Photograph © xyz Sasha Abramsky is The Nation's Western correspondent and the author of a weekly political column for the magazine. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker Online, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He is the author of eleven books, including The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar, and Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. Abramsky teaches writing at UC Davis. Follow him on Bluesky at @sashaabramsky.bsky.social.

Ever since her father had taken her to his place of work at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Hannah Echt had always wanted to work at NIOSH. Other kids dreamed of being astronauts or firefighters; Echt desired nothing more than to be an industrial hygienist, investigating dangerous workplace conditions and coming up with solutions that would help save workers’ lives. As a young adult, she realized that dream, conducting workplace evaluations at places as diverse as railyards, construction sites, and cannabis processing facilities. Then, in early 2025, everything ground to a sudden halt. Following Donald Trump’s January inauguration and DOGE’s onslaught against federal employees, her Cincinnati office’s “funds were frozen, travel was paused, and external communications, including our ability to publish and present our findings, were stifled.” Months later, large parts of the NIOSH operations were still non-functional.

By the spring of 2025, the deliberately manufactured dysfunction was encroaching into pretty much every corner of the federal government. “It’s made me doubt myself,” Carmen Drier (not their real name), a probationary employee at the U.S. Geological Survey who was fired and then, in the wake of court orders, begrudgingly rehired, admitted. “It just played into my fears and jerked me around for no good reason.” Drier, who was nonbinary and used “they/them” pronouns—an act of defiance in the face of federal orders to remove pronouns from the signature lines of government emails—worried that they weren’t equipped with the skills needed to succeed in life. After all, this was their first job out of college, and now the government was making it clear it wanted to fire them. They worried that their performance on the job wasn’t good enough. In their office, the pessimism as winter gave way to spring was contagious. Each morning, colleagues commuted to work in a funk, girding themselves for the next onslaught. “There’s such anger and bitterness,” Drier observed. “Everyone’s trying their best to keep their cool, but every morning is just a sullen time. You’re being told [by the government] that what you do is worthless.”

At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, workers were bombarded with one extraordinarily demeaning email after another. On February 8, they were directed to “halt several classes of work unless ‘required by law’ or expressly approved by the Acting Director.” They were ordered by that acting director to “cease any pending investigations” and not to open any new ones; to “cease all supervision and examination activity,” and to “cease all stakeholder engagement.” In short, they were mandated to stop doing everything that their agency had been created to do. Two days later, the acting director followed up by telling the CFPB staff that the headquarters building they worked in was closed and that “employees should not come into the office. Please do not perform any work tasks… employees should stand down from performing any work task.” But eighteen days later, having been told that they couldn’t work they were then ordered to fill in the Musk-mandated questionnaire listing “5 bullets describing what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Going forward, please complete the above task each week by Mondays at 11.59pmET.” It was, quite simply, Orwellian: having been ordered not to carry out their duties, or even to show up to their place of work, they were now being forced to justify their continued employment by saying what work accomplishments they had achieved each week.

**

The book that you are now reading follows eleven federal workers from the time they were told they were fired in the early weeks of Donald J. Trump’s second presidential administration through to the summer of 2025. Some were comfortable with their names being used. Others were terrified of retribution and would talk only on condition that their names and other identifying characteristics were shielded. Some reacted to being fired by curling up in bed and crying; others binged on pizza; still others exercised obsessively. Some became paralyzed by indecision, others leapt into fix-it mode. They reacted, in short, in the myriad ways that millions of other Americans would react in the face of traumatizing, and potentially financially devastating, events. Their stories are America’s stories. What happened to them — the bullying, the intimidation, the denigration of character, and the deliberate removal of financial stability — also happened to hundreds of thousands of other employees. And the destruction wrought on the institutions they worked at was mirrored by similar scenes of carnage throughout the federal government, and in non-profits and universities reliant on federal grant money, as the Administration took a chainsaw to everything from disease prevention to basic environmental research, from pre-school programs and enforcement of civil rights laws to crime victims’ services and food safety inspections. The pain they felt is one mirrored by the pain — and the shock — experienced by people in the US denied access to services once taken for granted, as retirees stand in line for hours at under-staffed Social Security offices to try to access benefits they have paid into their entire working lives; as consumers cheated by large financial institutions realize they no longer have advocates in their corner in the federal government; as survivors of the World Trade Center attacks have their healthcare services curtailed; as veterans are denied access to mental health and substance abuse services; as the homeless find even fewer federal resources directed their way. So too, it is a pain felt by desperately impoverished men, women, and children overseas whose lives were once made better, even if just at the margins, by organizations such as USAID, and who now are left having to find ways to survive in a landscape from which America has decided to absent itself.

As I reported this book, I realized that I was getting an inside view on one of the most extraordinary episodes in American political history. The stories that American Carnage chronicles collectively paint a picture of a country in a profound moment of crisis and dislocation. In the opening months of 2025, a year as consequential to American politics and society as any since the early days of the New Deal, the federal government’s social contract with its workers to provide good, stable, conditions of employment, and with the population to provide core social services, was breaking down.

Photograph © xyz Sasha Abramsky is The Nation's Western correspondent and the author of a weekly political column for the magazine. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker Online, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He is the author of eleven books, including The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar, and Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. Abramsky teaches writing at UC Davis. Follow him on Bluesky at @sashaabramsky.bsky.social.

Ever since her father had taken her to his place of work at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Hannah Echt had always wanted to work at NIOSH. Other kids dreamed of being astronauts or firefighters; Echt desired nothing more than to be an industrial hygienist, investigating dangerous workplace conditions and coming up with solutions that would help save workers’ lives. As a young adult, she realized that dream, conducting workplace evaluations at places as diverse as railyards, construction sites, and cannabis processing facilities. Then, in early 2025, everything ground to a sudden halt. Following Donald Trump’s January inauguration and DOGE’s onslaught against federal employees, her Cincinnati office’s “funds were frozen, travel was paused, and external communications, including our ability to publish and present our findings, were stifled.” Months later, large parts of the NIOSH operations were still non-functional.

By the spring of 2025, the deliberately manufactured dysfunction was encroaching into pretty much every corner of the federal government. “It’s made me doubt myself,” Carmen Drier (not their real name), a probationary employee at the U.S. Geological Survey who was fired and then, in the wake of court orders, begrudgingly rehired, admitted. “It just played into my fears and jerked me around for no good reason.” Drier, who was nonbinary and used “they/them” pronouns—an act of defiance in the face of federal orders to remove pronouns from the signature lines of government emails—worried that they weren’t equipped with the skills needed to succeed in life. After all, this was their first job out of college, and now the government was making it clear it wanted to fire them. They worried that their performance on the job wasn’t good enough. In their office, the pessimism as winter gave way to spring was contagious. Each morning, colleagues commuted to work in a funk, girding themselves for the next onslaught. “There’s such anger and bitterness,” Drier observed. “Everyone’s trying their best to keep their cool, but every morning is just a sullen time. You’re being told [by the government] that what you do is worthless.”

At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, workers were bombarded with one extraordinarily demeaning email after another. On February 8, they were directed to “halt several classes of work unless ‘required by law’ or expressly approved by the Acting Director.” They were ordered by that acting director to “cease any pending investigations” and not to open any new ones; to “cease all supervision and examination activity,” and to “cease all stakeholder engagement.” In short, they were mandated to stop doing everything that their agency had been created to do. Two days later, the acting director followed up by telling the CFPB staff that the headquarters building they worked in was closed and that “employees should not come into the office. Please do not perform any work tasks… employees should stand down from performing any work task.” But eighteen days later, having been told that they couldn’t work they were then ordered to fill in the Musk-mandated questionnaire listing “5 bullets describing what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Going forward, please complete the above task each week by Mondays at 11.59pmET.” It was, quite simply, Orwellian: having been ordered not to carry out their duties, or even to show up to their place of work, they were now being forced to justify their continued employment by saying what work accomplishments they had achieved each week.

**

The book that you are now reading follows eleven federal workers from the time they were told they were fired in the early weeks of Donald J. Trump’s second presidential administration through to the summer of 2025. Some were comfortable with their names being used. Others were terrified of retribution and would talk only on condition that their names and other identifying characteristics were shielded. Some reacted to being fired by curling up in bed and crying; others binged on pizza; still others exercised obsessively. Some became paralyzed by indecision, others leapt into fix-it mode. They reacted, in short, in the myriad ways that millions of other Americans would react in the face of traumatizing, and potentially financially devastating, events. Their stories are America’s stories. What happened to them — the bullying, the intimidation, the denigration of character, and the deliberate removal of financial stability — also happened to hundreds of thousands of other employees. And the destruction wrought on the institutions they worked at was mirrored by similar scenes of carnage throughout the federal government, and in non-profits and universities reliant on federal grant money, as the Administration took a chainsaw to everything from disease prevention to basic environmental research, from pre-school programs and enforcement of civil rights laws to crime victims’ services and food safety inspections. The pain they felt is one mirrored by the pain — and the shock — experienced by people in the US denied access to services once taken for granted, as retirees stand in line for hours at under-staffed Social Security offices to try to access benefits they have paid into their entire working lives; as consumers cheated by large financial institutions realize they no longer have advocates in their corner in the federal government; as survivors of the World Trade Center attacks have their healthcare services curtailed; as veterans are denied access to mental health and substance abuse services; as the homeless find even fewer federal resources directed their way. So too, it is a pain felt by desperately impoverished men, women, and children overseas whose lives were once made better, even if just at the margins, by organizations such as USAID, and who now are left having to find ways to survive in a landscape from which America has decided to absent itself.

As I reported this book, I realized that I was getting an inside view on one of the most extraordinary episodes in American political history. The stories that American Carnage chronicles collectively paint a picture of a country in a profound moment of crisis and dislocation. In the opening months of 2025, a year as consequential to American politics and society as any since the early days of the New Deal, the federal government’s social contract with its workers to provide good, stable, conditions of employment, and with the population to provide core social services, was breaking down.