I joined government under the first Trump administration. I did so because when the engine room is on fire and the captain is drunk at sea, everyone on board has a job—the passengers form the bucket brigade to get water to the engine, the crew get it running again, and the bridge officers shove the fucker in the closet and take command of the ship.

I had the privilege of being asked to serve. I had the luxury of being able to do so in a place full of kind, talented, and dedicated people. Even more, I had the opportunity to work on impactful projects that helped improve lives, and promote a more humane and equitable government. In my time, I worked on projects to improve government transparency, access to addiction support services, government-wide equity policy and processes, and so much more.

Then three years ago I was given the chance to pitch and help create a new office dedicated to making federal regulatory and oversight processes more open, transparent, and equitable. I would be the design director of Office of Regulatory and Oversight Systems, more than that, I would also be the acting engineering director until I could hire someone to permanently sit in that role. It was as if my studies and research in democratic theory, my experience in policy, and expertise in digital strategy were coming together for the opportunity of a lifetime. I could build a design-led organization that focused on making the regulatory process more participatory and government spending more transparent and understandable. I quickly had a ten-fifteen year plan for where the organization could go.

And that’s what it felt like at first. The work was hard, having OMB and the entire federal government as your major stakeholders in one of your programs is already difficult, regardless of who is in charge. Having them be major stakeholders in all of your programs but in different ways made for an exceptionally complex stakeholder landscape.

But we made progress. With hard work, we delivered results, built trust, and got more resources.

As the head of content strategy in 18F, I doubled the size of the content team, every one of them with a reputation of handling complex problems and team dynamics with grace and kindness. I helped hire dozens more across the organization, including every supervisor in the design team. Over my tenure, over half of the hires I contributed to, and almost every hire I made onto my team went into a leadership role somewhere within TTS.

In 18F, I got to build on top of the amazing bones that I inherited. This time I was doing it from scratch, the rest of the leadership team and I had to simultaneously navigate the legacy of the programs we inherited, while also building an entirely new team culture. It was hard work, but it was good work.

In three years we grew OROS to a team of about two dozen feds—most hired by me—and nearly a hundred contractors. The our practices were maturing and despite setbacks, our teams were starting to hit a sustainable cadence.

The thing I’ve learned since inauguration is that red lines not only about what orders you’re willing to follow whilst holding to your sense of justice and morality—that part is somewhat straightforward. Moral clarity did not dissipate for me, in times of growing fascism, it is even more important for people to be willing to say no, to document and pull them into sunlight. Glass houses will not fall with only those throwing stones from the outside, there always needs to be someone on the inside picking up the hardest stones and smash the structural walls on the inside. It is important and necessary work.

The hard part for me is the moral injury, of seeing the years of work get wiped away like a tidal wave, of seeing people’s basic constitutional rights get torn away by others who swore the same oath that I did, of seeing institutions being gleefully torn apart by ignorant children who are too immature to know how much they don’t know. The moral injury of watching the Constitution get torn apart from the inside. The moral injury of the utter contempt the society I have spent nearly my entire adult life serving, fighting to improve, fighting to make more equitable spit in my face with hate and contempt—not just because of my race or my gender but also because of the labor and love I have tried to give it.

I still believe deeply in the work. And there is good that I see I am doing and much good that I can still do. I can see that on the other side of this hell is a huge world of opportunity on the other side. But my heart is too broken, while there are still good days, they are fleeting and outnumbered by the bad more than ten to one, and the bad days keep getting worse. I have spent too many days crying out of sheer rage. My heart knows that this shall pass, but I can’t keep going down this path, this is not the path for me—not anymore.

I don’t know what’s next, but I know that my role is no longer in institutional harm reduction as it was during the first Trump administration. I can't keep trying to put out the fires, I want to be charting a new path. I want to help us dream about what comes next. I want to help us get there. That’s what OROS was supposed to be, but it’s not that anymore. As Grace Lee Boggs said: "We can’t change the whole system overnight. But we need to know what we would put in its place…” that’s what I want to work on. That’s the politics of love and joy I strive to build.