Our friend that works for the US Department of State has finally broken her silence and sent this text this morning.

Anonymous:

Please do what you can. This is very scary. For the first time, I have no idea if the future is bright for our kids (especially daughters).

Friends, if you haven’t already, start calling your congressional representatives today. Don’t use the website form or email - those get filtered in an algorithm. State your name and zip code and tell them what you care about.

We need Congress to put the breaks on Musk and on Trump’s expansionist agenda.

Trump didn’t campaign on colonizing Gaza or shutting down our foreign aid program which is a huge and effective tool against Chinese and Russian influence in developing countries - not to mention critical for public health and food security.

What Musk is doing is not legal or constitutional. I called Hickenlooper, Neguse, and Bennett’s offices this morning and told them I want them to do something to stop the closure of USAID. Join the chorus! It’s time to raise our voices!

At work we have been warned that there will be layoffs starting next week. Vacant positions will be cut, leaving hard to fill posts nearly inoperable.

We have had to remove keywords from all websites, intranet sites, job descriptions, etc… that are now considered bad like “DEI, women, girls, LGB.., environmental justice.”

New words are added weekly to the list of banned words. Anyone working on those issues is fired.

Yesterday we were ordered to remove all instances of the word “gender” and replace it with “sex.” There are two options - male and female, assigned at birth.

USAID colleagues are being evacuated from all over the globe. The National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence has been stopped.

Timber and Forestry experts in the Department of Justice have been fired.

Senator Rubio announced a proposal to send American citizen criminals to El Salvador.

We rejoined the Geneva Consensus Declaration - an anti-abortion pact with several other autocratic countries.

These are just some of the things happening in my world. I know there are other things happening that are equally deeply concerning.

We need to stand up and fight back with all the legal tools at our disposal!