The New Yorker Radio Hour
We the Builders: Federal Employees Stand Up to DOGE; Plus, Celebrating 100 Years: Michael Cunningham on “Brokeback Mountain”
18 Mar 2025
Across the federal government, the number of federal workers fired under Donald Trump and DOGE currently stands at over a hundred thousand. Some of those workers have turned to a website called We the Builders. It was created by federal workers associated with the U.S. Digital Service as a resource for employees who have lost their jobs, who are afraid of losing their jobs, or who have a whistleblower complaint. The Radio Hour’s Adam Howard spoke with two of the site’s creators: Kate Green, who recently left the federal government for a job in the private sector, and a web developer who identifies himself as Milo – using a pseudonym, since he is still employed in the government. “Both the beauty and the tragedy is that the work the government does is largely invisible,” as Milo put it. “You don't always know that it is USDA inspectors who are working in the slaughterhouses, who are making sure that work is being done in a safe and sanitary fashion … But they give a damn about making sure that food is safe. If that goes away, that's not immediately visible to people. And they don't necessarily know that these people have lost their jobs or that food is going to be less safe until people get hurt or worse. And so, we want to make sure that people start to understand what the cuts in these programs actually mean.”Plus, this year, The New Yorker’s centennial, we’re revisiting some classics from the magazine’s past with a series called Takes. The novelist Michael Cunningham was already in his forties when Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain”—about two young men working as shepherds who unexpectedly fall in love—was published. “The New Yorker was not the first big-deal magazine to run a story about gay people. It wasn’t, like, ‘Oh, my God, a story, finally!,’ ” Cunningham recalls. But it made a huge impression nevertheless. “It was a story in The New Yorker about two gay men that was first and foremost a love story. . . . I didn't want to just read it; I wanted to absorb this story in a more lasting way.” Excerpts of Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” were read by Monica Wyche.
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We heard in our last episode from Atul Gawande, who was a senior figure at USAID until days before the Trump administration began dismantling it and throwing it into a woodchipper. Across the federal government, the number of federal workers fired under Trump, this is reported by CNN, stands at over 100,000.
Some of those workers have turned to a website called We the Builders. It's a resource for federal employees who've lost their jobs or who are afraid of losing them or who have a whistleblower complaint or who don't know how to follow conflicting instructions about Musk's email demands. We the Builders was created by federal workers associated with the U.S.
Digital Service, which has now been absorbed into Doge. Two of the site's creators are Kate Green, who recently left for a job in the private sector, and the man we'll call Milo, who's still employed in the government. He asked us to use an alias. They spoke with our producer, Adam Howard.
So, Kate, let me start with you. If you could explain what We the Builders is and how it came into fruition.
So We the Builders is a way for people who are federal workers to get their message out, to explain what's happening to people who have less access. Like, this is why this matters. This is why this is dangerous. And that idea coalesced along with another idea that we were floating, which was to tell stories directly of federal workers, like a Humans of New York, but for federal workers.
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