Americans have plenty to worry about these days when it comes to infectious-disease outbreaks. This is the worst flu season in 15 years, there’s a serious measles outbreak roiling Texas, and the threat of bird flu isn’t going away. “The house is on fire,” Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at CUNY School of Public Health, told me. The more America is pummeled by disease, the greater the chance of widespread outbreaks and even another pandemic.

As of this week, the federal government may be less equipped to deal with these threats. Elon Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce have hit public-health agencies, including the CDC, NIH, and FDA. The Trump administration has not released details on the layoffs, but the cuts appear to be more than trivial. The CDC lost an estimated 700 people, according to the Associated Press. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 NIH staffers reportedly lost their jobs.

Perhaps as notable as who was laid off is who wasn’t. The Trump administration initially seemed likely to target the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, a cohort of doctors, scientists, nurses, and even veterinarians who investigate and respond to disease outbreaks around the world. Throughout the program’s history, EIS officers have been the first line of defense against anthrax, Ebola, smallpox, polio, E. coli, and, yes, bird flu. Four recent CDC directors have been part of the program.

The layoffs were mostly based on workers’ probationary status. (Most federal employees are considered probationary in their first year or two on the job, and recently promoted staffers can also count as probationary.) EIS fellows typically serve two-year stints, which makes them probationary and thus natural targets for the most recent purge. EIS fellows told me they were bracing to be let go last Friday afternoon, but the pink slips never came. Exactly why remains unclear. In response to backlash about the planned firings, Musk posted on X on Monday that EIS is “not canceled” and that those suggesting otherwise should “stop saying bullshit.” A spokesperson for DOGE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

This doesn’t mean EIS is safe. Both DOGE and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s newly confirmed health secretary, are just getting started. More layoffs could still be coming, and significant cuts to EIS would send a clear message that the administration does not believe that investigating infectious-disease outbreaks is a good use of tax dollars. In that way, the future of EIS is a barometer of how seriously the Trump administration takes the task of protecting public health.

Trump and his advisers have made it abundantly clear that, after the pandemic shutdowns in 2020, they want a more hands-off approach to dealing with outbreaks. Both Trump and Kennedy have repeatedly downplayed the destruction caused by COVID. But so far, the second Trump administration’s approach to public health has been confusing. Last year, Trump said he would close the White House’s pandemic office; now he is reportedly picking a highly qualified expert to lead it. The president hasn’t laid out a bird-flu plan, but amid soaring egg prices, the head of his National Economic Council recently said that the plan is coming. Kennedy has also previously said that he wants to give infectious-disease research a “break” and focus on chronic illness; in a written testimony during his confirmation hearings, he claimed that he wouldn’t actually do anything to reduce America’s capacity to respond to outbreaks.

The decision to spare EIS, at least for now, only adds to the confusion. (Nor is it the sole murky aspect of the layoffs: Several USDA workers responding to bird flu were also targeted, although the USDA told me that those cuts were made in error and that it is working to “rectify the situation.”) On paper, EIS might look like a relatively inconsequential training program that would be apt for DOGEing. In reality, the program is less like a cushy internship and more akin to public health’s version of the CIA.

Fellows are deployed around the world to investigate, and hopefully stop, some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The actual work of an EIS officer varies depending on where they’re deployed, though the program’s approach is often described as “shoe-leather epidemiology”—going door to door or village to village probing the cause of an illness in the way a New York City detective might investigate a stabbing on the subway. Fellows are highly credentialed experts, but the process provides hands-on training in how to conduct an outbreak investigation, according to Nash, the CUNY professor, who took part in the program. Nash entered EIS with a Ph.D. in epidemiology, but “none of our training could prepare us for the kinds of things we would learn through EIS,” he said.

In many cases, EIS officials are on the ground investigating before most people even know there’s a potential problem. An EIS officer investigated and recorded the United States’ first COVID case back in January 2020, when the virus was still known as 2019-nCoV. It would be another month before the CDC warned that the virus would cause widespread disruption to American life.

More recently, in October, EIS officers were on the ground in Washington when the state was hit with its first human cases of bird flu, Roberto Bonaccorso, a spokesperson with the Washington State Department of Health, wrote to me. “Every single outbreak in the United States and Washington State requires deployment of our current EIS officers,” Bonaccorso said.

EIS is hardly the only tool the federal government uses to protect the country against public-health threats. Managing an outbreak requires coordination across an alphabet soup of agencies and programs; an EIS fellow may have investigated the first COVID case, but that of course didn’t stop the pandemic from happening. Other vital parts of how America responds to infectious diseases were not spared by the DOGE layoffs. Two training programs with missions similar to that of EIS were affected by the cuts, according to a CDC employee whom I agreed not to identify by name because the staffer is not authorized to talk to the press.

The DOGE website boasts of saving nearly $4 million on the National Immunization Surveys, collectively one of the nation’s key tools for tracking how many Americans, particularly children, are fully vaccinated. What those cuts will ultimately mean for the future of the surveys is unknown. A spokesperson for the research group that runs the surveys, the National Opinion Research Center, declined to comment and directed all questions to the CDC.

And more cuts to the nation’s public-health infrastructure, including EIS, could be around the corner. RFK Jr. has already warned that certain FDA workers should pack their bags. Kennedy has repeatedly claimed that public-health officials inflate the risks of infectious disease threats to bolster their importance with the public; EIS fellows are the first responders who hit the ground often before public officials are even sounding the alarm bells.

Ironically, the work of the EIS is poised to become especially pressing during Trump’s second term. If measles, bird flu, or any other infectious disease begins spreading through America unabated after we have fired the public-health workforce, undermined vaccines, or halted key research, it will be the job of EIS fellows to figure out what went wrong.

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May 1, 9 a.m., was once the hour of chaos in New York City. In a tradition dating back to colonial days, leases all over the city expired precisely at that time. Thousands of tenants would load their belongings on carts and move, stepping around other people’s piles of clothing and furniture. Paintings of that day look like a mass eviction, or the aftermath of some kind of disaster. In fact, that day represented a novel American form of hope. Mobility, or the right to decide where you wanted to live, was a great American innovation. But lately, that mobility is stalling, with real consequences for politics, culture, and the national mood.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor and the author of the new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum explains how, over the decades, several forces combined to make it harder for the average American to move and improve their circumstances. And he lands at some surprising culprits: progressives, such as Jane Jacobs, who wanted to save cities but instead wound up blocking natural urban evolution and shutting newcomers out.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

I have moved many times in my life: across continents, across the country, back and forth across D.C., which is where I live now. And I didn’t think much about it. I just chalked it up to restlessness—until I read Yoni Appelbaum’s new book, which is also the March cover story in The Atlantic. The book is called Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

Appelbaum argues that there is and always has been something quintessentially American—and also, quintessentially hopeful—about moving. In the 19th century, Moving Day was, like, a thing—a holiday celebrated across different American cities at different times, when everybody would just up and move. To quote Appelbaum: “Nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a single day.”

But moving isn’t happening so much anymore. As Appelbaum writes: “Every year, fewer Americans can afford to live where they want to.” So what happens to a country—geographically, culturally, politically, and, in some ways, psychologically—when mobility starts to stall?

[Music]

Rosin: Can you read this from your intro, these couple of sentences?

Yoni Appelbaum: “The notion that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they happen to be born—is America’s most profound contribution to the world … The fact that it is now endangered is not just a problem for housing markets; it’s a lethal threat to the entire American project.”

Rosin: Okay. Let’s start with the second half: Why is mobility the thing that defines the American project?

Appelbaum: It is the thing that defines the American project, because it was the first thing that anyone who got here from Europe noticed. People would come to the United States and gawk. They saw this as either our greatest asset or our great national character flaw. But they were amazed at how often Americans moved. And they were particularly amazed that the Americans who were moving were not moving out of desperation, that Americans tended to be doing okay in one place and to still want something more for themselves—want something better for their children—and to move someplace else in pursuit of it.

Rosin: And you’re not just describing something geographic. You’re describing something psychological.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I’m talking about an attitude that Americans believed that they could change their destinies by changing their address, that they could move someplace new and do better than they were doing. And also—and this is the second half of the answer—Americans believed that they were not defined by the circumstances of their birth. That was the great gift that mobility gave us. And that had really profound implications that took me a while to unravel.

Rosin: Right. Because it’s not just about geography. It’s not just about money.

It’s about a sense of yourself as having infinite possibilities. Like, you could just move and move. You weren’t class-bound in any way.

Appelbaum: Here’s the thing about American individualism: We are individuals, in the sense that we have the ability to construct our own identities, but we define ourselves by virtue of the communities that we choose to join.

Throughout the world, communities tended to choose their members. Even in the early United States, in the colonial era, if you tried to move in someplace, you could be warned out. The town had the right to say, Hey. You may have bought property here. You may have leased a building. You may have a job. We don’t want you here. And not surprisingly, they disproportionately warned out the poor. They warned out minorities. Really, American communities, for the first couple hundred years of European settlement, were members-only clubs.

And then in the early 19th century, there’s a legal revolution. And instead of allowing communities to choose their members, we allow people to choose their communities. You could move someplace and say, I intend to live here, and that was enough to become a legal resident of that place.

Rosin: So just in numbers, can you give a sense of where we are now? What’s the statistic that shows most starkly the decline in mobility now?

Appelbaum: In the 19th century, as best I can calculate it, probably one out of three Americans moved every year.

Rosin: Every year?

Appelbaum: Every year. In some cities, it might be half. In the 20th century, as late as 1970, it was one out of five. And the census in December told us we just set a new record, an all-time low. It’s dropped over the last 50 years to one out of 13. It is the most profound social change to overcome America in the last half century.

Rosin: It’s so interesting, because if you told me that someone moved that many times in a year, I would not associate that with upward mobility. I would associate that with desperation and problems.

Appelbaum: For a long time, that’s exactly what historians thought too. There was this guy, Stephan Thernstrom, who set out to investigate this, and thought what he had discovered, in all this moving about, was what he called the “floating proletariat,” right? Here was evidence that, in America, the American dream was chimerical. You couldn’t actually attain it. There was this great mass of people just moving from one place to another to another.

And several decades later, as we got better data-mining tools, we were able to follow up on the floating proletariat and find out what happened to them. The people who had stayed in one place, Thernstrom saw—they were doing a little better than they had before. But when we could track the people who had left, it turned out, they were doing much better, that the people who relocate—even the ones at the bottom of the class structure—across every decade that historians can study, it’s the case that the people who move do better economically. And this is really key: Their kids do better than the people who stayed where they were.

Rosin: It’s like Americans are, in their soul, psychological immigrants. Like, that we behave the way we think of immigrants behaving, and the more robustly we do that, the better off Americans are. The most evocative image that you draw is something called “Moving Day,” from an earlier era. I had never heard of that. Can you paint a picture of what that is?

Appelbaum: We’ve got these wonderful accounts of Moving Day from people who came over, more or less, just to see it. By law or by custom, in most cities and in most rural areas, all unwritten leases expired on the same day of the year. And this actually gave renters an enormous leg up in the world in most times, in most places, because it meant that an enormous number of properties were potentially available to them. They could go back to their landlord and say, If you want me to stay for another year, you gotta fix the leaky sink. Or they could try someplace better.

And they would all pile their possessions down at the curb. First thing in the morning, they’d hire a cart to take them across town or down the lane, and then they would push past the family that was moving out of some other apartment or townhouse or home. As they were taking their stuff out, they’d be moving their stuff in. But between sunup and sundown, a quarter, a third, half of a city might relocate. And there are these descriptions of trash lining the gutters as things fell out of the carts or there wasn’t room for it in the new apartment, and people would go scavenging through the gutters, trying to find, out of the trash, their own treasures.

It was raucous and wild, and respectable Americans always looked down on it. And yet, for the people who participated in it, it was a way to have their home be kind of like an iPhone or a car: You keep the one you have for a year or two, and then you trade up for a newer model.

Rosin: So upgrades. Now, where is this happening? Is this happening in cities of a certain size, in immigrant communities? Like, who is doing all this chaotic moving?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s one thing that really upset the upper crust.

Rosin: And who are they? Let’s define all the sides. Who are the respectable Americans?

Appelbaum: The respectable Americans are those of long-standing stock who are trying very hard to impress the European cousins. And they are appalled that this defect of their national character—that people don’t know their place. They don’t know their station. They’re always moving around looking for something better for themselves, and they write about it in those kinds of moralistic terms.

But the people who are participating in it, it’s very broad. I mean, when you’re talking about half the city moving, what you’re talking about is activity that’s as much a middle-class and upper-middle-class activity as it is a working-class activity. As long as you are adding a good number of fresh new homes to the market every year, pretty much everybody who moved could move up, because the wealthy were buying brand-new homes that had just been erected.

But they were vacating, you know, homes that were a few years older or apartments that they were moving out of, and those became available to the upper-middle class, right? And you’d get a chain of moves. You can trace this, you know, a dozen, 15 moves, one family succeeding another, succeeding another—and everybody moving up to something a little bit better than they had the year before. And, you know, just like an iPhone or a car, they’re chasing technological innovation. One year, you move into a new apartment, and it’s got running water. And, you know, two years later, the water runs hot and cold, and it’s a miracle, right? So everybody is constantly moving up in the world as they constantly relocate.

Rosin: So there are decades of massive amounts of mobility. It’s considered respectable enough. And then, at some moment, a few forces start to slow this all down. So can you tell the story of what happens in Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah. It’s sort of a sad story when you look closely at it. Lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, is like no place that’s ever existed before or since. It is so dense. People are living in tenements at a sort of rate per acre, the way demographers measure this, that is multiples of any place in Manhattan today.

Rosin: Do you remember the numbers? Because I think they’re extraordinary. Maybe I’m just remembering this from going to the Tenement Museum, but when you actually look at the density numbers, they are just hard to get your head around.

Appelbaum: Yeah. I think it’s, like, 600 per acre. It’s really, really, really high. There’s no place in Manhattan today that’s even a third as dense, even though the buildings are now much, much taller. So they’re really squeezed in there. And reformers are appalled. And there are real problems with some of these, you know—what they’re really appalled about, it turns out, is less the housing conditions than the presence of so many immigrants, with their foreign ways, foreign religion, foreign languages, weird foods, odd smells, right?

They’re looking at this, and they are not happy that this is invading their city. They’re not subtle about it. They’re quite clear that they think that apartments are themselves degrading. This is the original progressive era, and there’s a tight intertwining between the reformers and government, and they move fluidly among them.

Rosin: Wait. Like, who is the “they”? Are we talking about city planners? Just, this is a really interesting moment. So I just want to—because it’s unexpected, this part of the history.

Appelbaum: Lawrence Veiller is sort of Mr. Tenement Reform. He’s the guy who will write most of the reports, who’ll serve on the commissions, who’ll move in as the first deputy commissioner of the Tenement Office when New York creates one. Like, he is both a government official and a reformer, and that was pretty typical. They move fluidly among these jobs. And he is the guy who really goes on a crusade against tenements.

And maybe the most remarkable moment in my research was stumbling across a speech he gave at a conference, where somebody had asked, How do you keep apartments out of your city? And he says, Well, you know. The problem is: If you put it to a vote, you can’t keep them out of your city, because people actually like living in apartments. They serve a useful function. So what you have to do is solve it the way I’ve done it in New York: You call it fire-safety regulation. And you put a bunch of regulations on the apartments that make them prohibitively expensive to build. But be careful not to put any fire-safety regulations on single- or two-family homes, because that would make them too expensive. And as long as you call it “fire safety,” you can get away with keeping the apartments and their residents out of your neighborhoods.

And it’s one of those moments where, you know, you just sort of gape at the page, and you think, I can’t believe he actually said it. I was worried, maybe, I was reading too much into some of the other things that he’d said. But here he is straightforwardly saying that much of the regulatory project that he and other progressives pursued was purely pretextual. They were trying to find a whole set of rules that could make it too expensive for immigrants to move into their neighborhoods.

Rosin: So we’re in a moment of just resistance to tenements and apartments and crowdedness. How does this, then, become encoded? What’s the next step they take?

Appelbaum: You know, the problem with building codes is that, ultimately, there are ways around them. People are developing new technologies. It’s not enough to keep the apartments back. It’s not enough to pen the immigrants into the Lower East Side.

And there’s a bigger problem, which is that the garment industry in New York is moving up Fifth Avenue. And on their lunch breaks, the Jewish garment workers are getting some fresh air on the sidewalks, and this infuriates the owners of the wealthy department stores on Fifth Avenue, who say, You’re scaring off our wealthy customers. And they want to push them out. They try rounding them up and carting them off in police wagons. They try negotiating with the garment-factory owners. But, of course, these workers want to be out on the sidewalk. It’s their one chance for fresh air, and it’s a public sidewalk. So there’s a limit to what they can do, and they finally hit on a new solution, which is: If you change the law so that you can’t build tall buildings near these department stores, then you can push the garment factories back down toward the Lower East Side.

Rosin: You know, anytime you step into the history of the technical and possibly boring word zoning, you hit racism.

Appelbaum: You know, the thing about zoning, which is sort of the original sin of zoning—which is a tool invented on the West Coast to push the Chinese out of towns and then applied—

Rosin: —in progressive Berkeley! That’s another thing I learned in your book, is how Berkeley, essentially, has such racist zoning origins.

Appelbaum: It’s a really painful story, and zoning, ultimately, is about saying there are always laws, which said there are things that you can’t do in crowded residential areas. But zoning was a set of tools, which said, Some things are going to be okay on one side of the tracks and not okay on the other. And given that that was the approach from the beginning, it was always about separating populations into different spaces.

And so New York adopts the first citywide zoning code. And at first, this is spreading from city to city. The New Deal will take it national.

Rosin: And what does—the zoning code is not explicitly racist? What does it actually say in the government documents?

Appelbaum: Well, that’s the brilliance of the zoning code. The courts have been striking down explicit racial segregation. But if you wrote your ordinance carefully enough and never mentioned race, you could segregate land by its use. You could figure out how to allow in some parts of your city only really expensive housing, or in other parts of your city, you could put all of the jobs that a particular immigrant group tended to have.

Rosin: Like the Chinese laundromat on the West Coast. Like, No laundromats. That’s the famous one.

Appelbaum: Exactly. That’s the original zoning ordinance: We’re gonna push all the laundries back into Chinatown. And if you push the laundries into Chinatown, you’re pushing their workers into Chinatown. So there were ways to effectively segregate—not foolproof, but effectively segregate—your population without ever having to use any racial language in the ordinance, and so it could stand up in court but still segregate your population.

Rosin: Okay, so we have zoning laws, we have government complicity in kind of dividing where people live, and then we have someone who comes in as a supposed savior, particularly of Lower Manhattan. Maybe not a savior, but someone who appreciates the diversity in the city as it is, and that’s Jane Jacobs. And you tell a very different story of the role she plays in all of this, which really brings us to the modern era. So can you talk about who she is and what role she played in transforming Lower Manhattan?

Appelbaum: Yeah, it’s a little heartbreaking sometimes to look closely at your heroes and find out that the story you thought you knew is not the one that actually played out. Jane Jacobs was a woman who saw clearly what it was that made cities great, at a time when almost nobody wanted to recognize that.

She saw the diversity of their populations, of their uses, the way that people mixed together as being not, as the progressives had it, something that needed to be corrected with rational planning, but as a strength that needed to be recognized and rescued and reinforced. And she stood tall against urban renewal, against the notion that the way to save cities was to knock them flat and to rebuild them with all the uses very carefully segregated out.

And she wrote this brilliant book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that laid out these principles, and she saved her own neighborhood from urban renewal and became, in the process, sort of the patron saint of urbanism. And her great lesson that she took from all of these experiences was that you needed to empower individuals with a deep appreciation of urban life, with the tools to stop governments. And that was the gospel that she preached. And in many ways, it was necessary at that moment, at the peak of urban renewal. But what she didn’t understand at the time—maybe couldn’t have understood at the time—was that she was going to create problems that were even worse than the problems that she was trying to prevent.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: how Jane Jacobs inadvertently contributed to the stuckness of America.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay, so here we have Jane Jacobs. She moves into—what street was that that she moved into?

Appelbaum: She moves into 555 Hudson Street.

Rosin: Okay, she’s on Hudson Street. That’s an amazing place to live. What had been all around her was—who was living there at the time? It wasn’t other people like her.

Appelbaum: No, it mostly wasn’t. She and her husband are two working professionals in Manhattan who are able to pay all cash for a townhouse on this block that is mostly filled with immigrant families. And it’s changing at the time. She’s not alone in coming in, in that way.

But it’s mostly been a neighborhood of immigrants, the children of immigrants. It’s got tons of street-front retail, and she writes about this beautifully, which activates the street front. The eyes on the street keep them safe during the day. She writes about the intricate ballet of the sidewalk as people dodge around each other, and people each pursuing their own tasks are able to live in harmony, in concert. She writes about this block absolutely beautifully, even as she is killing all of it.

Rosin: So if we freeze her there, then she’s a heroine of the city who appreciates it in all its diversity. So then what happens? How does the tragedy begin?

Appelbaum: You know, I tracked down the family that was in that building before she bought it. It was a man named Rudolph Hechler. Two of his adult children and his wife were working in a candy store on the ground floor. So they were renting, living above the shop that they operated, and that shop was everything that Jacobs says make cities great. It was a place where you could go and drop your keys if you’re going to be out for a while, and your kid could come pick them up and let themselves into the house. It was a place where you could just stop and talk to your neighbors.

It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home. She rips off the facade of this historic building and replaces it with modern metal-sash windows. She so thoroughly alters the appearance, presents a blank front to the street, where before there’d been a lively storefront, that when they eventually, at her urging, historically landmark the block, they find that the building that she lives in has no historic value whatsoever.

And so here, you have somebody who has written this ode to the way people are living around her but buys a building within it and changes it to suit her own family’s need—which was a reasonable thing, I should say, for her to do under the circumstances—but then landmarks the block, which prevents people from building new buildings in the way that that block had always had. So there’s a couple buildings right next to hers that have been torn down and turned into a six-story apartment building before she moves in. But her changes make it so that nobody can do that again. And if you’re not building new buildings to accommodate growth, what you’re going to have in response to mounting demand is rising prices.

Rosin: So the counterfactual history with no Jane Jacobs—I understand that this is imaginary—is what? You just build bigger, taller apartment buildings that more people can afford to move into, and you maintain it as a mixed neighborhood, which is partly immigrant, partly young professors?

Appelbaum: Yeah, the counterfactual is that her neighborhood and other urban neighborhoods throughout the country continue to do what they had done right up until about 1970, which is that they evolve. Sometimes the buildings get taller; sometimes they get shorter. I lived in a neighborhood once that had seen lots of buildings have their top stories shorn off when demand had fallen.

Cities morphed; they changed. And yes, in response to mounting demand, you would have had to build up. You have to make space for people to live in cities if you want to continue to attract new generations and give them the kinds of opportunities that previous generations have had. But she did not want that. And in fact, almost nobody ever wants that, which is a real challenge.

Rosin: And is this aesthetic? Is it just that it’s historic preservation? Is it just about: People arrive at a place, and they have an aesthetic preference, and that’s what ends up freezing change? Like, that’s what ends up preventing change?

Appelbaum: Well, let’s go back to the beginning of the 19th century, when we get this legal change, which says, You can just move someplace and establish residence. The reason that states make that change is because they are looking around at communities, and they see that communities individually are walling themselves off to new arrivals, even though, collectively, it is in the interest of the individual states and the United States to let people move around.

They take that right away from communities. They recognize that if you let communities govern themselves, they will always wall themselves off. Change is really hard. It is uncomfortable. Even if a lot of changes leave you better off, while you’re going through them, you may not welcome them. And if you give communities the power to say, We’re going to pick and choose what we allow. We’re going to pick and choose who can live here, then those communities will almost always exercise that power in exclusionary ways.

And this is even worse: The communities that exercise it most effectively will be the ones that are filled with people with the time and the money and the resources and the education to do that. And so you’ll separate out your population by race, by income. That’s what happens. That’s what was happening in the United States when we opened ourselves up to mobility. And we reversed that, and for a long stretch, we were this remarkable place where people could move where they wanted.

And as we’ve switched that and given the tools back to local communities to make these decisions, the communities are behaving the way that local communities have always behaved, which is with a strong aversion to change and a disinclination to allow the interests of people who might move into the community to trump the interests of those who are already there.

Rosin: And I guess the communities who are less willing to see themselves that way, because it goes against their sense of themselves, or progressive communities—like people who are interested in historic preservation, who say they love cities, who are interested in urban renewal—like, those are not the same people who think of themselves as complicit. I mean, your subtitle is accusatory. It’s like, “breaking the engine of opportunity.”

Appelbaum: It is, and it’s led to a lot of uncomfortable conversations with friends. But when I look out at the country, what I see clearly is that the people who believe that government can make a difference in the world, the people who believe that through laws and collective action, we can pursue public goods—they want government to do things like preserve history, protect the environment, help historically marginalized populations. Well, they create a set of tools to do this. They’re inclined to see government use those tools. When, invariably, those tools get twisted against their original purposes and get used, instead, to reward affluence, it is the most progressive jurisdictions where this happens to the greatest extent.

I’ll give you a statistic from California that blew my mind, which is that for every 10 points the liberal vote share goes up in a California city, the number of new housing permits it issues drops by 30 percent.

Rosin: You talked about how this changes our framework on certain things, like a housing crisis—that we tend to say there’s a housing crisis, but that isn’t quite right.

Appelbaum: Yeah. We talk a lot about an affordable-housing crisis, but what we’ve got is a mobility crisis. And the distinction is twofold: One, there’s a lot of cheap housing in America. It’s not in the places where most people want to live. Housing tends to get really, really cheap when all the jobs disappear. I would not recommend relocating large numbers of Americans to those communities. Their prospects will be pretty bleak. You want the housing to be where the opportunities are rich. And so if all we’re trying to do is make housing affordable, without an eye on where that housing is located, on what kinds of opportunities it opens up, we’re pursuing the wrong solutions.

We also often—and this is the other side of it—create solutions. If we think of it as an affordable-housing problem, you can do something like build a lot of new public housing. But we’ve never in this country managed to build enough public housing to meet demand. Usually, if you manage to get in, it’s like a winning lottery ticket. Why would you ever give that up? Which is to say that you are stuck in place. You are tied to the place where you happen to be lucky enough to get the rent-controlled apartment, to get the public-housing unit, to get your voucher accepted after months of fruitless searching. And then you’re really disinclined to leave, even if staying in that place puts you and your family at all kinds of disadvantages.

And so if we have policy that’s focused on allowing people to live where they want, rather than policy that’s simply focused on affordability, we’re likely to return not just the kind of social and economic dynamism that have made America a wonderful place to live, but we’re also likely to return the sense of personal agency.

Rosin: Okay. Last thing: In reading this book and having this conversation, what struck me is that, essentially, you’re making a defense of America—its rootlessness, America’s infinite choice. And right now, those two things—our rootlessness and our infinite choice—are things which we think of as cursing us. The words we often use now are loneliness, lack of community, bowling alone—however you want to call it. We talk a lot about our spiritual collapse as related to the same mobility and rootlessness that you describe as a positive force in the book. And I wonder how you’ve talked about that or reconciled it.

Appelbaum: If you take a graph of when Americans joined a lot of clubs—the Bowling Alone graph, right, where Americans belong to a lot of voluntary associations and when they didn’t—and you match it against the graph of when Americans have moved a lot and when they haven’t, they line up really well, and they line up in a surprising way.

When we’re moving a lot, we’re much likelier to build really vibrant communities. When you leave someplace and start over, you’re gonna go to church on Sunday to try to find friends and build connections. Or if church is not for you, maybe you go to the local bar. Maybe you join the PTA. It depends on the phase of life that you’re in. But when people relocate, they tend to be much more proactive in seeking out social connection. Over the course of time, we fall into familiar ruts. We tend not to make as many new connections. We tend not to join as many new organizations. And people who have been a resident for a long time in a place—they may list a lot more things that they belong to, but they’re less likely to be attending them, and they’re less likely to add new ones.

The peak of American communal life comes during our peaks of mobility. When we’re moving around a lot, we’re creating a really vibrant civil society that was the envy of the world. And over the last 50 years, as we’ve moved less and less and less, all of those things have atrophied. And there’s one other side, too, which is: It’s not just about measuring the health of voluntary organizations. If you’re moving a lot, you’re giving yourself a chance to define who you want to be, to build the connections that are important and meaningful to you, as opposed to the ones that you’ve inherited.

We know something about how that works psychologically. People who are trapped in inherited identities tend to become more cynical, more embittered, more disconnected over time. People who have the chance to choose their identities tend to be more hopeful. They tend to see a growing pie that can be divided more ways, and therefore they’re more welcoming of strangers and new arrivals. They tend to be more optimistic. And if you restore that dynamism, it doesn’t mean that you’ve got to leave behind your inherited identities. It means that committing to those inherited identities becomes a matter of active choice too.

And so the United States, traditionally, was a country that was much more religious than the rest of the world, because people could commit to those faiths that they were adopting or sticking with. Americans were expected to have a narrative of, like, Why do I go to church? It wasn’t something which was really comprehensible to somebody who came from a country where everybody had the same faith. You didn’t have to ask yourself, Why am I Muslim? Why am I Catholic? In America, you always did.

And so our faith traditions tended to be particularly vibrant. So it’s not some sort of assault on tradition. I’m not advocating that we dissolve our social ties and each new generation negotiate new ones. I’m saying, the thing that has made American traditions very vibrant, the thing that often made American immigrants more patriotic than the people in the lands they left behind, and American churchgoers more religious than they had been in the old world was precisely the fact that they got to choose.

And even committing to your old traditions and your inherited identities became a matter of active choice, and something that was much more important to folks. And so you got the vibrancy both ways—both the new affiliations that you could create, the old traditions that you chose to double down on. But it all stemmed from individual agency. You have to give people the chance to start over so that their decision to stay is equally meaningful. If you choose to stay, that’s great. If you feel like you’ve got no choice, that’s really terrible.

Rosin: All right. Well, thank you, Yoni, for laying that out and joining us today.

Appelbaum: Oh, it’s a pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Yoni Appelbaum. His book, again, is Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

The best way to dismantle the federal government, then repurpose it as a tool of personal power and ideological warfare, is to start with the soft targets. Entitlements and defense, which comprise more than half of federal spending and a large share of its fraud and waste, enjoy too much support for Elon Musk to roll them up easily. But nothing is less popular than sending taxpayers’ money to unknown people in poor, faraway countries that might be rife with corruption. Americans dislike foreign aid so much that they wrongly believe it consumes at least a quarter of the budget (in the previous fiscal year, aid constituted barely 1 percent). President John F. Kennedy understood the problem, and after creating the United States Agency for International Development, in 1961, he told his advisers: “We hope we can tie this whole concept of aid to the safety of the United States. That is the reason we give aid. The test is whether it will serve the United States. Aid is not a good word. Perhaps we can describe it better as ‘Mutual Assistance.’ ” At another meeting, Kennedy suggested “International Security.”

USAID continued for the next six decades because leaders of both parties believed that ending polio, preventing famine, stabilizing poor countries, strengthening democracies, and opening new markets served the United States. But on January 20, within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze foreign aid. USAID was instructed to stop nearly all work. Its Washington headquarters was occupied and sensitive data were seized by whiz kids from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. One of their elder members, a 25-year-old software engineer and Matt Gaetz fan named Gavin Kliger, acquired an official email address to instruct the staff of USAID to stay home.

Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudo­nyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. “It felt like it went very authoritarian very quickly,” one civil servant told me. “You have to watch everything you say and do in a way that is gross.”

The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—­from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.

A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholar­ship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department.

But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.

With no workforce or funding, USAID’s efforts around the world—vaccine campaigns in Nepal, HIV-drug distribution in Nigeria, nutrition for starving children in Sudanese refugee camps—were forced to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who championed USAID as a senator and now, as the agency’s acting head, is its executioner) issued a waiver for lifesaving programs. But it proved almost meaningless, because the people needed to run the programs were locked out of their computers, had no way to communicate, and feared punishment if they kept working.

The heedlessness of the aid wreckers recalls Nick Carraway’s description in The Great Gatsby of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” An agency of 10,000 employees is shrinking to about 300 and, despite its statutory independence, being dissolved into the State Department. The veteran USAID official I spoke with foresaw a skeletal operation reduced to health and food assistance, with everything else—education, the environment, governance, economic development—gone. But even basic humanitarian programs will be nearly impossible to sustain with the numbers that the administration envisions—for example, 12 staff members for all of Africa.

“This is the infrastructure and architecture that has given us a doubling of the human lifespan,” Atul Gawande, the writer and surgeon who was the most recent, and perhaps last, head of the agency’s Bureau for Global Health, told me. “Taking it down kills people.”

Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg: Send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers. The assault provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy. It also demonstrated the radicalism of Trump’s view of America’s role in the world.

Every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama understood that American power was enhanced, not threatened, by attaching it to alliances, institutions, and values that the American people support, such as freedom, pluralism, and humanitarianism. This was the common idea behind Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. refugee program, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These weren’t simple acts of generosity. They were designed to prevent chaos and misery from overwhelming other countries and, eventually, harming our own. They expanded American influence by attraction rather than coercion, showing people around the world that the Leviathan could benefit them, too. Political scientists call this “soft power.”

Every president betrayed these ideas in one way or another, making U.S. foreign policy a fat target for criticism at home and abroad, by the left and the right. Kennedy used foreign aid to wage a bloody counterinsurgency in South Vietnam; Carter put human rights at the center of his policy and then toasted the repressive shah of Iran; Bush, claiming to be spreading democracy to the Middle East, seriously damaged America’s global legitimacy. USAID antagonized host governments and local populations with its arrogance and bloat. “We had a hand in our own destruction,” one longtime official told me. “We threw money in areas we didn’t need to.”

But the alternative to the hypocrisies of soft power and the postwar liberal order was never going to be a chastened, humbler American foreign policy—­neither the left’s fantasy of a plus-size Norway nor the right’s of a return to the isolationist 1920s. The U.S. is far too big, strong, and messianic for voluntary diminish­ment. The choice for this superpower is between enlightened self-­interest, with all its blind spots and failures, and raw coercion.

Trump is showing what raw coercion looks like. Rather than negotiate with Canada and Mexico, impose U.S. demands with tariffs; rather than strengthen NATO, undermine it and threaten a conflict with one of its smallest, most benign member countries; rather than review aid programs for their efficacy, shut them down, slander the people who make them work, and shrug at the humanitarian catastrophe that follows. The deeper reason for the extinction event at USAID is Trump’s contempt for anything that looks like cooperation between the strong and the weak. “America First” is more imperialist than isolationist, which is why William McKinley, not George Washington or John Quincy Adams, is Donald Trump’s new presidential hero. He’s using a techno-futurist billionaire to return America to the late 19th century, when the civil service was a patronage network and great-power doctrine held that “might makes right.” He’s ridding himself and the country of restraining codes—the rule of law at home, the rules-based order abroad—and replacing them with a simple test: “What’s in it for me?” He’s unilaterally disarming America of its soft power, making the United States no different from China, Russia, or Iran. This is why the gutting of USAID has received propaganda assistance and glowing reviews from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Transactional logic has an obvious appeal. Dispensing with the annoying niceties of multilateral partnerships and foreign aid brings a kind of clarity to international relations, showing where the real muscle is, like a strip-down before a wrestling match. Set loose, the U.S. might be strong enough to work its will on weaker friends and neighbors, or at least claim to do so. Trump’s threat of tariffs to intimidate Colombia into allowing deportation flights to land there was like the assault on USAID—an easy demonstration project. His domination of the propaganda sphere allows him to convince the public of victories even where, as with Canada, there was never much of a dispute to begin with. If NATO dissolved while the U.S. grabbed Greenland, many Americans would regard it as a net win: We’d save money and gain a strategic chunk of the North Atlantic while freeing ourselves of an obligation whose benefit to us wasn’t entirely clear.

It isn’t obvious why funding the education of oppressed Burmese students serves our national interest. It’s easier to see the advantages of strong-­arming weak countries into giving in to our demands. If this creates resentment, well, who said gratitude mattered between nations? Strength has its own attractive force. A sizable cohort of Americans have made their peace with Trump, not because he tempered his cruelty and checked his abuses but because he is at the height of his power and is using it without restraint. This is called power worship. The Russian invasion of Ukraine won Vladimir Putin a certain admiration in countries of the global South, as well as among MAGA Americans, while Joe Biden’s appeals to democratic values seemed pallid and hypocritical. The law of “might makes right” is the political norm in most countries. Trump needs no explaining in Nigeria or India.

Coercion also depends on the American people’s shortsightedness and incuriosity. Trump’s flood of executive orders and Musk’s assault on the federal government are intended to create such chaos that not even the insiders most affected understand what’s happening. An inattentive public might simply see a Washington melee—the disrupters against the bureaucrats. Short of going to war, if the U.S. starts behaving like the great powers of earlier centuries and the rival powers of our own, how many Americans will notice a difference in their own lives?

According to Rubio, the purpose of the aid pause is to weed out programs that don’t advance “core national interests.” Gawande compared the process to stopping a plane in midair and firing the crew in order to conduct a review of the airline industry. But the light of the bonfire burning in Washington makes it easier to see how soft power actually works—how most aid programs do serve the national interest. Shutting down African health programs makes monitoring the recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, and preventing its spread from that region to the rest of the world, nearly impossible. In many countries, the end of aid opens the door wider to predatory Chinese loans and propaganda. As one USAID official explained: “My job literally was countering China, providing develop­ment assistance in a much nicer, kinder, partnership way to local people who were being pressured and had their arms twisted.” When 70 Afghan students in central Asia, mostly women, had their scholarships to American universities suddenly suspended and in some cases their plane tickets canceled, the values of freedom and open inquiry lost a bit of their attractiveness. The American college administrator responsible for the students told me, “Young people who are sympathetic to the United States and share our best values are not only not being welcomed; they’re having the door slammed in their faces.”

Most Americans don’t want to believe that their government is taking life­saving medicine away from sick people in Africa, or betraying Afghans who sacrificed for this country. They might disapprove of foreign aid, but they want starving children to be fed. This native generosity explains why Trump and Musk have gone to such lengths to clog the internet with falsehoods and hide the consequences of their cruelty. The only obstacle to ending American soft power isn’t Congress, the bureaucracy, or the courts, but public opinion.

One of the country’s most popular programs is the resettlement of refugees. For decades, ordinary American citizens have welcomed the world’s most persecuted and desperate people—European Jews after World War II, Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, Afghans after the fall of Kabul. Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by U.S. and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.

Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans—­when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing U.S. weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. He had heard Trump criticize the Biden administration for leaving military equipment behind in Afghanistan. Because he had worked to prevent that from happening, he told me, “that gave me a hope that the new administration would value my work and look at me as a valuable person, a person who is aligned with all the administration is hoping to achieve, and that would give a chance for my kids and family to be moved out safely.” Biden’s ineptitude stranded the captain once; Trump’s coldheartedness is doing it again.

A sense of loyalty and compassion isn’t extraneous to American identity; it is at the core of national pride, and its betrayal exacts a cost that can’t be easily measured. The Biden administration created a program called Welcome Corps that allows ordinary Americans to act as resettlement agencies. (My wife and I participated in it.) In Pennsylvania, a retiree named Chuck Pugh formed a sponsor group to bring an Afghan family here, and the final medical exam was completed just before Inauguration Day. When resettlement was abruptly ended, Pugh found himself wondering, Who are we? I know what I want to think, but I’m just not sure. The sponsor group includes Pugh’s sister, Virginia Mirra. She and her husband are devout Christians and ardent Trump supporters. When I asked her early this month how she felt about the suspension of the refugee program, she sounded surprised, and disappointed—she hadn’t heard the news. “I feel sad about that,” she said. “It does bother me. It’s starting to sink in. With these people in danger, I would wonder if there would be an exception made for them. How would we go about that?” Her husband frequently sends American-flag lapel pins to Trump, and I suggested that he write the president about the Afghan family. “I will talk to my husband tonight,” Mirra said. “And I will continue to pray that the Lord will protect them and bring them to this country by some means. I do believe in miracles.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Era of Might Makes Right.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

They arrived casually dressed and extremely confident—a self-styled super force of bureaucratic disrupters, mostly young men with engineering backgrounds on a mission from the president of the United States, under the command of the world’s wealthiest online troll.

On February 7, five Department of Government Efficiency representatives made it to the fourth floor of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, where the executive suites are located. They were interrupted while trying the handles of locked office doors.

“Hey, can I help you?” asked an employee of the agency that was soon to be forced into bureaucratic limbo. The DOGE crew offered no clear answer.

Nearby, a frazzled IT staffer was rushing past, attempting to find a way to carry out the bidding of the newcomers.

“Are you okay?” an onlooker asked.

“This is not normal,” the staffer replied.

Similar Trump-administration teams had moved into the U.S. Agency for International Development the previous weekend to, as DOGE leader Elon Musk later wrote on his social network, feed the $40 billion operation “into the woodchipper.” A memo barred employees from returning to the headquarters building but made no mention of the other USAID offices, allowing some civil servants one last look at their desk before the guidance was revised.

“Books were open, and things had been riffled through,” one USAID staffer told us.

A second USAID employee said she had the same experience, finding signs “of activity overnight.” Her brochures and folders had been moved around. Panera cookie wrappers were left on her desk and in the trash can nearby, she said.

“It’s like the panopticon,” one USAID contractor told us, recalling a prison designed to let an unseen guard keep watch over its inhabitants. “There’s a sense that Elon Musk, through DOGE, is always watching. It has created a big sense of fear.”

The contractor said that she had placed her government laptop in her closet at home, underneath a pile of clothes, in case DOGE was using it to listen to her private conversations. She said that other colleagues were so paranoid, they had discussed stowing their laptop in their refrigerator.

Over at the Department of Education, the new strike force invited sympathetic witnesses to cheer their arrival. Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who had been appointed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as trustee of a Florida college, posted photos like a soldier on the front: the door of the building, a picture of the secretary of education’s office. “Such a cool vibe right now,” he wrote. “And everyone is waiting for the opening moves.”

Donald Trump wanted to act fast upon his return to power. He was determined to fundamentally change the institutions that so effectively constrained him during his first term. “I am your retribution,” he had promised on the campaign trail. This time he would be seemingly everywhere at once, the only public notice coming in unverified claims made by social-media accounts overseen by Musk and through leaks by the workforce that bore the brunt of the assault.

Undefined and hard to track, DOGE has claimed to be a new government department but operates more as a disembodied specter. Some of its emissaries, including Musk, have insisted they don’t work for DOGE at all, but for the White House directly as “special government employees.” Much of the cost savings that Musk has touted as DOGE victories on social media have been carried out by other appointees.

Over the first month of Trump’s new term, patterns have nonetheless emerged as a small crew of Musk’s young technologists worked their way through the federal workforce. This new unit has trained its initial attention on the key punchers who make the government work, executing Musk’s belief that by controlling the computers, one could control the entire federal bureaucracy. They’ve mapped systems, reworked communication networks, and figured out the choke points. Instead of taking command of the existing workforce, Trump’s new team has pressured them to disperse, firing those who were probationary, offering buyouts to others, and subjecting many others to 15-minute interviews in what many felt were juvenile tests of their worth.

The full impact of the blitz will not be known for months, when the courts and Congress decide where to push back—if at all. But the scale and speed of the transformation now taking place across the executive branch is likely to leave a deep mark. The civil service is built on the caution that comes from layers of rules, with the knowledge that the American people directly depend on the services provided. Reliability, however creaky, is typically paramount. Musk’s broader operation started from the opposite premise: Radical action was the only responsible course. The improperly fired could be rehired. The confusing memo could be withdrawn and replaced. The courts might overturn their actions, but that is a problem for another day. Make change happen, and rebuild the smashed shards later, if necessary.

This story is based on interviews with more than 25 current and former government workers, most of whom requested anonymity to avoid retribution or public targeting. They told the story of a chaotic few weeks when DOGE and its allies infiltrated their offices, with an endgame that is still being written. The first month of Trump’s second term may be the start of a government transformation on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, fundamentally remaking the powers of the president under the emerging authority of digital data systems. Or it could be the start of a constitutional crisis and the fracturing of the government systems upon which Americans rely.

The White House maintains that the DOGE transformation is being done securely, in full compliance with the law. “DOGE has fully integrated into the federal government to cut waste, fraud, and abuse,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told us in a statement. “Rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people, and their obstructionist efforts will fail.”

Pushback within the government has already started to emerge. A top GSA engineer resigned this week when faced with orders to turn over root access to Notify.gov, the system that government agencies use to send text messages to citizens, because the file contained personal information, according to an internal message we obtained.

Outside observers have been watching with increasing anxiety, worried that the rush for change and the blunt-force methods will break something important that will hurt people who need services and take years to put back together.

“You are controlling technology pipelines, which is the modern-day equivalent of blocking the highway. You are controlling any in and out flow,” Ayushi Roy, a former technologist at the General Services Administration who now teaches digital government at the Harvard Kennedy School, told us. “You have to know where the breaker is and what the right order of switches is to turn the thing back on. I don’t know that they know where all the breakers and the mains are for this house yet, and they are letting go of all the people who do know.”

Democrats like to call him “President Musk”—following polling that shows the world’s richest man is less popular than Trump, and holds powers that make even one in five Republican voters disapprove. But White House officials, who lionize Trump for a living, dismiss the attack as a fundamental misunderstanding.

Musk is not the architect of the plan, they say, but its executor. Conservatives spent decades fantasizing about shrinking government down to the size it could be drowned in the bathtub. Musk’s big innovation is finding ways to get that done.

Russell Vought, a co-author of Project 2025 and the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, laid out the mission shortly after the election, back when Musk was still getting used to his guesthouse at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club. Vought called for a return to a pre-Watergate mindset—“a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy in their power centers.” There would be three prongs of the attack, he told Tucker Carlson during a November 18 podcast.

First, “the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out,” Vought said, giving the president complete control of the executive branch to impose his will. Second, the courts must be provoked to smash the idea that Congress directs spending. “Congress gets to set the ceiling. You can’t spend without a congressional appropriation, but you weren’t ever meant to be forced to spend it,” Vought said, dismissing the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which basically decrees the opposite. Third, the protections of the civil service must end, making nearly all of the federal workforce at-will employees.

This is where Musk entered under the banner of cost reduction, a useful side effect of the larger project. His major contribution, repeated to Trump and his advisers down at Mar-a-Lago, was to reject thinking about government as a lawyer would—a collection of institutions bound by norms, laws, and rules, and controlled by policy and decree. The bureaucracy does not easily bend to white papers. “The government runs on computers” soon became a mantra repeated by Trump’s advisers, who found themselves in awe of his enthusiasm and speed, even as they expressed annoyance at having to constantly clean up his messes, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Musk began wearing a T-shirt around the White House that said Tech Support to drive home the point. “One of the biggest functions of the DOGE team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out,” Musk told Fox News in a joint interview with Trump on Tuesday.

His team focused on accessing the terminals, uncovering the button pushers, and taking control.

“He is kind of going after the nerve center of government,” said Amanda Ballantyne, the director of the Technology Institute at the AFL-CIO. “It looks like he’s using data and IT systems as a backdoor way to gain considerable discretionary power without normal, legal oversight.”

Musk recruited loyalists. They started with the data sets, the programs deep in the bowels of the government. They abided by no official hierarchy, and many of his employees worked out of a large conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, their backpacks strewn about. Steve Davis, DOGE’s unofficial chief operating officer, was a former SpaceX engineer who once owned Mr. Yogato, a D.C. frozen-yogurt shop where customers could win discounts by singing a song.

The targets of DOGE takeovers were often among the most obscure outposts of the federal government. But each had something that Musk’s allies needed. In previous changes of government, the employees of the Bureau of Fiscal Service, the paymaster of the federal government, had waited months for the new administration to even discover their existence. Now they found themselves fielding questions from Musk’s team during the transition about how things worked.

The General Services Administration, long thought of as the government’s landlord, took on new importance as the repository of massive data sets—about grants, contracts, even the personal identity verification cards that control access to federal buildings and workstations. The DOGE team sought access to the Integrated Data Retrieval System at the IRS, a point of entry for the tax-record master file and similar systems at the Social Security Administration.

Technologists who watched the work from the inside wondered if Musk had plans to impose new AI tools on the federal machine. They speculated about plans to create a massive “data lake” that connected the disparate bits and bytes of the federal government into one giant system. New Trump appointees tried to gain access to a U.S. Treasury system to stop payments from USAID, rather than simply ordering the agency to stop spending—a test case, perhaps, for mastering 23 percent of the U.S. GDP, the scale of the federal government, from a single keyboard.

Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer recently appointed as director of Technology Transformation Services at GSA, suggested a broader plan in an all-hands meeting on February 3 that was recorded and later shared with The Atlantic. “We want to start implementing more AI at the agency level and be an example for how other agencies can start leveraging AI,” he said, providing AI-powered coding assistants and federal contract analysis as examples. The ambitions raised security concerns. Government systems are hardened against outside attack but remain vulnerable to insider threats, veteran federal employees warned. Centralizing data could raise the risk.

“At present, every hacker in the world knows there are a small number of people new to federal service who hold the keys to access all US government payments, contracts, civil servant personal info, and more,” one recently departed federal technology official wrote in draft testimony for lawmakers. “DOGE is one romance scam away from a national security emergency.”

Without a master AI at hand, the Trump team has worked agency by agency. One of the first tasks when they arrive is to get a full list of its contracts and grants, a person familiar with the process told us. “They are kind of like freelance henchmen,” observed the departed technologist who has been speaking with current officials directly interacting with DOGE. “They are going on little missions that Elon and Steve Davis are telling them to go on.”

Trump appointees have sometimes asked agency leaders for a one-line description of every contract, as well as who is responsible for it. Then they go through the list, highlighting contracts that they think might contradict one of Trump’s executive orders or require additional scrutiny. Those singled out then get put in different batches, by category, before ending up on the secretary’s desk, to make a final determination.

The process is error-prone. Employees at CFPB warned the newcomers that the telephone hotline for consumer complaints, operated by a contractor, was mandated by law. But for one day last week, it went offline, infuriating people on the inside of the frozen agency. It was reinstalled a day later. In other cases, the cuts sparked congressional backlash from key Republican members, forcing reconsideration.

At the Treasury Department, one of the Trump team’s first steps was simply to print out Government Accountability Office reports and go through them line by line, implementing the GAO’s recommendations for cutting spending and more, said a person familiar with the methods. The new team could also search whole contract data sets for supposedly “woke” words such as equity and diversity to target their cuts.

But the promise of digital supremacy can go only so far. Trump’s advisers encountered systems of what the incumbent engineers called “spaghetti code,” the product not of any grand design but of decades of revisions under new administrations and legal edicts.

Multiple agencies have as many as 20 to 30 different versions of code, sometimes decades old, a person familiar with the process told us. So even when one of Musk’s allies masters a system, the team cannot simply replicate it across the government. Musk has expressed disbelief at some of the government’s antiquated programs and the challenge of centralizing command and control. Speaking in the Oval Office last week, he described the process of manually retiring government employees using paperwork stored in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania, marveling that the “time warp” system restricted how many bureaucrats could retire each month.

Government veterans, who have spent decades toiling in the mines of government data, looked on knowingly. “If they are targeting the computer systems, when are they going to realize that the computers don’t work?” a veteran federal technologist asked us. “There are so many systems strapped together or held together by duct tape or literal humans. There are limitations to what you can do with a systems-first approach.”

Some of the engineers at the U.S. Digital Service, a strike team of technologists where Musk embedded his new operation, dared to harbor initial optimism that Musk could build something better. On January 20, USDS had projects running in at least 15 different federal agencies, including improving online passport applications and helping the Department of Veterans Affairs upgrade its app.

But it soon became clear that they were not invited to this new party. There would be two teams, the newcomers and those already there.

Within weeks of Trump’s arrival, the new technology leadership was telling federal employees to consider a modest buyout offer that arrived in an email titled “Fork in the Road,” an echo of a similar offer Musk had written to staffers when he took over Twitter.  

“In recent years, priorities have shifted from efficiency to ideology, and the agency has strayed from its mission,” Stephen Ehikian, the acting director of the GSA and a former Salesforce executive, wrote in an email to staff on Inauguration Day. Under his leadership, GSA could expect a “return” to “making government work smarter and faster, not larger and slower.”

“It was different in tone from anything I’ve heard from a government official,” one GSA worker told us. “It was very much: ‘You all have been slacking off, and we’re going to stop that.’”  

Probationary employees, including veterans of government service who had just taken new roles, were targeted as the easiest to dismiss, in many cases regardless of their qualifications. In at least one instance, a federal technology employee never received notice of apparent termination, the person said. The official’s computer and email were disabled. A supervisor thought initially that there might be an IT glitch. The word from human resources was to wait. Then the paychecks stopped.

Federal coders and product managers found themselves called into 15-minute interviews with the Musk newcomers, who were sometimes young enough to be their children and had a fraction of their experience. Employees received calendar invites to virtual meetings with nongovernment email addresses, were given only hours’ notice, and some were first asked to fill out a form describing recent “wins” and “blockers.”

The questions hit the same points across agencies, typically with variations on the wording—a request for a greatest-hits list of what employees had done, a probing of their capabilities. “Like, what’s your superpower?” a young Musk acolyte asked in an interview with one GSA employee, according to a recording obtained by The Atlantic. Some got quick coding tests. Others reported hearing questions that sounded like loyalty tests about what they thought of DOGE.

The uncertainty and chaos has left thousands of federal employees wondering what comes next and whether it will make more sense.

Last Wednesday, when a U.S. District Court judge’s ruling allowed the “Fork” buyout program to proceed, Department of Energy employees received an email at 7:18 p.m. alerting them of the ruling and saying they had until 11:59 p.m. that evening to make a decision about whether to resign, according to a copy of the email provided to us.

At approximately 8 p.m., Energy Department staff received another email saying that, in fact, “the Deferred Resignation Program is now closed” and that any resignations received after 7:20 p.m.—just two minutes after the initial email went out—would not be accepted.

One Energy Department employee told us that he was on the phone with fellow department staff, everyone agonizing over what to do, when the second email came in saying that, despite the midnight deadline, the window had already shut. He later told us that resignations had, in fact, been accepted until midnight.

The amateurish errors caused unnecessary chaos and scrambling in an already uncertain time, leaving many government employees wondering if casual cruelty was as much the point as the government overhaul itself.