I want to share a post from The Guardian that was published today.
“Inside the building, staffers said that Doge cultivated a culture of fear.
“It’s an extreme version of ‘who do you trust, when and how?’” said Kristina Drye, a speechwriter at the agency, who watched dozens of senior colleagues escorted out of the building by security. “It felt like the Soviet stories that one day someone is beside you and the next day they’re not.”
People started meeting for coffee blocks away because “they didn’t feel safe in the coffee shops here to even talk about what’s going on”, she added.
“I was in the elevator one morning and there was an older lady standing beside me and she had glasses on and I could see tears coming down under her glasses and before she got off her elevator she took her glasses off, wiped her eyes, and walked out,” she said. “Because if they see you crying, they know where you stand.””
Everyone should read this article about “DOGE” tearing apart USAID (and then read more reporting about how they are being allowed to do the same to other US federal entities). Elon Musk and his minions are violating our highest laws and destroying lives and livelihoods in the US and abroad. USAID is less than 1% of the federal budget— this isn’t about cost-cutting or “investigating fraud”. It’s about cruelty and seeing how much unlawful devastation and psychological warfare they can get away with, with the intention to repeat this process at one federal agency after another. They already have access to IT systems at the Treasury, NOAA, and other agencies, and have taken over OPM (essentially HR for the federal government), using the latter to send demeaning and threatening e-mail blasts to civil servants.
I’m urging everyone who reads this to recognize what’s happening here and how abhorrent and frightening it is. I wager that even most people who wanted Trump back didn’t want a centibillionaire technocrat making unilateral decisions on which parts of the federal government to “feed into the wood chipper” (as he has described his team’s actions at USAID in a recent post on X, The Everything App).
Please call your elected representatives and urge them to act against Musk now— before his actions make our legislative branch totally irrelevant.
I’ve been seeing posts about Musk’s coup-in-progress going around on here, but I feel like a lot of people still aren’t aware of the extent of it, and I really want to help get the word out. I’m heartsick for all the civil servants at USAID and beyond. Some of them, their unions, and some Democratic congresspeople and others are speaking out, but these workers need us everyday Americans to speak out for them, too.
Thank you for reading. And anyone who isn’t American, please keep us in your thoughts.
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