David Remnick: We heard in our last episode from Atul Gawande, who was a senior figure at USAID until days before the Trump administration began dismantling it and throwing it into a wood chipper. Across the federal government, the number of federal workers fired under Trump, this is reported by CNN, stands at over 100,000. Some of those workers have turned to a website called We the Builders. It's a resource for federal employees who've lost their jobs or who are afraid of losing them, or who have a whistleblower complaint, or who don't know how to follow conflicting instructions about Musk's email demands.

We the Builders was created by federal workers associated with the US Digital Service, which has now been absorbed into DOGE. Two of the site's creators are Kate Green, who recently left for a job in the private sector, and the man we'll call Milo, who's still employed in the government. He asked us to use an alias. They spoke with our producer, Adam Howard.

Adam Howard: Kate, let me start with you. If you could explain what We the Builders is and how it came into fruition.

Kate Green: We the Builders is a way for people who are federal workers to get their message out, to explain what's happening to people who have less access. Like, this is why this matters, this is why this is dangerous. That idea coalesced along with another idea that we were floating, which was to tell stories directly of federal workers, like Humans of New York, but for federal workers. I was like, "Wait, could we do a platform to explain these things, to share it with the public, share with reporters, share with activists to help them to figure out their messaging, what the next steps are?" I love the idea of explaining technical concepts to everybody so that it's demystified.

Adam Howard: You both worked at USDS or the US Digital Service and this has now been co-opted into DOGE. I wondered if you could both speak a little bit about what the mandate of that department was when it was originally founded, and in what ways has DOGE departed from that.

Milo: I think initially the mandate was to just go in and fix healthcare.gov because that was when it was created. There was this notion that USDS was digital firefighters, or you'll sometimes hear people say digital SWAT team. The idea being that if a project was in trouble, if there was some kind of thing that needed immediate attention from people with a lot of experience in Silicon Valley or in the world of IT outside of government, they could parachute in, work on solving those immediate problems, getting the project back on track.

VA, for example, is one of my favorites. When USDS initially started working with them, there was some real challenges with veterans getting the benefits that they're entitled to. USDS did a really good job of documenting the challenges that veterans were experiencing and getting some real change to happen within the VA itself. I think that that was the direction that USDS was heading when DOGE arrived.

Kate Green: When you're in the private sector and you're rolling a social media app, you can just keep shipping code every 5 minutes, every 10 minutes. I specialize in helping people do that. When you're in government, you can't just keep shipping and experimenting directly on people without taking great care and making that a piece of how the work gets done makes it look slower, but in the end it gives us a product that people love, that people-- Okay, I'll take it back. They may not love it. Nobody likes filling out a government form, but it's something that's usable, it's understandable, and it's about capacity building and culture shifting. It usually looks slower than what we're seeing right now.

Adam Howard: Now, the public, and I think a lot of Congress doesn't have a lot of transparency into what DOGE is up to, but Milo, you are aware of some face to face confrontations that people have had with DOGE teens, I guess. I'm curious if you could share some of the experiences that people have been having.

Milo: The folks who are working for the DOGE side of USDS, they called all of the original or existing USDS-sers into meetings. They were supposed to be 15-minute long meetings. They felt a little bit like an interrogation for the USDS folks, where they were being asked to talk about what work they were doing, why was it important? Was it mission critical?

The real challenge was the DOGE folks who came in did not identify themselves. They didn't explain who they were.

If the meetings were even in person, and some of them were not, the DOGE folks were wearing White House visitor badges, but were saying things and acting as if they were the supervisors for USDS folks. It felt very confrontational, and it felt very ugly. The people who work at USDS take great pride in the work that they've done, but it's also really hard to condense something that you've done into 15 minutes or into a few sound bites.

The DOGE folks weren't interested in learning about that complexity. They weren't interested in getting into the details, they just wanted to have some kind of snappy two or five bullet explanation of this is what I've done in the last couple of weeks. That's not how USDS has ever operated. We've often said, the most good for the most people who need it the most. When you have that mentality, that sometimes means that you're navigating through multiple different ways to accomplish things, but it doesn't sound good as a bullet point.

Adam Howard: This kind of treatment that Milo's describing, is that dissuading people from getting involved in this kind of work going forward?

Kate Green: I don't think want is in the equation. It's whether they feel safe to, whether they feel they'll be able to. I've heard more than once lately, I'm waiting until it's time to go back in. I'm biding my time and finding other ways to help. State governments, local governments, right now are asking for us to come over. Not us like the two of us, but us writ large. We're seeing a lot of-- my state, Maryland, "We want you. Please come work for us." I also need to call out some of my colleagues who are still there and intend to stay. What respect I have for them.

Adam Howard: I'm sure you've seen there are reports that Trump may be starting to reign Elon Musk in or at least allowing the cabinet members to make more of the decisions. Is there any sense that this whole spree of firings might be winding down?

Milo: I don't think it's done. I think that it's going to come in waves. There is still talk of a reduction in force, which is sometimes referred to as a RIF. There was talk about executing a RIF at GSA and firing 90% of the people who work there. There's talk about doing the same thing at SSA and firing 50% of the people who work. I think that-

Adam Howard: That's the Social Security Administration.

Milo: Yes. I think that people at these agencies still believe there's a strong chance that they are going to be fired. To go back to the question of should people stay put, I don't know. I think that people really are afraid. I think that people are fearful that any day that they log in, there's going to be an email that says, "Today is the day that your agency, your office, your small team has been swept up in a reduction in force, and you no longer have a job here."

I have heard it happen firsthand to people at agencies. Sometimes they come in overnight, sometimes they come in first thing in the morning, there's no rhyme or reason, and in many cases, managers don't even know that it's going to happen. They're just learning at the same time as their employees that their whole entire team is being shuttered.

Adam Howard: What do you make of the assertion that's been made by the former Social Security administrator, Martin O'Malley, that there may actually be an interruption in service, like people not getting their checks and that sort of thing? Is that plausible to you?

Milo: Sure. At this point, I think anything is plausible. There are many systems within, not just Social Security, but Medicaid, Medicare. They are designed and maintained by dedicated, serious, thoughtful professionals. If you are going in and you're just turning things off or you're changing code or even changing data without understanding what is going to happen in the system, then you could very well disrupt the ability for those systems to operate and function.

Medicare and Medicaid, which we refer to as CMS. If you look at the CMS systems, if those systems go down for a day, you're already talking about the chance for a recession. We don't take this kind of stuff lightly, and we never have.

Kate Green: I described it earlier today to somebody as like playing Jenga, the game where you stack up the blocks, and if you just start pulling things out without being cautious, you don't know what's going to happen. Unplugging stuff, plugging stuff in to these systems introduces a lot of risk. This is people's livelihoods, their access to disaster recovery, health care, payments for their children. There are true consequences that are life or death.

Adam Howard: We talked about Social Security benefits. I have two young children. I'm very worried about food safety. Do you think when more Americans start to feel the impact of these cuts, that might galvanize people to be more proactive?

Kate Green: Yes. I think it's three prongs, Judicial, Congress, and the third is the people. We saw it in 2020 with George Floyd, and that's starting a movement that stopped too soon, and we've seen it across the world over and over again. I can't say I know when that will happen and what will be the tipping point, but that's part of how we fight back.

Milo: I think that that's probably going to happen, but I think in a lot of cases, both the beauty and the tragedy is that the work the government does is largely invisible. You don't always know that it is USDA inspectors who are working in the slaughterhouses, who are making sure that work is being done in a safe and sanitary fashion. These people are oftentimes highly educated. They have doctorates in veterinary medicine.

If they went into the private sector, they could probably be earning two or three times what they get working for USDA, for example, but they give a damn about making sure that food is safe. If that goes away, that's not immediately visible to people, and they don't necessarily know that these people have lost their jobs or that food is going to be less safe until people get hurt or worse. We want to make sure that people start to understand what the cuts in these programs actually means.

Kate Green: Can I add one thing?

Adam Howard: Sure.

Kate Green: One of the things that we're starting to see is DOGE talking about building new things. Let me be clear, if they're going to build things that are going to increase access to services that Americans have paid taxes for or entitled to, I'm all for that, but we need to be paying attention to where they're focusing and what they're doing and making sure that we are speaking up and holding them accountable.

Adam Howard: Thank you guys so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Milo: Thank you.

Kate Green: Thank you.

David Remnick: Kate Green is a software engineer in the private sector, and Milo, he's using an alias to protect his identity, currently works in the federal government.

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