the government Wi-Fi for fear of being surveilled. “USAID is a canary in a coal mine,” a terminated USAID worker told me. “It felt like being hunted by your own government.”

Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.

No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as “Liberation Day,” a moment when, in his words, “vermin” and “radical left lunatics” would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing.

These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose.. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.

This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform]

The destruction of the modern civil-service ethos will take time. It dates from the late 19th century, when Theodore Roosevelt and other civil-service reformers launched a crusade to eliminate the spoils system that dominated government service. At that time, whoever won the presidency always got to fire everyone and appoint his own people, even for menial jobs. Much of the world still relies on such patronage systems, and they are both corrupt and corrupting. Politicians hand out job appointments in exchange for bribes. They appoint unqualified people—somebody’s cousin, somebody’s neighbor, or just a party hack—to jobs that require knowledge and experience. Patronage creates bad government and bad services, because it means government employees serve a patron, not a country or its constitution. When that patron demands, say, a tax break for a businessman favored by the leader or the party, they naturally comply.

Until January 20, American civil servants worked according to a different moral code. Federal workers were under instructions to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations. They were supposed to measure objective reality—evidence of pollution, for example—and respond accordingly. Not all of them were good administrators or moral people, but the damage that any one of them could do was limited by audits, rules about transparency, and again, an ethos built around the rule of law. This system was accepted by everyone—Republican-voting FBI agents, Democratic-voting environmental officers, the nurses at veterans’ hospitals, the air-traffic controllers at LAX.

What precisely replaces the civil-service ethos remains unclear. Christian nationalists want a religious state to replace our secular one. Tech authoritarians want a dictatorship of engineers, led by a monarchical CEO. Musk and Trump might prefer an oligarchy that serves their business interests. Already, DOGE has attacked at least 11 federal agencies that were embroiled in regulatory fights with Musk’s companies or were investigating them for potential violations of laws on workplace safety, workers’ rights, and consumer protection.

The new system, whatever its ideology, will in practice represent a return to patronage, about which more in a minute. But before it can be imposed, the administration will first have to break the morale of the people who believed in the old civil-service ethos. Vought, at a 2023 planning meeting organized in preparation for this moment, promised exactly that. People who had previously viewed themselves as patriots, working for less money than they could make in the private sector, must be forced to understand that they are evil, enemies of the state. His statement has been cited before, but it cannot be quoted enough times: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at the time. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”

[Renée DiResta: My encounter with the fantasy-industrial complex]

The email Musk sent to most employees in the federal government, offering them a “buyout”—several months’ pay, in exchange for a commitment to resign—was intended to inflict this kind of trauma. In effect, Musk was telling federal workers that he was not interested in what they were doing, or whether they were good at it, or how they could become more efficient. Instead, he was sending the message: You are all expendable.

Simultaneously, Musk launched an administrative and rhetorical attack on USAID, adding cruelty to the hostility. Many USAID employees work in difficult places, risking terrorism and violence, to distribute food and medicine to the poorest people on the planet. Overnight, they were told to abandon their projects and come home. In some places, the abrupt end of their programs, for example those providing special meals to malnourished children, will result in deaths, and USAID employees know it.

The administration has not acknowledged the dramatic real-world impact of this cut, which will, if not quashed by the courts, result in relatively minor budgetary savings. On the contrary, Musk and others turned to X to lie about USAID and its alleged waste. USAID did not give millions of dollars in direct grants to Politico, did not fund the visits of celebrities to Ukraine, did not send $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, and did not pay $84 million to Chelsea Clinton. But these fictions and others have now been blasted to hundreds of millions of people. Information taken from grant databases is also being selectively circulated, in some cases fed to internet trolls who are now hounding grant recipients, in order to smear people and organizations that had legitimate, congressionally approved goals. Musk and others used a similar approach during the so-called Twitter Files scandal to discredit researchers and mischaracterize their work.

But the true significance of USAID’s destruction is the precedent it sets. Every employee of every U.S. department or agency now knows that the same playbook can be applied to them too: abrupt funding cuts and management changes, followed by smear campaigns. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which safeguards bank customers against unfair, deceptive, or predatory practices, is already suspended. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, which mostly manages student loans, may follow. Within other agencies, anyone who was involved in hiring, training, or improving workplaces for minority groups or women is at risk, as is anyone involved in mitigating climate change, in line with Trump’s executive orders.

In addition, Musk has personally taken it upon himself to destroy organizations built over decades to promote democracy and oppose Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence around the world. For example, he described the journalists of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who take extraordinary risks to report in Russia, Belarus, and in autocracies across Eurasia, as “radical left crazy people.” Not long after he posted this misleading screed on X, one RFE/RL journalist was released from a Belarusian prison after nearly three years in jail, as a part of the most recent prisoner exchange.

Putting them all together, the actions of Musk and DOGE have created moral dilemmas of a kind no American government employee has faced in recent history. Protest or collaborate? Speak up against lawbreaking or remain silent? A small number of people will choose heroism. In late January, a career civil servant, Nick Gottlieb, refused to obey an order to place several dozen senior USAID employees on administrative leave, on the grounds that the order violated the law. “The materials show no evidence that you engaged in misconduct,” he told them in an email. He also acknowledged that he, too, might soon be removed, as indeed he was. “I wish you all the best—you do not deserve this,” he concluded.

[Robert P. Beschel Jr.: Making government efficient again]

Others will decide to cooperate with the new regime—collaborating, in effect, with an illegal assault, but out of patriotism. Much like the Ukrainian scientists who have kept the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant going under Russian occupation because they fear catastrophe if they leave, some tech experts who work on America’s payment systems and databases have stayed in place even as Musk’s team of very young, very inexperienced engineers have demanded illegitimate access. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one government employee told my Atlantic colleagues Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost.

Eventually, though, if the assault on the civil service is not blocked, the heroes and the patriots will disappear. They will be fired, or denied access to the tools they need to work, or frightened by the smear campaigns. They will be replaced by people who can pass the purity tests now required to get government jobs. Some will seem silly—are you willing to say “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico”?—and some will be deadly serious. Already, the Post reports, candidates for national-security posts in the new administration are being asked whether they accept Trump’s false claim to have won the 2020 election. At least two candidates for higher positions at the FBI were also asked to state who the “real patriots” were on January 6, 2021. This particular purity test is significant because it measures not just loyalty to Trump, but also whether federal employees are willing to repeat outright falsehoods—whether they are willing, in other words, to break the old civil-service ethos, which required people to make decisions based on objective realities, not myths or fictions.

To show that they are part of the new system, many loyalists will also engage in loud, performative behavior, designed to attract the attention and approval of Trump, Musk, Vought, or their followers. Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., wrote a missive addressed to “Steve and Elon” (referring to Musk and his associate Steve Davis) in which he vowed to track down “individuals and networks who appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees.” If anyone is deemed to have broken the law “or acted simply unethically,” Martin theatrically promised to “chase them to the end of the Earth.” Ostentatious announcements of bans on supposed DEI or climate-change projects will similarly threaten civil servants. Late last month, the Air Force removed videos about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, the first Black and female Air Force pilots, from a training course. After an uproar, the videos were put back, but the initial instinct was revealing. Like the people asking FBI candidates to lie about what happened on January 6, someone at the Air Force felt obliged to deny older historical truths as well.

Eventually, demonstrations of loyalty might need to become more direct. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out that a future IRS head, for example, might be pressured to audit some of the president’s perceived enemies. If inflation returns, government employees might feel they need to disguise this too. In the new system, they would hold their job solely at the pleasure of the president, not on behalf of the American people, so maybe it won’t be in their interest to give him any bad news.

Many older civil servants will remain in the system, of course, but the new regime will suspect them of disloyalty. Already, the Office of Personnel Management has instructed federal employees to report on colleagues who are trying to “disguise” DEI programs, and threatened “adverse consequences” for anyone who failed to do so. The Defense Health Agency sent out a similar memo. NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the FBI have also told employees who are aware of “coded or imprecise language” being used to “disguise” DEI to report these violations within 10 days.

Because these memos are themselves coded and imprecise, some federal employees will certainly be tempted to abuse them. Don’t like your old boss? Report him or her for “disguising DEI.” Want to win some brownie points with the new boss? Send in damning evidence about your colleagues’ private conversations. In some government departments, minority employees have set up affinity groups, purely voluntary forums for conversation or social events. A number of government agencies are shutting these down; others are being disbanded by organizers who fear that membership lists will be used to target people. Even private meetings, outside the office, might not be safe from spying or snooping colleagues.

[Annie Lowrey: Civil servants are not America’s enemies]

That might sound implausible or incredible, but at the state level, legislation encouraging Americans to inform on other Americans has proliferated. A Texas law, known as the Heartbeat Act, allows private citizens to sue anyone they believe to have helped “aid or abet” an abortion. The Mississippi legislature recently debated a proposal to pay bounties to people who identify illegal aliens for deportation. These measures are precedents for what’s happening now to federal employees.

And the fate of federal employees will, in turn, serve as a precedent for what will happen to other institutions, starting with universities. Random funding cuts have already shocked some of the biggest research universities across the country, damaging ongoing projects without regard to “efficiency” or any other criteria. Political pressure will follow. Already, zealous new employees at the National Science Foundation are combing through descriptions of existing research projects, looking to see if they violate executive orders banning DEI. Words such as advocacy, disability, trauma, socioeconomic, and yes, women will all trigger reviews.

There are still greater dangers down the road—the possible politicization of the Federal Electoral Commission, for example. Eventually, anyone who interacts with the federal government—private companies, philanthropies, churches, and above all, citizens—might find that the cultural revolution affects them too. If the federal government is no longer run by civil servants fulfilling laws passed by Congress, then its interests might seriously diverge from yours.

None of this is inevitable. Much of it will be unpopular. The old idea that public servants should serve all Americans, and not just a small elite, has been part of American culture for more than a century. Rule of law matters to many of our elected politicians, as well as to their voters, all across the political spectrum. There is still time to block this regime change, to preserve the old values. But first we need to be clear about what is happening, and why.

Agency confirms death of staffer a day after UN pauses operations in northern Yemen due to Houthi detentions.

This week, CIA personnel came to a “fork in the road.” That’s the official euphemism for a buyout that the Trump administration has offered federal government employees, among them the more than 20,000 who work for the intelligence agency. But many longtime officers and new recruits really do feel like they are at a crossroads as they ask themselves whether they still want their jobs, or will be able to keep them.

The buyout, part of a legally dubious proposal called “deferred resignation,” is ostensibly an attempt to cut government spending by reducing the number of employees. But another objective is plainly visible: The president suspects that the CIA harbors people who oppose his policies and might try to undermine them. The buyout is one way to weed these people out. But it’s a strategy that reflects a misunderstanding of how the CIA actually works—and a drawdown that could leave the country exposed at a time of heightened global risk. The measures the administration is taking to thin the ranks further risk doing the very thing that Donald Trump claims he wants to stop: politicizing the intelligence community.

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

The CIA wasn’t initially among the government agencies offered the buyout, which excluded “positions related to … national security.” But John Ratcliffe, the new CIA director, asked the White House to make the offer available, “believing it would pave the way for a more aggressive spy agency,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported about it.

Ratcliffe has said many times that CIA employees aren’t “aggressive” enough. What exactly he means by this can be hard to pin down, but generally Ratcliffe—who was the director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration—seems to think that the CIA has “subordinated the truth,” as he once wrote, to the political biases and preferences of unaccountable analysts, most consequentially those studying China. He has said that he personally saw officers pulling punches or altering analysis to comport with “the company line” that the country did not pose as significant a threat to the United States as Trump claimed during his first term. He has also said that the agency is too hidebound and bureaucratic, an assessment that surely some, and perhaps many, CIA officers would agree with.

In his first written message to the entire workforce as CIA director, Ratcliffe said the agency needed to rededicate itself to its core mission of international espionage, people who read his note told me. He largely repeated remarks from his Senate confirmation hearing last month, when he promised that the CIA “will collect intelligence—especially human intelligence—in every corner of the globe, no matter how dark or difficult.”

This was an odd thing to emphasize, given that the CIA literally does this every day, and has since its inception more than 75 years ago. But Ratcliffe argues that the agency has lost its focus and is drifting away from its apolitical ethos. He promised “a strict adherence to the CIA’s mission … never allowing political or personal biases to cloud our judgement [sic] or infect our products.” Addressing personnel, Ratcliffe said, “If all of this sounds like what you signed up for, then buckle up and get ready to make a difference. If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work. ”

Here was another curious exhortation, because risky and dangerous spying in the service of presidents, regardless of party, is exactly what people who work for the CIA signed up for. Presumably many of them also thought they were making a difference. When Ratcliffe talks about stamping out bias, many will presume he’s talking to people who wish Trump weren’t the president. And surely there are many. But CIA officers are trained to subordinate their own political views and do their job regardless of who sits in the White House. Ratcliffe appears to think that for a lot of intelligence officers, that’s just lip service, and his broader critique of political bias aligns neatly with Trump’s own long-held suspicions.  

So now those who don’t want to buckle up are being invited to get out. Ratcliffe addressed the buyout yesterday when he held his first “all-hands,” a town-hall meeting in an auditorium at headquarters known as the “Bubble.” The gathering was uncontentious, people who heard his remarks told me. Ratcliffe said he wanted CIA officers to have the same opportunity as other federal employees to leave if they decided that they could not work for the Trump administration. Those who were on board with the administration’s vision—which he described as countering China and protecting the United States from terrorists—were welcome to stay.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil service reform]

In a written statement, a CIA spokesperson described the buyout offer as “part of a holistic strategy to infuse the Agency with renewed energy, provide opportunities for rising leaders to emerge, and better position the CIA to deliver on its mission.” But the agency exists to support the president’s policies—any president’s policies—and moves with the political tides. Presidents come and go. CIA officers salute (metaphorically) and carry out their orders. At the town-hall meeting, Ratcliffe “highlighted his determination to rebuild the Agency’s trust with the President,” a CIA official said. Trump’s feelings are no secret, but to hear the new director articulate them to the nation’s most important intelligence agency was still remarkable: The president doesn’t really trust you.

Trump’s attacks on the CIA are not new, and most officers sweated them out through the president’s first four years in office. But some are wondering if they can do it again—not because of their political beliefs, but because of what they see transpiring at other agencies in the first few weeks of the new administration. Some have told me that they’re watching events at the FBI—where Trump is rooting out agents who worked on criminal investigations of his conduct—and the wholesale demonization of USAID, and they wonder if this is a preview of things to come at Langley.

Holly Berkley Fletcher, who worked as a senior Africa analyst, resigned in December, having decided before the election to bring her 19-year career to a close. “Watching all of this feels like a massive betrayal,” she told me. CIA officers “give up elements of their privacy and personal freedom, curtail their political activities, and constrain their speech in the workplace in order to function as a team, with mission always at the center of what they do. Diversity of all kinds, including political diversity, has always been CIA’s strength in accomplishing that.”

Trump is not likely to simply shut down the CIA. But he could gut it. And buyouts aren’t the only means to that end. Two officers told me they are considering early retirement, an option that could be attractive for people who are financially prepared to leave the government after decades of service and would collect a pension. And the Trump administration has taken other steps that might push out people who joined very recently.

The White House demanded the names of all officers under probationary status, meaning that they have worked for the CIA for two years or less, people familiar with this process told me. Those new employees don’t yet have full civil-service protections, which could make them easier to fire than those who do. The agency plans to review their qualifications to ensure that they are aligned with the mission. Presumably they will be; the CIA hired them for a reason. But the obvious and troubling implication is that people who joined while Joe Biden was president are at greater risk of losing their job.

Demanding a list of names in this way (as first reported by The New York Times) is unconventional and risky. Foreign governments labor diligently to learn the identities of anyone working at the CIA. To protect the information while complying with the White House’s directive, the probationary officers were identified by only their first name and the first initial of their last name. Those names were delivered to the Office of Personnel Management, which has been effectively taken over by Elon Musk and his staff.

[Listen: Purge now, pay later]

Reducing the number of CIA employees at a moment when the United States faces such formidable challengers as Russia, Iran, China, and international drug cartels “is potentially a big mistake,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former operations officer who worked in the Middle East and on Russia, told me. “This may have a significant impact on CIA’s core mission of recruiting and handling agents. Replacing case officers with years of street experience, tradecraft training, and hard-target language skills is exceedingly difficult if many indeed walk out the door.”

To train officers to work in the field takes years. Polymeropoulos worries that getting rid of the newest officers, who are the next generation in the pipeline, could set back the work of espionage. “This is not reform, which is for sure needed,” he said. “This is more of a sledgehammer.”

And surely U.S. adversaries are taking notes, Fletcher, the Africa analyst, told me—just as the CIA would be if an adversary’s intelligence service were in such disarray.

“Our adversaries could not have scripted things better, and they are no doubt celebrating the chaos, fear, and division permeating the agency right now,” Fletcher told me. “As a former CIA officer, I am heartbroken. As an American citizen, I am terrified.”

It took the Trump administration—and, really, Elon Musk—all of 10 days to dismantle USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. On January 24, a memo from the State Department ordered virtually every foreign-assistance program funded by the United States government to halt work for 90 days. Four days later, the State Department said that lifesaving humanitarian assistance should continue, and that special waivers could be granted to select programs. Nevertheless, soup kitchens stopped handing out food, clinics suspended care, and truckers paid through aid programs stopped delivering medicine.

Then came the purge. Early yesterday morning, the Department of Government Efficiency, a Musk-led group that has been announcing what stays and goes in Washington, told employees not to come to work. Musk posted on X an hour later, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” More than 1,000 employees—including some in war zones—were locked out of their work accounts. Earlier today, Politico reported that nearly all of USAID’s Washington-based staff will soon be placed on leave, and ABC News reported that staff on foreign assignments are being evacuated.

USAID, which has distributed aid to hundreds of millions of people around the world for 60 years, estimates that it has extended children’s life expectancies by six years in many of the countries it works in. But its $40 billion in annual spending—about 0.7 percent of the U.S. budget—has been criticized for inefficiencies, and many Americans accuse the government of spending too much on foreign aid. Some of those critiques are arguably fair. In 2022, for example, USAID spent more than $100,000 on theatrical productions in Ireland and Colombia. (That said, Americans also tend to drastically overestimate the amount we spend on foreign aid.) USAID was established by Congress as an independent agency, and by law, only Congress can dissolve it. The White House, though, seems determined to do away with it as an independent agency; yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he is now the acting head of USAID. If the agency is successfully subsumed by the State Department, it could, in theory, continue in a slightly diminished form—or be totally gutted. When reached for comment, a State Department spokesperson referred me to Rubio’s recent statements to the media. One of them read: “USAID may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State, and the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law.”

So far, the administration has framed the foreign-aid pause as temporary. But even if much of USAID’s work is allowed to resume in a few months, the intricate global-health ecosystem being torn apart will not be easily repaired. Famine and disease—two of the issues against which USAID has made the most progress—don’t stop when funding does, and can spread disastrously in even a short window. Prior to the stop-work order, at least 220,000 people worldwide got their HIV medication every day at clinics supported by the U.S. government. Juli Duvall-Jones, who oversees an HIV clinic in eastern Ivory Coast, told me that the pregnant women her clinic serves are no longer receiving their daily treatment, meaning that some children will almost certainly contract HIV during birth or through breastfeeding. People who are exposed to HIV have only 72 hours—less than the amount of time many clinics have now been closed—to begin a medication regimen called post-exposure prophylaxis that can help prevent infection. A pause of any length in USAID-funded anti-HIV efforts will cause more people to contract the disease. Missing doses of treatment can make it less effective. Without treatment, the disease kills young people in about 12 years, and older adults even faster.

[Read: Melinda Gates on why foreign aid still matters]

The head of one aid group, who, like several aid workers I spoke with, asked that neither she nor the group be named for fear of permanently losing their USAID funding, told me that her organization—which, among other projects, treats severely malnourished children and babies in Sudan—is now scraping by on money diverted from other projects. Most aid efforts operate on extremely thin margins, so any pause in funding is felt almost immediately. “We can sort of keep it going for a few days,” she said. But once the money runs out, these children will lose the supplemental oxygen, fortified foods, and 24/7 medical supervision they need. Many, she said, will die in two to six hours.

As the 90-day pause drags on, longer-term consequences will start to become clear. In Uganda, the national government has stopped spraying insecticide and distributing bed nets to pregnant women and young kids; during the country’s next rainy season, which spans from March to May, malaria cases and deaths may spike. The Center for Victims of Torture, a global nonprofit, has furloughed most of its staff and stopped rehabilitation programs in Jordan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, including one for women among the estimated 100,000 raped in a recent war in Tigray, Ethiopia. Scott Roehm, CVT’s director of global policy and advocacy, told me that many of the center’s clients attempted suicide prior to getting help. He fears what will happen to people who have to stop their treatment—and those who never get help at all.

Right now, it seems unlikely that all or even most of USAID’s programs will resume at the end of April. Yesterday, Donald Trump said Ukraine should give America its lithium in exchange for aid, suggesting that programs that don’t give the U.S. an immediate win may be cut for good. The longer the pause lasts, the more devastating the effects will be, not just for aid recipients but also for Americans. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a monitoring tool funded by USAID, has been offline since Friday. Without it, aid workers may struggle to intervene early enough to prevent mass starvation, and farmers have lost a major tool for anticipating agricultural shocks. Michael VanRooyen, an emergency physician who has led humanitarian work in Darfur, Rwanda, and Ukraine, estimates that an extended pause in food aid could kill hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children. USAID workers leading the agency’s response to an active Ebola outbreak in Uganda were among those locked out of work systems. Without their involvement, the U.S. could miss signs that the outbreak is growing or changing—or even that a new pandemic is brewing.

Democratic lawmakers have started pushing back on the demolition of USAID. Yesterday, Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, said in a statement that “dismantling USAID is illegal and makes us less safe,” and placed a blanket hold on nominees for State Department positions until USAID is back up and running.

[Read: The constitutional crisis is here]

But if the agency is restored—next week, next month, or years from now—restarting its work won’t be as simple as turning the flow of cash back on. After the week USAID has had, staff might be hard to come by. According to one group of development workers tracking the fallout, the aid freeze has caused nearly 9,000 Americans and far more people around the world to lose their jobs. Many may decide to pursue work outside the humanitarian sector, which typically offers low pay and benefits. Even if the pause ends quickly, the federal government has given workers little incentive to return. Musk has called USAID “a criminal organization,” “a ball of worms,” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

Whoever does come back to work will need to get back in touch with the people who lead local organizations (many of which have or will have gone defunct), the world leaders with whom they once partnered, and the people who shuttle supplies around the world. Susan Reichle, a foreign-assistance expert who served in every presidential administration from George H. W. Bush’s to Trump’s first term, told me that the pause has already broken trust that could take years to repair. “USAID staff are having to meet with ministers of health, ministers of power, ministers of education” to tell them that work has stopped, Reichle said. “And they can’t tell them if or when those partnerships will ever continue.”

Having a measured, humane debate about the way the U.S. distributes humanitarian aid is possible. It is in the country’s interest to spend aid money effectively. And the way the United States distributes global aid could certainly be improved. But the instant retraction of much of the world’s food and health-care infrastructure will create damage that cannot be undone. After three months, “many of those people will be dead, or so severely harmed and malnourished that it causes them irreversible and deep suffering,” Lawrence Gostin, the faculty director of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told me. A pause on saving lives means exactly that.