“I don't work for the President. I work for Americans, and not for Americans as we are, but for the dream of what we could be.”

Dear America,

I work in the Office of Disaster Recovery at HUD. We help communities recover and rebuild their homes and lives after major disasters. We serve low-income people all across the U.S. and territories, from American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, to New Orleans, to Minot, North Dakota, to bustling New York City. We not only provide grant assistance for housing; we also fund mitigation and infrastructure work, economic development activities for low-income communities, and resiliency work to help those communities be better prepared for the next disaster, which is always sooner than we'd like it to be. This work, a vital lifeline to a class of people usually unable to access traditional financial means of recovery, is being actively threatened by this administration. Our communities are being abandoned in their hour of need.

Over the past 16 months, we've lost about 35% of our staff from the bullying DOGE and Russell Vought's OPM put us through. Among those staff were several veterans, a father of three small children, a woman pregnant with her first child, a Presidential Management Fellow, and several colleagues with over 20 years of experience. These were all qualified, passionate people, each a veritable well of institutional knowledge, and now they can no longer continue the work Americans affected by disasters so desperately need.

As for myself, my workload has tripled. The work of those departed colleagues still has to get done. I've had to console terrified community development staff, scared their funding would be taken away and afraid of what that meant for their affected neighbors. I've had to partake in an Orwellian effort to excise "DEI" from official policy documents instead of making it easier for people who need our funding to access it. I've had to read weird spam sermon emails from the Secretary as he zealously enacts policies that harm the least of us. I'm not sure if it's his ideology or his god telling him to do it, but the difference is negligible and the hypocrisy is nauseating.

The past 16 months have been the hardest of my life. I've cried at my desk so many times. I've been despondent, angry, grief-stricken, afraid, and overwhelmed. I dread most days and I feel a type of exhaustion I've never felt before. I'm tired in my soul. No one's emotional bearing can withstand this much sustained whiplash without consequences. My work has been made so much more difficult, slower, the risk of fraud, waste, and abuse has skyrocketed, and the communities we serve are worse off for it. Dear America, I'm talking about you.

I have always known that I wanted to work in public service. I'm not motivated to do a good job via money, much to prior employers' chagrin. The only requirements I have for my work are that it must be interesting and it must help people. This job still meets both of those requirements, and that's why I'm still here. I'm also quite a spiteful person, so that's probably a factor for my staying as well.

I've been reflecting this whole time about what all of this means and attempting to see myself as I will be seen 7 generations from now. This has to be how people who've gone through the agonizing birth of a new age have felt- weary to their bones from the feeling of reality quaking beneath their feet and still doing their work because it's important. I imagine the stress one of my heroes Hannah Arendt must have felt fleeing Nazi Germany and still finding the strength to skewer their ideology with her writing. Or Vasiliy Grossman, who survived the Bolshevik Revolution, the 1937 collectivization and purges, outliving Stalin himself as a Ukrainian Jew, whose book about the horrors of Stalingrad, was arrested, backup tapes and all. His book lives on and they are dead. The anger of the State, that oppressive gristmill of the soul, is something I never thought I'd feel. But in this job, with my principles, I can feel it waiting, gnawing at its bindings with me in its sights, and I am afraid.

I'm not ashamed of my fear. It is a catalyst to growth. At a crossroads such as the one our country is currently facing, I want to live with no regrets. I'm still finding what choices I want to make, and every day I test the limits of my courage. It's possible that I have been involuntarily assigned my life's work or shown the beginnings of the path that leads to my death; what my principles require of me remain the same.

I think it's important to dream about the world we want to live in and find ways to make them reality. Even in this dark time, I have a lot of dreams about the future. I dream about outlasting this administration and stomping out their technofascist, corrupt, reactionary ideology. I dream about watching Scott Turner squirm as he is made to answer for the abuse of his office. I dream that the donors, the enablers, the lackeys and goons, the complicit and the complacent have been reduced to nothing more than fleshy-faced idiots blubbering on the stand about how none of this was their fault (Article 6 and Article 9 of the London Charter beg to differ). I dream about revitalization and renewal for my country, for ALL Dear Americans, whose uniting cause is that we all yearn to breathe free. I don't work for the President. I work for Americans, and not for Americans as we are, but for the dream of what we could be. I work to lay the path forward, boring report by boring report, to this greater ideal. It's to this hope I swore loyalty.

Service to others, caring about my fellow human beings, is necessary for my job; it is also what will get us through this. It is the single most radical thing we can do right now. There is no better example of this care and service than HUD staff. HUD staff care about those we serve even when we're maligned and threatened, when we're fired for standing up for both our and your rights, or when we're harassed and denigrated as "parasites" by an annoying rich guy who doesn't pay his fair share of taxes. We care about others because it's a foundational part of what it means to be human. We can't commit the error of mistaking this resolute tenderness for weakness. It's what these too-powerful dorks want, because if they can destroy what is human about a person, you can follow their ideology past the brink to its logical conclusion- death. HUD staff have shown incredible grit and resolve during this assault on our livelihoods and our mission. I am in awe of you, my dear colleagues. Keep going. Keep caring, spitefully if you must. I know I will.

—A HUD Civil Servant