Washington insiders are facing an 'uncertain' future after DOGE cuts wreaked the D.C. community where New York Times Senior Audio producer Jillian Weinberger lives. In an editorial titled, “Living Among the DOGE Wreckage,” she claimed her community, filled with “smart, nerdy people who work(ed) in government because they want to do good,” is caught in the crosshairs of cutbacks.
“The Trump administration and DOGE came in, literal chainsaws buzzing, determined to demoralize and displace these government do-gooders,” Weinberger said.
Many of her neighbors are “unemployed or completely miserable, just trying to get through their days without moral compromise,” she wrote.
She found the words of Russell Vought, the president’s Office of Management and Budget chief, billowing everywhere she looks. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said.
“His approach appears to be working,” Weinberger affirmed. “One friend, who spent the better part of a decade at the U.S. Agency of International Development managing programs that deliver food and medicine in places like the Gaza Strip and South Sudan, fell victim to DOGE cuts this year.”
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Another friend, “took a buyout from the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, and yet another is soon to depart the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.”
Of the few friends that Weinberger knows are working, they face “at best, uncertain” futures.
“Recently, at an outdoor neighborhood concert, I ran into a friend who works as an attorney at the IRS. I hadn’t seen her in months, and I asked her, as many of us Washingtonians do these days, ‘How are you holding up?’”
Weinberger recalled her friend “laughed bitterly. Her new boss is an Elon Musk lackey from DOGE. She gave me a dismal report, then asked me, just before we parted ways: ‘Why did I go into public service? Why did I do this to myself?’”
