The metaphor:
Whether it’s wood chippers or chainsaws, this administration is awash in metaphors that make it clear what they’re trying to do. Since the inauguration, our government and the organizations it funds, their research and services, and the infrastructure that recruits and supports them have all been targeted by funding freezes and firings. As Rachael Dietkus describes, these swift, broad cuts are an “intentional effort to create instability and fear” with the goal of “leveraging psychological distress as a method of control and dismantlement” – and it’s working:
“A traumatic experience occurs when something happens too often, too fast, and/or for too long. By all accounts, many federal employees are experiencing [a significant] psychological, emotional, and physiological toll [from the] mass terminations and agency restructuring…These workers will likely carry lasting emotional and professional scars from this experience, particularly as they attempt to navigate new employment, financial insecurity, and a fractured trust in government institutions.”
Watching this destruction across the social sector is devastating. It’s clear that the cuts are designed to replace public servants with enablers and yes men because they’re not yielding much else: not efficiency or salient savings, not increased innovation or reduced fraud. In fact, the opposite seems guaranteed, to devastating effect. As Stephen Nuñez writes, “It will be difficult to rebuild infrastructure that developed over decades, to recapture the specialized knowledge of [experts] forced out and into early retirement, and to recover from the loss of talented young people who will decide on different careers.”
From AmeriCorps and Peace Corps to Points of Light and Public Service Loan Forgiveness, recruiting and supporting young professionals to service careers has long been a bipartisan endeavor – even as Republicans laid the groundwork for Trump’s takeover, loosening regulations and counting corporate campaign contributions as free speech. The sudden shift to the government annihilating public service systems, expertise, and talent pipelines horrifies me because I know their value firsthand.
I’ve spent 17 years working for six social sector organizations across DC, California, and New York. Half have focused domestically, half globally; half help other organizations run better, half help young people join this line of work. I have only been able to do this because of the infrastructure built up to find and support people like me, and the colleagues who’ve trained and supported me along the way.
Nuñez is right that the cuts will lose young talent, but that’s not just because some young people will decide on different careers. If my experience is any indication, untold numbers of ambitious and idealist young people will never find a way to channel their passion into usefulness without recruiting and support like I had.
“Passion” is the positive word for it; to be honest, the drive I feel to close access gaps often feels more like desperation. I’ve described the way that I struggle to orient myself in spaces that don’t start from the premise of people’s equal worth. What I’m saying is, it’s already traumatic to be a person who wants the world to be fair and sees that it isn’t. Earning my living in a way that aligns with my values feels like a gift, but it doesn’t feel like a choice.
The story:
As a college senior, I was ambitious and hard-working: good at school, active in extracurriculars, and totally unprepared to graduate. I was the top-ranked student in my major, yet didn’t understand that I had loans to repay, not just grants. I was proactive, creating multiple new student groups, but didn’t know how to find career advice that wasn’t targeted at finance majors. I got a cover letter template from the Career Center that led to an EMILY’s List application where I said I was drawn to their “unique corporate culture.” I was lost.
I worked throughout college, from lifeguarding and tutoring kids to organizing for Planned Parenthood and the campus community service office. But when I started looking for nonprofit jobs, I had no sense of the landscape, from policy (law, research, advocacy, and organizing) to service delivery (health, education, housing, and humanitarian relief). I certainly didn’t know about consulting or intermediary organizations, or how funding flowed from government, private, and grassroots sources. I didn’t know how work would feel on a 20-person team compared to 200 or 2000, or at a recent start-up compared to one founded in the 1960s’ infrastructure boom or an institution over a century old.
My cluelessness is well documented. In my senior fall, November ‘07, I started sending myself emails with Idealist.org job posts and my shorthand notes about them. I was completely undiscerning, saving any entry-level-seeming job I could find, and clearly understood very little about the content. I saved policy jobs (“ooh, action-oriented research on women”), health service delivery jobs (“helping out with abortions”), international development jobs (“WOW microbicides!”), and grassroots jobs (“I could get out the vote for places like moveon.org?”).
One of my favorite emails – again, to myself – has an Administrative Assistant job link and some important questions. “With RAND.org I could be an entry level person in the Global and Emerging Risks department,” I wrote. “But what are those risks?? And actually...what is RAND?” In another, I strained to discern the application requirements. “Too much work – requires references. Although, getting references is work for other people, not me? Oh wait! I bet it's just names of references! I wonder what sort of writing sample they want?”
Luckily, mine was among the hundreds of campuses where Teach for America was deeply embedded, looking for students like me – literally. It’s a common criticism that the organization relies “on its recruits’ ambition and idealism instead of preparation.” Preparation is certainly what other entry level job posts were looking for: administrative assistant positions requiring two years of experience, program assistant positions requiring technical classes or graduate degrees. But instead of barriers to entry, Teach for America rolled out a red carpet.
They invited me to meet with a Recruitment Director on campus, and when I said I didn’t want to teach, they said they had one-year internal positions where I could still help close the achievement gap. They asked for references but not writing samples, which is great, because I’m sure I would’ve sent an essay about the role of gender in E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howard’s End. Probably the graded version, so they could see the big A+ just before they turned to each other to say, What the heck is this?
Teach for America gave me not just my only job offer but my only interview. To prepare, I read the entire website, copy/pasting quotes into an email that I accidentally sent to the interviewer instead of myself. (She wrote back, “I just wanted to make sure there was not a question you were trying to ask here?”) But the interview itself was easy, all questions about how I’d overcome challenges to keep up my grades and fulfill leadership commitments.
When I got the offer, I forwarded it to my dad. “Look at my benefits!!! I even have dental!!!!” I didn’t mention the retirement plan, flexible spending account, or disability and life insurance because I had no idea what those were, which is why I ended the email, “P.S. okay but what do these mean?”
I told my high school friends, too. “My plans have just gotten substantially more...substantial, in that I got a job! I'll be working as a Recruitment Associate for Teach for America, which means I don't teach but I send a lot of emails convincing college kids in the DC area that they want to. I think a job sending enthusiastic emails is a good one for me…especially because I'm pretty sure no one else will hire me.”
The job started in July with 10 days of training for all new hires on topics from brand messaging to the custom-built database. If my career were a movie, my year at TFA would be a Rocky-style montage of me getting into working shape. In our row of cubicles, I frantically traded tips with the four other Recruitment Associates on how to mail merge custom emails, work block our Outlook calendars, and manage the student employees we hired on every campus in our portfolios. By spring ‘09, I’d gone from good potential to good results; I’d come for the mission, but fallen in love with the people who served it. I got back on Idealist to find my next job.
Of course, that year was a dramatic one for the country, too. In summer ‘08, as I’d started making student loan payments to Sallie Mae, her sister Fannie was verging on collapse. That fall, the Great Recession took full effect, and that winter, Obama took office, bringing a flood of young, tech-savvy campaign staffers to DC. It was a time of loss and uncertainty, and of idealism and hope: as my friends and I saw the private sector stumble, it seemed clear there was no “safe” career path anymore. Any hesitations I had about pursuing social sector work vanished.
Still, it was a scary time for job searching. My future boss told me in an interview that she’d pulled my resume out of 300+ applications. At the top of the page were my TFA results: I’d helped grow application rates by 41% across my four-school portfolio. When I got the job, I used my TFA skills constantly, from improving the database to managing interns. Still, big learnings remained. At TFA, we’d come to work in sweatpants during the busiest times, channeling our exam week habits from undergrad. At my new job, I was an administrative assistant of a global policy advocacy team, coordinating civil society events at WHO and UN conferences. I gave my boss structure; she gave me a frontrow seat to fundraising, agenda planning, and professional writing. I soaked it up.
Where at TFA, I’d been one of many in my position, my new job supported a team of about a dozen. Beyond my boss, I was working closely with seasoned policy professionals at the top of their game. One of them pointed out gently that when I sent scheduling emails, I needed to specify time zones. When another went on maternity leave, she said she’d bring the baby in so we could meet her, and I laughed. I had never “met” a baby before and thought the choice of words was a joke meant to invoke the infamous DC networking scene.
One particularly kind colleague had master’s degrees in both law and health policy. I loved getting to hear his policy analysis, his educational background, and the motivation for his career. “The thing with international development is, it can be hard to know what people actually want,” he told me. “That’s why I work in health: people always want that.” Once, when I finished some assignment for him, I teased him that I wanted a cut of his salary in return. He barked out a laugh and rolled his eyes. “Oh yeah, my HUGE salary!” I was taken aback. It had never occurred to me that he might not have a notable, glamorous compensation package.
After a year or so as administrative assistant, I helped write a USAID grant proposal for a reproductive health project. As I formatted the table of contents and footnotes, I daydreamed about calling my college self to describe the work and hear her squeal of joy. When we got it, I was promoted to the junior program position on the grant; when the manager left a couple years later; I was promoted again to fill that role. In addition to the program work, I managed the extensive USAID reporting requirements. This was only possible with the support I got from our finance person, who used her own program experience to help translate spreadsheets for me, and our USAID program officer, who encouraged me to call her with questions.
Now, Elon Musk brags about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” and my LinkedIn feed is full of skilled and passionate people who’ve been furloughed or fired. The staggering scale and speed of the reductions feels comparable to the ‘08 Recession or to COVID lockdown. Then I remember that this crisis was manufactured on purpose and I want to scream.
The people who work in the social sector are far from the only victims of this administration’s cruelty. In fact, if you ask them about it, they’ll say that what really matters is the work: the hundreds of programs cut off midstream, ceasing counted-on care and support that ends trust, partnership, lives. They are right that this matters, but so do they: I am heartbroken to see them harmed deliberately.
While there are people who will pivot to other careers, there are many who do not want to do any work but this, both those already in the sector and those who are lost, like I was, who we have yet to find and recruit. Moreover, no one who wants to serve the public should have to pivot. There is so much need, so many ways that human rights are not yet met “without distinction of any kind,” as the Universal Declaration envisions.
There are many ways to speak out in this moment, like calling your Congressmen, or getting out the vote for upcoming elections like the one April 1st for Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court. But more than that, I hope you’ll do what the social sector has always done, and look for ways to fill the gaps of what the government should be providing. We can all share knowledge and opportunities, mentor others and review their application materials. And if it helps you to hear my story, my particular anger and anguish, and the joys and hopes of our sector, then consider telling yours. I’d love to hear it.
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Literally teary-eyed getting to the bottom of this. Fill the gaps. As I flirt with burnout, I'm also wondering about 'what does good mean right now?' and I love this reminder about the ways we can fill the gaps.