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- [00:00]
Terry Gross
Terry. This is FRESH air. I'm Terry Gross. Elon Musk is gone from Doge, the so called Department of Government Efficiency, and he and President Trump are estranged, but Doge is continuing its work. Some Doge staffers now have positions within several government agencies, and Doge's goals are shared by the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vaught. My guest, Hannah Natenson, is a Washington Post reporter covering Trump's reshaping of the federal government. And she's broken several stories. She's investigated how Doge has created new inefficiencies and bureaucratic red tape, how the Trump administration has been trying to fix Doge's mistake of firing too many federal workers and contractors, what impact that's had on those who were fired, and what Doge is up to now. She's currently investigating which data Doge has accessed from every federal agency. Natenson won a Peabody in 2024 for a podcast series on school gun violence, and she was part of a team of Washington Post journalists awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. We recorded our interview yesterday morning. Hannah Natenson, welcome back to FRESH air. What is left of Doge now that Musk is gone and so is his number two, who handled the day to day, Stephen Davis.
- [01:23]
Hannah Natenson
So that's a very good question, and I think the situation is changing day by day, and it's something we're continuing to try to report out. But as far as we can tell, those who have left Doge include, of course, Elon Musk, Steve Davis, James Burnham, who was Doge's general counsel, and Katie Miller, a Doge advisor who is married to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. And Katie Miller is now working for Musk. But other parts of Doge are still very much in place, embedded across agencies from lower level folks whose names are not household names, all the way up to those who have not left. And what I think we're going to see is Doge is very much going to continue its work. It just sort of remains to be seen who might be leading it. And we did report recently that Russell Vaught is expected to sort of pick up where Musk left off.
- [02:18]
Terry Gross
Yeah. You report that he seems to be taking over for now. And Russell Vaught, in addition to being the director of the Office of Management and Budget, he had a leading role in Project 2025 seems to have become a blueprint for the Trump administration agenda. And he told the House that Doge is shifting from a consulting role to a position far more institutionalized at the Office of Management and Budget. What does that mean?
- [02:47]
Hannah Natenson
Well, we'll find out. I certainly think that we will see more cuts or in attempts to really legitimize how Dogeous in sort of the Elon Musk era slashed away staff and spending in all these sort of chaotic ways and didn't end up saving as much as Musk had promised. Initially, he said we'll cut, you know, $2 trillion, eventually rounded that down by their own accounting, which is somewhat faulty, to about $180 billion. So I think with Vought, we, as he's promising, write a more institutionalized role for Doge, we might see a more organized, thorough, thoughtful Doge making these cut. We might not. But I think that's what he's angling himself as.
- [03:33]
Terry Gross
So Trump had nominated a close associate of Elon Musk's, Jared Isaacman, to be the next head of NASA. But after Trump and Musk had a public feud, Trump retracted Isaacsman's name from the nomination. Do you think he'll want to remove other people who are Musk associated?
- [03:55]
Hannah Natenson
I think it depends. I mean, I think we'll see. Certainly the fate of Isaacman raises that question. But I do think that, you know, some of these folks are not on Trump's radar, perhaps lower level Doge staffers. And I think if those folks are demonstrating loyalty to the administration or carrying out the objectives of whomever takes over Doge. Right. If that's Russell Vaught, I don't know that those folks would be removed. I know there's been concern among perhaps some of them about, you know, will I be losing my job. But I think Trump, as we've seen again and again, right. He's loyalty based. If these folks are showing dedication to the mission of Doge as it's being redefined or perhaps more seriously codified under Vought, I don't know that they would necessarily be kicked out. I think if they are publicly showing felty to Musk, I think it's much more likely, you know, that they would lose their jobs.
- [04:49]
Terry Gross
One of Doge's goals has been to consolidate data from different agencies, including personal data about Americans, like health records, Social Security numbers. This is an effort in the name of efficiency. But is there a reason why data from different agencies haven't been consolidated before?
- [05:10]
Hannah Natenson
Yeah, it's interesting. It's not actually. Some other countries do take that approach. I think in the United States until now, it's been the approach that each federal agency that collects this sensitive Data has strong safeguards and strong protocols and strong silos for that data. And you would only share that information with another agency under strict data sharing agreements that take a while to hash out and are highly protected and have all these protocols for the transfer of information to ensure that it is done safely and securely. And I think the idea behind this approach until now has been right, that you have a small handful of experts within each agency who know precisely what data they are collecting. They know how to handle it. They're trained on where to put it, they're trained on why it's sensitive, they're trained on the protections. And each agency can be very confident that I have my collection of data. It's safely and securely stored. I know how to manage it. I'm confident in the integrity of it. And also that if, say, a hacker is able to get inside the United States government, there's no one thing that that hacker can hit that gives them the golden key to get inside all of our data, right? There's no one, one centralized database where you can see someone's tax information, their Social Security number, all of their addresses if they're an immigrant, you know, their immigration case history, if they've had immigration cases before the law. And so some of the concern around what Doge is doing, while, you know, in some sense it might be more convenient, you just have one massive database. Any little bit of information you can cross reference, you can find, you can analyze with AI, potentially, if you need to right, the risk there, as cybersecurity experts have repeatedly pointed out to me in my months of reporting, is one hit and you're done, right? If you get inside, if there's a master US Database and you get inside just that one database, then you have everything.
- [07:06]
Terry Gross
Is that data at risk as it's being transferred and consolidated? If the utmost security protocols aren't followed.
- [07:16]
Hannah Natenson
Correct, and with the speed at which Doge has done this or forced federal workers to do this, we have seen a lot of those concerns arise. You know, Doge, in asking to transport data between agencies or combined databases in some cases, has not followed these sort of staid protocols that perhaps Doge is seeing as an unnecessary step of convenience. But, you know, for the federal career workers who follow them, are these steps that are meant to ensure that at no point, right, when I'm moving sensitive Americans information around, Social Security numbers, birth dates, employment history, disability records, medical documentation, whenever I'm transferring that, I know at every step, right, per these protocols, that, first of all, I've set up an information sharing agreement with the other federal agency that I'm giving this to. I know where it's going to be routed at every point. I know where the servers that might host this information are all going to be located, and the ultimate destination and interim destinations are all going to be set up with the appropriate security protocols, including, for example, being placed behind a virtual private network. And I know that, as we've reported in at least one instance, for example, a website for a new visa program that Trump is pushing was not set up behind a virtual private network or VPN as would be customary, and that really alarmed some Homeland Security employees.
- [08:41]
Terry Gross
There are concerns about how this data could be used once it's consolidated, and one of the concerns is that it could be used in Trump's effort to locate and deport undocumented immigrants. What are their concerns about how the data could be used?
- [08:58]
Hannah Natenson
I think that's certainly one of them, apart from concerns that it's more vulnerable to hackers. It's just a wealth of information, especially if you're trying to understand immigration status. So, you know, effectively, the federal government has records on where people work, where they study, where they live, where they've done all those things for years, decades. Right. You have this repository, for example, just within the Justice Department of all this immigration case data that gives for any given immigrant. Right. Their entire legal record of existence in the country, which often includes things like addresses, sometimes for someone who's seeking asylum. It's very important personal testimony that would be, you know, potentially deadly if exposed. Right. And basically, as we've reported, you know, the Trump administration has come in and seen this goldmine of federal information and thought, well, this is a great way to identify undocumented immigrants and to remove them. And you can see that functioning in multiple ways. For example, within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, officials have been working on this rule that would ban mixed status housing households, in which some family members have legal status and others don't, from public housing. And you also have this one striking example from the Social Security Administration, where the Trump administration labeled 6,000 living immigrants as dead, which is an unprecedented use of that database. So Social Security has this death database, and once you're put in it, the government treats you as dead. So, you know, you have a very hard time getting a job, paying your taxes, being treated as alive in any way. It makes it very hard to live in the country. And so the idea from the Trump administration was, well, we've been working with Homeland Security. We've got this list of immigrants you know, now we're going to label them dead, and it's going to effectively make their lives so difficult, they're going to self deport. And so just from these two examples, right, you can see the power that the federal government has to not only identify immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, but to really make their lives so difficult that they will or might leave. And I think the next step that some are concerned about is, you know, willing to sort of weaponize the Social Security death database like this. Right. And declare living people dead. What is really stopping you from at some point deciding to use that same strategy for political enemies? So there is a great deal of concern over how basically the Trump administration has taken every tool at their disposal and weaponized a lot of the federal government.
- [11:37]
Terry Gross
The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that DOGE could access sensitive Social Security data again. That ended a temporary injunction that prevented access for several months. What is the significance of that decision?
- [11:50]
Hannah Natenson
I mean, it lets DOGE back inside the agency to continue its work there. And we're still not totally sure what the ultimate scope of that will be. So far, DOGE came into Social Security and was vowing all these radical reforms. We're going to find and root out all this fraud. And basically everything they tried ended up backfiring. So as we reported on extensively, they initially focused on phone fraud after sort of a detour led by Musk, claiming that folks who were centenarians were receiving Social Security payments, which had no rooting in reality, and was based sort of on a misunderstanding of how this sort of archaic database coded dead people.
- [12:40]
Terry Gross
So, you know, what you mentioned about the 150 years old just not really being somebody's age. It's more of a code. What's that about?
- [12:49]
Hannah Natenson
So it's basically. It's a little hard to explain, but the way that the Social Security system is set up, there are some people with impossibly long lifespans who do appear on the rolls, but it's just this feature of an antiquated technology system. None of those people or their relatives are actually receiving benefits. And this was actually explained to Doge really early on after they arrived at the agency, even sort of as Elon Musk went out and was tweeting claims about it, and the team accepted it and sort of moved on pretty fast. They then shifted to focusing on phone fraud, but that kind of didn't pan out either. There just isn't that much phone fraud at Social Security. And these checks that DOGE tried to impose, new checks to, like, eliminate more phone Fraud ended up not doing anything. They weren't catching fraud, and they were just delaying claims processing further. And so DOGE actually backed off of that as well. So it's totally unclear, you know, now that they have been let back inside Social Security data, what use they will actually make of that. We'll find out.
- [13:51]
Terry Gross
Does the Supreme Court decision that DOGE could access sensitive Social Security data make it easier to consolidate data from different agencies?
- [14:00]
Hannah Natenson
Oh, I would expect so, yes.
- [14:03]
Terry Gross
One of your articles was headlined, Trump Administration Races to Fix a Big Mistake. DOGE fired too many people. What are some of the agencies that realized they fired people that were essential?
- [14:16]
Hannah Natenson
So it's still fluid and still happening across the government. But some of the earliest ones that I recently reported on include the Food and Drug Administration, usaid. Well, it's sort of accurate, sort of not to say that, because the U.S. agency for International Development doesn't technically exist anymore. But the State Department, which has taken over some functions of usaid, is hiring back some ex USAID staffers. And then you're also seeing, you know, some of these rehirings at the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
- [14:52]
Terry Gross
So let's talk about some of the things that were going wrong with all the people that were fired and the reasons why some of them are being asked back. Let's look at the Social Security Administration. What are some of the problems the administration faced after staff cuts?
- [15:08]
Hannah Natenson
Well, a big thing is just bogging down claims processing. So not only have we had a massive amount of turnover at Social Security between resignations and firings, but they also debuted this program that reassigned sort of administrative staff to field offices. And the emails that went out was promising. You know, if you take this reassignment and you move from your analyst job to like answering the phones in a field office, you're going to be protected from getting fired. Thousands of people took this, something like 2,500 people. And now what you're having is depleted field office staff, so already burdened with too many calls for claims or to ask what's going on, because as staff has dropped down, the volume of incoming calls has risen because people are scared about what DOGE is doing to Social Security, and they just have lots of questions. So you're having these depleted, overburdened offices, and then incoming to them are these administrators who until now have done things like it work. Right. They have no idea how to do all the protocols around taking claims processing, answering the phone, all these little things you have to do, which might sound simple, but it's not. And so now you have these field office staff who are being asked to at once train the newcomers, stay on top of their burgeoning claims piles, and keep the whole thing running. And it's just been chaos. You know, things aren't getting done at the same time. DOGE has strangled spending, and employees can't afford things like pens or pencils or paper or printer toner, or. In one striking email that we obtained that I won't forget, employees had to crowd fundraise to replace a broken fridge.
- [16:51]
Terry Gross
Wow. Really?
- [16:52]
Hannah Natenson
Yes.
- [16:53]
Terry Gross
And you report that, like, in one place, I think it was a place in Pennsylvania, actually, one of the computers broke down in some way, and there was no IT person on the staff anymore to fix it. So somebody was without a computer for three days and couldn't respond to any phone calls as a result.
- [17:13]
Hannah Natenson
Yeah, correct. And that led to the reversal of this reassignment of the IT workers. That was one of those cases where the Trump administration had sent in central office staff to take over field office jobs, and it just led to chaos. And after three days, they reversed it, and the IT workers got their normal jobs and equipment back. And so you're starting to see more and more, and I was actually very fascinated to see, when I did a round of common outreach for this particular story, that agencies are not only backing off DOGE initiatives, DOGE cuts, or DOGE restructurings or reassignments, but starting to use a lot of language like mistakes were made. And I had that from a senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to be candid, and basically said, yeah, you know, mistakes happen, but we're working to fix it. So you're starting to see even a more public acknowledgement or a distancing from at least the Elon Musk era of doge.
- [18:12]
Terry Gross
The fda, the Food and Drug Administration, let thousands of workers go. And you write that dismissals hit hard at the Office of Regulatory Policy, the Office of Drug Policy, and teams that worked on Freedom of Information act requests and patent extensions. So a lot of people were hired back because things weren't going well. So three weeks after they were fired, a lot of workers started getting calls and emails saying they were due back. So I'm going to read one of the emails that they got. The Notice of Reduction in Force issued to you is officially rescinded, and you will not be separated from employment. You are expected to return to duty the next business day following your receipt of this notice. If you're already fired, can you be ordered back the next day like that, apparently.
- [19:00]
Hannah Natenson
I mean, so much of this stuff is them building the plane as they're flying it in terms of testing what they can do legally. And they're moving a lot faster than the pace of the courts, as you saw, for example, with their mass firing of probationary workers, which happened over Valentine's Day this year. Probationary workers are those with with two or fewer years of experience in the government, typically, although, interestingly, if you just got a promotion, you actually are in many cases classed as probationary. So when they went in and blanket fired all of these probationary workers, which they chose as a target because they have fewer job protections, they also caught not only sort of the new entrants to government work, but they caught people who'd just gotten major promotions after, in some cases, decades of service. And it was just chaos. And there have been lawsuits and conflicting patchworks of rulings that have since led to the reinstatement of some of those folks. And, you know, we're just seeing the same thing here. They're sort of following maybe an interpretation of the law, but not really. And so we'll find out what sticks and what doesn't.
- [20:07]
Terry Gross
Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is Washington Post reporter Hannah Natenson. We'll talk more about her investigations into DOGE after we take a short break.
- [20:17]
Hannah Natenson
Terry welcome back.
- [20:17]
Terry Gross
I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH air. You know, the GE in DOGE stands for government efficiency, but you've reported on ways that federal employees work is becoming more inefficient, how there's more red tape and bureaucracy, and that's especially true with spending. Give us an example of how spending for even the smallest items has become so difficult.
- [20:46]
Hannah Natenson
So I'll give you two one's quite quick. So recently at NASA, a group of employees needed fastening bolts, and it took several rounds of emails and detailed paragraphs explaining, you know, what they were going to spend and why they needed it before they got approval. Because at every point in the spending process across agencies, DOGE has sort of inserted a check or a new need to get a political appointee to sign off. That's one example, and I'll give another, because not only is it just driven by this DOGE initiative to cut spending, but it's often also driven by a desire to comply with the president's executive orders or policies. And this second example speaks to that. So last month, somewhere in the world, which I can't say per my sourcing Agreement, a State Department employee decided they needed to hire a vendor for this upcoming embassy event. And I can't be more specific than that, but I'll just say it was a really routine vendor, yearly thing, no issues. But this vendor this time around was saying, I am not going to sign this new paperwork certifying I do not promote diversity, equity and inclusion, or, you know, dei, which is this new requirement that Trump has pushed under an executive order that is meant to eradicate DEI from the government. So if you're going to provide services to the government, you have to certify. I don't promote that either. And this overseas vendor was just like, no way. And so the state employee, he looks at this and he's like, all right, I know what I gotta do now. And what he had to do next was this multi step workaround that they'd had to develop to sort of accommodate international vendors who are just like, I have nothing to do with the Trump administration, I'm not gonna follow these orders. And so first this state employee had to get his ambassador signed approval to hire this routine vendor. Then he had to fill out an Office 365 form justifying the expense in 250 words before selecting which like pillar of spending it fell under. And one of the options there was, quote, safer, stronger, more prosperous, end quote. And then after submitting that form and getting sign off, he had to fill out yet one more form. And this one went to political appointees in D.C. in total, this took a week. And under any previous administration it would have taken a day.
- [23:08]
Terry Gross
You also write about how people in the Federal Aviation Agency, the air traffic controllers, had to put in like complicated forms just to get the windows washed. And of course, if you're an air traffic controller, having clean, visible windows is a really good idea. Can you talk about that?
- [23:24]
Hannah Natenson
Pretty important. Yeah, yeah. These new checks and balances that are required by doge, they had done an overhaul of the payment system meant that FAA staffers had to write statements justifying all expenditures. And that included things like pens, pencils, elevator maintenance, and then these regular window washing and shade cleaning efforts at air traffic control towers, where, yes, it is pretty important to be able to see out the window. And formerly these purchase orders used to take 15 or 20 minutes. Now it's taking one or two hours per tower, according to someone I talked to with the Federal Aviation Administration. And because this person is having to spe so much time justifying basic purchases, he's falling behind on other things that are also pretty key for air Traffic towers such as landscaping and fire alarm safety and pest control. And so this person and colleagues is just pretty fatigued.
- [24:20]
Terry Gross
At the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is in the Department of Energy, 17% of the staff was hired. And this is the group that protects the safety and security of America's 500 nuclear warheads. So they were fired, and then they were hired back. What made Doge or the agency or whoever was in charge of this realize that firing these people was a really bad idea?
- [24:45]
Hannah Natenson
So this was pretty early on, and this was during that mass firing of probationary employees that Trump, his administration, pursued over Valentine's Day. But in the case of this agency, what happened there was almost immediately you started getting a stream of panicked calls from lawmakers of both political parties. And as those came in, they pretty quickly reversed course. That was sort of an isolated incident at the time. Otherwise, cuts just kept proceeding, I think. Only now we're starting to see, without the intervention of maybe, you know, high profile names or top lawmakers making calls behind the scenes, now you're starting to see more reversals that don't require that level of intervention.
- [25:32]
Terry Gross
In 2023, Russell Vaught, who's now director of the Office of Management and Budget, gave a private speech for a pro Trump think tank. And in that speech, he said, we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected when they wake up in the morning. We want them to not want to go to work because they're increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma. Part of the investigation you've done is what affects these firings have had on individuals who were fired, what the mental health consequences have been. And you gave some very dramatic examples. Do you want to tell us one of the stories?
- [26:11]
Hannah Natenson
Yeah. That was a difficult article to research and report. I and a colleague, Liam Wan, spent a long time following a large number of federal workers to try to tell the stories of how this, this approach to governing had affected them. And two of the cases that I'll mention that we had in this large story we put together, one was a woman who ended up dying by suicide a little bit into the Trump administration, Caitlin Cross Barnett, who was a federal health researcher. And another was Monique Lockett, who was a Social Security worker who passed away at her desk of a heart attack around the time Doge was trying to Social Security data and layoffs were looming. And, you know, we spoke to medical experts who reviewed our case and said certainly she had some risk factors, she was overweight, high blood pressure, but that the stress likely played a role and would have in cases like hers. And those two people really stuck with me. And my colleagues spent a lot of time with the family of Caitlin Cross Barnett. And I went to the wake for Monique Lockett. And I just won't ever forget. I was in my car and I think I can't remember precisely when this was, but I had just seen a tweet, I think, from Elon Musk or a post on X criticizing federal workers. And I closed my phone and walked into the funeral home, and it was open casket. And I just had this moment where I saw Monique's body and I just paused and couldn't move for about a minute.
- [27:57]
Maureen Corrigan
Just.
- [27:59]
Hannah Natenson
The contrast was just really strong for me. And, you know, of these stories that we included in our piece, it's just one of thousands of folks who are struggling in different ways, from having to take more anxiety medication to having suicidal thoughts, to just coping with losing their jobs. It's just been a massive trauma that they've inflicted on federal employees.
- [28:25]
Terry Gross
How difficult do you think it would be to return to the norms that we had before Doge?
- [28:33]
Hannah Natenson
Very difficult. In some cases, impossible. Something I have thought about and something that I hear a lot about from federal employees. You can't rebuild the ship once it's sunk is something that someone said to me recently. Well, it's scattered in pieces on the bottom of the ocean. That's pretty hard. Also, theoretically, depending how the future shakes out, if we do hit this point where the government is going to try to rehire a bunch of people or rebuild, I think there's been a lot of trust lost because a lot of the things that once made the federal government attractive as a workplace included job stability. Right. Because typically federal work is lower pay than what some of these people, especially highly trained people, lawyers or programmers, could be making in the private sector. But the appeal has been it's stable. You are in a nonpartisan role that is meant to serve the American public. And a lot of these federal workers that I've spent a lot of time talking to, I've talked to more than 900 since January, they really joined on that conviction. Right. The idea is I'm going to help the American public. But they're pointing out to me now that not only has Trump created chaos and instability, stripping federal jobs of their stability and firing bunches of people and questioning agency missions and in some cases, making it difficult to federal workers, say, for the agencies to carry out those missions, but he's busily codifying changes to the federal workforce that could last if implemented for a long time in what federal workers say will be damaging ways. So he most recently transitioned the hiring process that used to be sort of this non partisan merit based civil service process to this new system that would prize loyalty to the president. You know, for example, making federal applicants write an essay about how they would advance Trump's priorities in order to get hired. And those efforts are sort of ongoing. And some of these things are being laid out through the budget proposal in Trump's quote, unquote, big beautiful bill. And some are being unveiled through these merit hiring changes that are being pushed out through memoranda by the Office of Personnel Management. But if those things happen, that is going to create a radical change to who we hire for our government and how.
- [31:00]
Terry Gross
Well, let me reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is Washington Post reporter Hannah Natenson. We're talking about her reporting on Doge. And we'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH air. Are there any norms that you think we've lost either permanently or at least for an extended period of time that you want to mention?
- [31:21]
Hannah Natenson
I mean, I think it ties back to sort of the defining architecture of federal work is what we've lost. And you can see that in multiple different ways. The idea that the things that defined federal work was stability, nonpartisan desire to serve the public, the ability to persist between administrations and you are a dedicated public servant who at any point is able to pivot and fill the priorities of the new administration. All of those norms I've just described, the way we've conceived of our federal work and the way we've seen America's presence, you know, governmentally, both within the country and internationally, providing aid to other countries through the work of usaid, all of that has been shattered. A lot of folks would say there's no stability anymore. We're in the middle of this wholesale overhaul and re evaluation of who works for government, how they get hired, what they do when they get there, and what the government means, not only to American citizens but to anyone watching us globally.
- [32:28]
Terry Gross
What are some of the challenges you've faced in investigating what's happening with Doge?
- [32:35]
Hannah Natenson
Well, for one thing, Doge won't talk to me and I would love if they would. But so far I have not been able to reach them. And it would be really, really great to get a firsthand account or perspective on the work they've done, maybe any re evaluations they're undertaking. So that's been one big challenge is when we report a story. We want to hear from all sides of it and we want to make sure we understand what's happening. And one of the best perspectives there would be the Doge representative's thoughts. Right, but, but otherwise, I think a lot of the challenge has been federal workers who are understandably very concerned about retaliation or losing their jobs or losing their ability to support their families. And so I've actually over the course of several months here, about a half year, because when this year started I covered education and then ended up just jumping into this. I have developed this stringent process for sourcing and protecting sources, names and identities that really heavily relies on the encrypted messaging app Signal, which many folks might know through what happened with the Atlantic magazine, their editor in chief getting added to a war planning chat on that app. But I've been using it since January and I've had as of last count 903, I am counting federal workers reach out to me on Signal. And so it's been this long process of figuring out how to at once verify their identities. So I need to make sure that they're real people, that they work where they say they work, figure out this like constant stream of information, right? Like what we need to report out immediately, what we could save for a longer term story, and then how to safely store and report that information without, you know, threatening anyone's identity or threatening issues of national security. And so that's been an ongoing process that I'm still working on, but it's certainly been in high octane and challenging reporting environment.
- [34:38]
Terry Gross
In the Washington Post articles that you've written or co written, it says kind of in the middle of the article, help us report on the Trump administration. The Washington Post wants to hear from anyone with knowledge of the Trump administration's inner working, including the activities of the US DOGE Service. Then it gives contact information for each reporter on that specific story. So is that one of the ways you've gotten like more than 900 contacts?
- [35:07]
Hannah Natenson
Yes, although I will say a lot of it happened through Reddit. So that's a social media platform, a website for those who don't know. I think many do. But this is actually how I became sort of a government transformation reporter. Like I said, I began January as an education reporter and the Trump administration was making cuts to the Education Department. So I was covering that and I noticed this Reddit sub thread, or subforum as it's called, and it was called RFEDNews and it was a bunch of federal workers. I think it's now more than a half a million at the time. It might have been closer to 400,000 members of this forum. And I had gotten a tip about the Education Department. I wanted to check it out. And I figured, well, there's a lot of federal workers who are posting on here all the time right now. I mean, posts were coming in every couple of minutes with a new tidbit of is this true, what's happening? And so I posted my information and a colleague's information, and for whatever reason, it took off. I was getting a lot of messages on signal of incoming people. And then when I did that story, I went back to the same Reddit platform because I wanted to show that I had taken what they had risked so much to tell me and done something with it, Right? And I posted the story and I again posted my information. I said, thank you for being willing to speak to me. I'm going to keep doing this coverage even though I was still an education reporter at that point, and please reach out. And that has just built and built and built. I've done that pretty much every time I have a new story, I drop it in that Reddit platform and I post my information or whoever's on the byline's information, and it has gone insane. I mean, there were weekends there where I was getting one message every 30 seconds, I kid you not. And so I am inbox zero as a person, and that was quite difficult for me. I was going to bed at like 11pm answering signal messages and then waking up at 5am to keep answering signal messages. But it's been a really valuable way to source stories.
- [37:15]
Terry Gross
So we're recording this on Tuesday morning. And later this week, the House is expected to vote on a bill that would codify billions of dollars in Doge cuts. So if Congress does codify the cuts that are in this bill, would that protect against any legal challenges to those cuts?
- [37:35]
Hannah Natenson
I would expect so, yes. It would certainly give them much more authority and much more lasting power.
- [37:42]
Terry Gross
Hannah Natenson, thank you so much for talking with us.
- [37:45]
Hannah Natenson
Thank you so much for having me on. It was a pleasure.
- [37:48]
Terry Gross
Hannah Natenson is a reporter for the Washington Post, covering Doge and how President Trump is reshaping federal government. Our interview was recorded yesterday morning. After we take a short break, Maureen Corrigan will review Thomas Mallon's new book, collecting his journals from 1983-94, which includes when he came out and when the AIDS crisis decimated the gay community. This is FRESH air. Novelist and nonfiction writer Thomas Mallon has been keeping diaries for most of his life. They've just been acquired by the Library of Congress. A collection of his diary entries for the years 1983-94 has just been published under the title the Very Heart of It. Book critic Maureen Corrigan says, if you're curious about why Thomas Mallon's diaries are a national treasure, just read this book.
- [38:39]
Maureen Corrigan
I was living my 20s and my 30s, Thomas Mallon says of his life in New York during the 1980s. What he means is that it took this nice politically conservative Catholic boy a while to come out to himself as a gay man and to be sexually active. And then the brutal irony, even as Mallon finds the courage to move out of Poughkeepsie while he continues to teach at Vassar and rent a place in the city to embrace all the possibilities New York can offer. AIDS is decimating the gay population. Here's an entry from June pride month of 1985, where Mallon, drinking in a bar, also stands apart and thinks of the moment he's in. I had never seen the gay bar so packed. People were celebrating, forgetting about AIDS for a night, dancing versus Death, and some of them probably going home to exchange more death. I remember the news of the Stonewall riot the week I was graduated from high school. I remember thinking knowing fearfully that it had something to do with me. Even with AIDS around, I have to feel we're lucky. If I'd been born 20 years earlier, my life might have been a miserable lie. Other people have fought my battles. I have loved Thomas Mallon's writing ever since I reviewed Henry and Clara, his 1994 novel about the young, engaged couple who shared the Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater on that fateful night in 1865. Throughout a career spanning seven works of nonfiction and 11 novels, almost all of them historical, including Fellow Travelers, his McCarthy era novel that was made into a Showtime series two years ago, Mallon has managed to capture the all of it the tragic and mundane, the petty and comically absurd lurking in even the weightiest moments of the past. Turns out that all along in his diaries, Mallon was simultaneously doing the same for his own life and times. Even in entries for spring of 1984, when testing positive for AIDS was largely regarded as a death sentence, and Mallon is mourning the death of a beloved whom he fears may have infected him, his wit refuses to wither away. Here, for instance, is an entry about a movie date we saw the Bounty, a very good, morally complicated movie. All day I'd been making bargains with God just let me live and I'll be content with work and writing and friendship. I'll retire from sex forever. Then I saw Mel Gibson on the screen and thought, this isn't going to be easy. In addition to being a real time serenity to AIDS and its victims, as well as a love letter to a New York where the Runyenesque waitress in the local coffee shop will call him Cookie, and a walk can include sightings of Greta Garbo and Jackie Kennedy. The very heart of it is also a portrait of an artist trying to break free of his day job. Mallon moves into the city not only to find love, but to pursue his dream of eventually quitting teaching and becoming a full time writer. His entries about life at Vassar constitute the stuff of academic farce. The visiting Susan Sontag is a thumping bore. The English department's building is an odd little gothic place surrounded by its own self generated atmosphere like a poison gas. And grading a student's tedious paper is like diving into a dirty swimming pool by the final journal entries. Here in the early 90s, much of Mallon's professional and personal life has come together, including finding the love to whom this book is dedicated. Like their close cousin, the memoir journals are most engrossing when uncertainty is still in the air, when the subject is just setting out to become who they want to be. So it is that in a poignant entry For May of 1985, Mallon writes, the paper had a particularly frightening article about aids. Sometimes I think I'm walking into the future on nerve alone, sure, at some small spot inside that God and destiny will protect me from the bullets. Mallon is well aware he's one of the lucky ones, and his life's great luck is also ours. His readers.
- [43:55]
Terry Gross
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed the Very Heart of It by Thomas Mallon. Tomorrow on FRESH air, Benicio Del Toro talks about his leading role in Wes Anderson's new film, the Phoenician Scheme. He'll look back on his film career and tell us about losing his mother when he was 9 and in his teens moving from Puerto Rico to Pennsylvania. Del Toro's other films include the Usual Suspects, Traffic and Sicario. I hope you'll join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram nprfreshair. FRESH air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne MarieBoldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Maddox, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.