Most layoffs come as a surprise. Mine came with an eight year warning.
For years the dread never let up. The man in charge of my professional life had said, over and over, in public, with real conviction, exactly how little he thought of us. He started saying it in 2015 and he never stopped. When he was elected in 2016, everyone I worked with understood it would be bad. When he was re-elected in 2024, we understood it would be worse.
There is a specific kind of dread that comes from hearing, on the record and on a loop, that the work you organized your life around is worthless. You do not get to file it away. It scrolls across the bottom of news screens, is read to you on podcasts in your car, and told to you by strangers "just making conversation".
From November of 2024, my team and I prepared for the turnover on January 20th. We gathered the evidence: $11 million in cost avoidance, compounding annually. The highest rate of compliance with federal digital policy of any agency in the government. We put our performance plans where we could reach them. We greeted the new administration professionally, as we had sworn to do.
I want to be honest about why those numbers were in the folder, because it was not only self-defense. I cared about the $11 million because no one at my agency had ever hit that number before, and I wanted to be the one who did. I cared about the compliance rate because it was the highest in the federal government, and there is a particular kind of person who cannot leave a number like that unbeaten. I am that kind of person. Points on the board. I have always been like this.
In the weeks after the inauguration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) made its view of us plain. They said, in writing and out loud and in front of anyone who cared to listen, that we were stupid, that we were dead weight, that we were less than the people doing the cutting. I had spent a long time bracing for contempt. I had not understood that it would be said to my face, by people who wanted me to hear it.
The cuts started the day they walked in the door. Across January, February and March I scrambled to save my team. I held up the legal justification for our existence. I held up the efficiencies, the compliance rates, the performance reviews. I pointed out that I was doing crucial work on my agency's AI Safety and Red Teams. I had built the first platform-agnostic AI training the federal government had ever had. No one had done it before me, and I both knew it was the right thing to do and wanted to be the first one to have done it. Points on the board.
None of it mattered.
On Friday, March 14, 2025, my agency told me my services were extraneous to the interests of the American taxpayer. I would be on administrative leave by the end of the day.
I spent the hours that were left trying to hand off my work. The Enterprise Digital Experience product that drove millions in taxpayer savings. The enterprise-wide AI training that was scheduled to roll out the following week. The ethical AI testing framework I had researched and built. We had documented all of it well, and I have rarely been so grateful for anything. It would not necessarily die without me.
What I felt was closer to grief than anger. Like being told I could not play with my friends anymore. Like having the John Grisham novel yanked out of my hands at the good part.
I would never get to know the ending.
I have thought about that sentence more than any other since March. If you get fired in the private sector, there is almost always another version of your job somewhere. It's with a competitor or in an adjacent industry. You could even build it yourself. In the private sector, you lose a position, but every company likely needs some version of it.
Most federal work is not like that. There was one Enterprise Digital Experience Team for that agency, and there is one agency. There is not a rival firm doing the same work at better pay. The thing I had spent my career building existed in exactly one place, and I was no longer permitted to be in that place. That is not losing a job. It is losing the only instance of a thing.
In the weeks that followed I scrambled for the right lawyers and the right deadlines. I was lucky in ways many others are not. People knew what was happening to us. The rules for firing a civil servant are published where I could check them, not buried in a handbook I would never be allowed to see again. Law firms wanted our case as badly as we wanted them to take it. My colleagues put their names in filings next to mine. People who had never heard of my agency or a single thing I built were protesting because they believed in the system like I did. I was not alone.
What I did not escape is the ordinary part. The fight that goes on and on, long after you're tired of it. The self-doubt that shows up at four in the morning with nothing new to say. The realization that some of what I thought were friendships were situationships centered on work.
I responded by starting Ishmael Interactive, a firm that cleans up technology messes so that organizations can adopt new technologies the right way. I did not find another version of my old job, because there was not one to find. What I did instead was carry some of the skills I built as a Fed to somewhere they could thrive.
I still care about points on the board. I still want to be the first one to do a thing. Those are portable. They were mine before the agency, and they were mine on March 14th at five o'clock. Nobody took them when I packed up my laptop and sent in my badge.
I never did get to know the ending. I am writing a different one.