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Around 2A.M.on Saturday morning, operators manning emergency lines in the Minneapolis suburb of Champlin, according to a police report, got a call from someone who said that a masked man had come to their home “and then shot their parents.” When police and medics arrived, they discovered that the victims were a Democratic state senator named John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, who were alive but badly injured. A “very intuitive” sergeant from the nearby city of Brooklyn Park, who had helped respond to the call, asked officers from his jurisdiction to check on the home of the Democratic state legislator Melissa Hortman, who was until recently the state House speaker. According to the Brooklyn Park police chief, Mark Bruley, when the officers arrived, at about 3:35A.M., they saw something unexpected: a “vehicle that looked exactly like an S.U.V. squad car” in the driveway with its emergency lights on. The front door was open, and the officers saw a man dressed like a cop firing into it; he killed Hortman and her husband, Mark. The officers fired at the shooter—since identified as Vance Boelter, a fifty-seven-year-old evangelical Christian (a website of his said that he is an ordained minister) with a scattered work history, who had recently been employed by local funeral-service companies—who ran back into the house and, for a time, escaped. He was arrested on Sunday evening and has been charged with federal murder, which carries the possibility of the death penalty.

The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.

The assassination of one elected official, and the attempted assassination of another, confirm the arrival of a new political era, in which the expectation and the fear of political violence are endemic. But who Boelter is, and the exact nature of his objectives and perceived grievances, may ultimately be less salient than whom he pretended to be. (Boelter’s motives aren’t yet clear, though he possessed what police have suggested may have been a target list of about seventy individuals, many of whom are Democratic politicians.) A state legislator summoned to his or her door well after midnight may be wary about opening it, but somewhat less reluctant if the person on the step is uniformed and there’s a cop car parked on the street. As it turns out, Boelter was driving an S.U.V. that he had presumably outfitted for a security business that hadn’t taken off. But he made the deliberate decision to leave the emergency lights on.

It was very smart of the real Brooklyn Park police officers to suspect what was happening, and their quick reaction might well have saved lives. (At a news conference on Monday, authorities in Minnesota revealed that Boelter had visited at least two other homes between Hoffman’s and Hortman’s, though no one was home at one, and he seemed to have been scared away at the other.) Their job could not have been helped by the fact that the past decade has seen the rise of an unstable environment around politics and law enforcement—one that arguably worsened around January 6th, when Donald Trump celebrated the vigilanteswho stormed the Capitoland attacked its police force as “warriors,” and later when he pardoned them for their decision to take the law into their own hands.

The politicization of law enforcement has acquired a new dimension during the ongoingimmigration crackdowns, when the Administration has sometimes seemed to allow its agents to disguise their identities or affiliations so that it is often unclear to detainees whose custody they are in, or under what authority. (If the vigilantes have been encouraged to act as cops, the actual cops have also been encouraged to act a bit more like vigilantes.) In Boston, in March, when federal agents arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student who had co-written a pro-Palestine op-ed in a campus newspaper, they were in plain clothes and masked. Sometimes the mission has been fuzzy or concealed: not long after the White Housedeployed seven hundred marinesto Los Angeles, purportedly to help quell the protests against immigration raids, photos spread of them detaining a protester. Catherine Rampell, of the WashingtonPost, reported last week on an immigration raid targeting a landscaper working outside a boutique home-design business in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in which agents showed up “in masks and tactical gear and refused to show IDs, warrants or even the names of any criminals they were supposedly hunting.” In the piece, Rampell spoke to the business’s co-owner, Linda Shafiroff, who said, “It could have been like a band of the Proud Boys or something.”

In each of these circumstances, the federal government is asking ordinary people to trust that those wearing uniforms are acting on behalf of the public, while also allowing them to shroud their identity and their mission, and pushing the boundaries of what law enforcement can do. It is hard to imagine a scenario more perfectly engineered for exploitation. In February, a man wearing anICEjacket at the Conservative Political Action Conference, outside Washington, D.C., admitted to a podcaster that he had no affiliation with the agency, but said of his jacket, “It’s $29.99 on Amazon. I would recommend buying a small, if you’re my size.” In Philadelphia, police sought a man who had entered a car-repair shop wearing fake security apparel; yelled “Immigration!,” which caused some employees to scatter; and then proceeded to tie up a worker and rob the business. By the end of March, the fake-ICEsituation had grown sufficiently common in Southern California that the Los AngelesTimesran a feature titled “ICE impersonators and other scammers are on the rise: How to protect yourself.”

Some of these impersonators are scamming for money. But others, especially those harassing migrants, may be expressing some solidarity with the President’s political aims. The leaky membrane that Trump has established between law enforcement and his own agenda does a disservice to the officers, many of whom are simply trying to do their jobs. It may also make their work more dangerous. The more lawless the government is, the easier it is for lawless individuals to impersonate officers, and the more likely it is that citizens will doubt that the real officers actually represent a legal authority.

Which is a recipe for generalized mistrust. For citizens to know who an armed federal agent really is, and what authority he is operating under, should be part of even the most basic commitment to transparency. At a minimum, courts and politicians should pressure government agents to disclose their identities during raids and detentions, and to clarify where their authority begins and ends. If they don’t, or can’t, a more dystopian path beckons, of endemic suspicion of authority. (In California’s Central Valley, as immigration raids peaked, school attendance reportedly dropped by twenty-two per cent.) On Saturday, at an anti-Trump No Kings protest in Salt Lake City, Utah, a man reportedly appeared to be crouching behind a wall, while carrying what looked like an AR-15-style rifle. (Open carry is mostly legal in Utah, and it isn’t yet clear whether he supported or opposed the protests.) Several armed people whom the police referred to as “peacekeepers” providing security for the protest—though whether this role was official or self-assigned was under investigation—pulled their own weapons and yelled. One fired at the man, managing to disarm him but killing a bystander.

In Minnesota, authorities said that they were looking into Boelter’s motives, and whether he belonged to a wider network. In the meantime, jitteriness prevailed across the political class. TheTimessuggested that political violence is “becoming almost routine”; Greg Landsman, a Democratic congressman from Ohio, told the paper that for months he has envisioned an assassination attempt each time he speaks in public. “It’s still in my head. I don’t think it will go away,” he said. “It’s just me on the ground.” These are the kinds of pressures that can dispel public service, and disrupt a democracy. Amid all the general calls to cool the heated rhetoric of partisan politics, a specific measure might prove helpful: more clarity about who represents what area of law enforcement, and where the limits of their mission lie. Otherwise, this risks becoming the summer when everyone—all the way up to the politicians—began to feel unsafe.♦

Last Thursday afternoon, the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, stood smiling in a hallway of the Capitol as he deflected reporters’ questions about the week’s most recent outrage. A few hours earlier, in Los Angeles, Alex Padilla, the senior Democratic senator from California, had interrupted a press conference held by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, then was thrown to the ground and handcuffed by federal agents. In a video of the incident, Padilla, in dark slacks and a windbreaker, identifies himself before asking Noem about the Administration’s deployment of the National Guard and federal troops to police protests in L.A. “I saw the same video, a very brief video that I think many people did,” Johnson said. “Everybody can draw their own conclusions.” He went on to say that he would support a motion to censure Padilla, who, he added with a smirk, had acted “inappropriately.”

Shortly after the video went viral, the Trump Administration responded with its usual mendacity. Noem blamed Padilla for not identifying himself, even though the footage refuted her claims. In a subsequent interview, Padilla, who had arrived at the federal building in L.A. that day for a different meeting, said, “From the moment I entered the building, I’m being escorted by a member of the National Guard and an F.B.I. agent. I asked, ‘Well, since we’re waiting, can we go listen in to the press conference?’ They opened the door for me.” The Department of Homeland Security went on to post a statement on X in which it claimed, falsely, that Padilla had “lunged toward Secretary Noem” and “did not comply with officers’ repeated commands,” adding that the Secret Service “thought he was an attacker and officers acted appropriately.”

At the time, the arrest of a U.S. senator in Los Angeles was the latest incident in a pattern of increasingly aggressive actions that the Administration has taken against elected Democrats and their allies. Each instance has been tied to Trump’s immigration crackdown. In late April, the F.B.I. arrested and charged a Wisconsin county judge, Hannah Dugan, for allegedly aiding an undocumented immigrant in evading Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at a local courthouse. (She has pleaded not guilty.) On May 9th,ICEagents arrested the mayor of Newark,Ras Baraka, and LaMonica McIver, a U.S. congresswoman, outside an immigration jail in New Jersey. Baraka, who was accused of trespassing on private property, was held for five hours before being released; the charges were dropped, and, a few weeks later, Baraka filed a defamation lawsuit against Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer and the interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. (The suit cites a stream of misleading claims that Habba had posted on social media about Baraka’s actions, saying, among other things, that “he has willingly chosen to disregard the law.”) McIver was charged with assaulting a federal officer in the chaos surrounding Baraka’s arrest, and indicted on June 10th. “The charges against me are purely political,” McIver hassaid. “They mischaracterize and distort my actions.” If convicted, she faces up to eight years in prison. On May 28th, D.H.S. agents barged into the New York City office of the veteran Democratic U.S. congressman Jerrold Nadler in pursuit of alleged rioters who had protested whileICEofficers arrested immigrants outside a courtroom. Moments after the agents reached the door, they handcuffed a staffer, claiming that, when they had demanded entry without a warrant, she had physically impeded them. On June 17th, less than a week after Padilla’s arrest,ICEagents tackled and handcuffedBrad Lander, the New York City comptroller and a candidate for mayor, as he accompanied a person outside an immigration court. “You’re obstructing,” an agent told him, according to a recording. Lander, as he was being cuffed near an elevator, replied, “I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway.” D.H.S. later charged him with “assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.”

The incidents involving lawmakers all have something in common: in each case, video evidence directly contradicted or undermined the Administration’s account of what happened. The charges against Representative McIver are without question the most serious. Yet she and two other representatives—Rob Menendez and Bonnie Watson Coleman, both New Jersey Democrats—travelled to the facility on May 9th to exercise an uncontroversial prerogative: members of Congress are allowed to visit and inspect immigration-detention facilities, unannounced, as part of their oversight role. The practice has become fairly common in recent years. The facility in Newark, called Delaney Hall, opened the first week of May, a few months after D.H.S. signed a $1.2-billion contract with the private-prison company GEO to operate it. Baraka, who at the time was running for governor, had objected to the contract and raised questions about aspects of the building permit. When he had tried to visit the facility in the past, GEO employees turned him away.

The three members of Congress arrived on May 9th around noon. To enter the facility, visitors pass through an outer gate and into an interior parking lot that leads to the main compound. They had been waiting for about an hour when Menendez noticed a number of armedICEagents exiting the building into the parking lot. “I’ve never really seen a handful of armed officers at a detention center,” he told me. “These guys were showing up clearly, like, the way you’d expect them to if they were about to go out into the field.” He remembered thinking, “What’s about to go down?”

It was then that Menendez realized Baraka had shown up, but that hardly explained why there would be so many agents. “I honestly thought that there literally was going to be a major, major raid, because I’ve never seen this many armed agents,” he said. According to Baraka’s lawsuit, Representative McIver had invited him to meet with the congressional delegation outside the facility after their tour. But, at 1:50P.M., a guard stationed at the outer gate invited Baraka inside, claiming that it would “calm the crowd” that had gathered outside to protest. About forty-five minutes later, a senior D.H.S. agent approached Baraka and ordered him to leave. He lingered, but only briefly. By then, the Congress members had seen Baraka inside the gate, and walked over to confer with him. The agent returned and threatened to arrest Baraka, who exited the premises onto public property outside.

What happened next is less clear. Menendez says he overheard part of a phone conversation in which a D.H.S. agent, apparently speaking to a superior, said something about a decision to arrest Baraka. A large group of agents then left the facility. “We were ready to go do the tour,” Menendez told me. “The mayor walked out. The situation was over.” Yet, he continued, “that’s when they decide to open the gate where they knew there were all these people who were on public property protesting.” It was inevitable that the situation would escalate: armed federal agents were converging on a crowd outside the grounds of the facility. The representatives went to join Baraka. Videos show them getting jostled and pushed in the scrum. There’s little question that McIver made physical contact with a federal agent. But the footage hardly demonstrates what she’s been accused of—she appears to be getting shoved herself. “You can’t talk to a congresswoman like that,” McIver can be heard saying at one point. A D.H.S. spokesperson later claimed, without evidence, that the members of Congress were part of a “mob” and were “assaulting ourICEenforcement officers, including body slamming a femaleICEofficer.”

Robert Gottheim, Nadler’s chief of staff, was stunned by the government’s inflated descriptions of its confrontations with public officials. “You exercise your rights. They do what they want. Then you figure it out after the fact,” he said. The immigration court in Manhattan is on the fifth floor of the federal building at 201 Varick Street; Nadler’s office is on the sixth floor. On the afternoon of May 28th,ICEofficers had shown up on the fifth floor with photos of immigrants who were scheduled to appear in court. As the Administration has intensified its arrest operations at courthouses and at routine check-in appointments atICEoffices, demonstrators and clergy have shown up to document the activity. Two members of Nadler’s staff had gone downstairs to observe and, when tensions flared, invited the activists upstairs to defuse the situation. Officers from the Federal Protective Service, a D.H.S. agency that guards government property and personnel, followed them to Nadler’s office.

The initial video of the encounter, shot on a witness’s phone and obtained byGothamist, opens with the sounds of Nadler’s staffer sobbing as an officer cuffs her hands behind her back. “She pushed him back,” another officer says. Someone off camera says, “No, she did not. That is not what happened.” Nadler’s office later releasedadditional security footagethat shows more of the exchange. Two officers enter the outer vestibule of Nadler’s office, while a third, with a dog, stands by the door. There’s no sound on the video, but Nadler’s staffer appears to have a conversation with the two officers before walking over to an interior door leading into the office that requires a code to open. As soon as she punches it in, one of the officers grabs her.

The government initially threatened to charge the staffer with assaulting a federal officer. Gottheim was in Italy with his family at the time. He received a call from a ranking officer at the Federal Protective Service, who told him that a staffer had committed an assault. Gottheim said, “Where? In our office?” According to Gottheim, the officer then said that he could charge her with disorderly conduct instead. “I said, ‘You’re going to give her disorderly conduct while she was in our own office? I need to get the congressman on the phone.” The staffer, who has not been identified, was eventually released without charges. Publicly, D.H.S. claimed to have been investigating rioters on the premises. There was no mention of the alleged assault. “In the beginning, we were not sure what they were going to do,” Gottheim said. “Then they released the statement. It really angered us. It was a total fabrication.” Nadler later said of the Administration, “They’re behaving like fascists.”

The Administration’s political calculus seems aimed at punishing and intimidating Democrats who challenge the President’s agenda. Earlier this week, following a day of nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump orderedICEto increase arrests and deportations in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. “ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve this very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” he wrote on Truth Social. That D.H.S. personnel are unencumbered in targeting members of Congress marks a further—and unprecedented—escalation. It also capitalizes on the fact that many protections against such retaliation are grounded in norms rather than laws; pushing the boundaries of acceptable political conduct is easier when those lines are inherently blurry. A senior congressional aide told me, “Members themselves have some limited or arguable protections under the Speech and Debate Clause. But a lot of those protections, mostly due to case law over the years, don’t extend to staff and don’t apply when staff or offices are doing immigration casework.” Such outreach generally falls under the category of constituent services, the aide said, “but we have no immunity in any of those situations.” (In a statement, a White House spokesperson said, “It’s alarming Democrats think they can obstruct federal law enforcement, assault ICE agents, or physically push law enforcement officers while charging a cabinet secretary, without consequence – it’s even more alarming that the New Yorker is encouraging this lawless behavior.”)

There are increasingly urgent reasons for congressional oversight of immigration jails, which have always been notorious for their abysmal conditions. Now, with the Administration expanding its enforcement operations in radical new ways, there are fifty-one thousand people inICEcustody nationwide. On Friday, four detainees escaped from Delaney Hall, in the midst of rolling protests inside the facility among immigrants who described a persistent lack of food and sweltering heat. “People were desperate, breaking doors, banging on walls,” the wife of one of the escaped detainees told theTimes. (A GEO representative said, “There has been no widespread unrest at the facility.”) Last week, as thousands of people marched in the streets of Los Angeles and New York, in response to immigration raids, five members of Congress, in California and New York, were barred from touring detention facilities housing those who had been arrested in the enforcement sweeps. “It’s a direct violation of federal law,” a House aide told me. Since 2019, annual appropriations bills have included a provision explicitly making funding for immigration jails contingent on the ability of congressional appropriators to check on their investment.

There are three months left in the current fiscal year, and, by some estimates,ICEis already a billion dollars over budget. Last week, members of the House Appropriations Committee issued a report detailing its concerns. “ICE began spending more than its appropriated level shortly after the fiscal year commenced and operations now far exceed available resources,” the report says. The Trump Administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed in the House on May 22nd, would increaseICE’s funding for enforcement by seventy-five billion dollars. The actions ofICEand its partner agencies thus far have been extreme, but this would almost certainly supercharge their operations in the year ahead. One of the more surreal aspects of the Administration’s unapologetic aggression toward members of Congress is that Trump is also demanding their support to expand the very power that’s being used against them.“They’re targeting senators at the same time that these senators are being asked to triple the Administration’s enforcement budget,” Andrea Flores, the vice-president of immigration policy at the nonprofit FWD.us, and a former aide to Democrats in both the White House and the Senate, said. “They’re trying to criminalize legally protected congressional activity. It’s terrifying for any legislator trying to do their job right now.” The White House has called for the bill’s passage by July 4th. ♦

As an Australian who wrote about the demonstrations while on campus, I gave my phone a superficial clean before flying to the U.S. I underestimated what I was up against.

Many people are detained at U.S. airports for reasons they find arbitrary and mysterious. I got lucky—when I was stopped by Customs and Border Protection last week, after flying to Los Angeles from Melbourne, a border agent told me, explicitly and proudly, why I’d been pulled out of the customs line. “Look, we both know why you are here,” the agent told me. He identified himself to me as Adam, though his colleagues referred to him as Officer Martinez. When I said that I didn’t, he looked surprised. “It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University,” he said.

They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. Officer Martinez intercepted me before I entered primary processing and took me immediately into an interrogation room in the back, where he took my phone and demanded my passcode. When I refused, I was told I would be immediately sent back home if I did not comply. I should have taken that deal and opted for the quick deportation. But in that moment, dazed from my fourteen-hour flight, I believed C.B.P. would let me into the U.S. once they realized they were dealing with a middling writer from regional Australia. So I complied.

Then began the first “interview.” The questions focussed almost entirely on my reporting about the Columbia student protests. From 2022 to 2024, I attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program, on a student visa, and when the encampment began in April of last year I began publishing daily missives to mySubstack, a blog that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read. To Officer Martinez, the pieces were highly concerning. He asked me what I thought about “it all,” meaning the conflict on campus, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He asked my opinion of Israel, of Hamas, of the student protesters. He asked if I was friends with any Jews. He asked for my views on a one- versus a two-state solution. He asked who was at fault: Israel or Palestine. He asked what Israel should do differently. (The Department of Homeland Security, which governs the C.B.P., claims that any allegations that I’d been arrested for political beliefs are false.)

Then he asked me to name students involved in the protests. He asked which WhatsApp groups, of student protesters, I was a member of. He asked who fed me “the information” about the protests. He asked me to give up the identities of people I “worked with.”

Unfortunately for Officer Martinez, I didn’t work with anyone. I participated in the protests as an independent student journalist who one day stumbled upon tents on the lawn. My writing, all of which is now publicly available, was certainly sympathetic to the protesters and their demands, but it comprised an accurate and honest documentation of the events at Columbia. That, of course, was the problem.

This past February, I booked a trip from Melbourne to New York, with a layover in Los Angeles, so that I could visit some friends for a couple of weeks. In that time, stories of tourists being detained in and denied entry from the U.S. had begun to regularly appear in Australian media. I began to think about what precautions I should take when crossing the U.S. border. I opted against taking a burner phone—a move that some legal experts had advised, in the press—believing it would provoke suspicion, and simply decided to give my phone and social media a superficial clean.

I designed my strategy around the understanding I had developed, after living in the United States for five years and travelling between the States and Australia time and time again, that C.B.P. was fundamentally unsophisticated and ad hoc in its methods, and that I would have to get extremely unlucky to be searched at all. I understood that, if I encountered any difficulty, it would be because the primary-processing officer at the end of that long line at LAX would notice that I had been a Columbia student, and ask to see my phone. If he searched through it, he would encounter the messy and personal digital life of a worryingly single thirty-three-year-old man. But he would not find photographs from protests, Signal conversations, or my Substack posts, which I took down in the week leading up to my flight.

But C.B.P. had prepared for me well before my arrival. They did not need to identify me at LAX as someone worthy of investigation: they had evidently decided that weeks before. MyESTAapplication—the system by which many tourists become eligible to visit the U.S. under the visa waiver program—must have triggered something on their end. Perhaps C.B.P. now has the technological dexterity to check the web history of everyESTAapplicant. Or, perhaps, I was named ina list—provided by the far-right pro-Israel organization Betar US, to representatives of the Trump Administration—of visa holders whom it hoped to see deported. In either case, a U.S. government officer must have read my work and decided that I was not fit to enter the country. Because Officer Martinez had apparently read all of my material so long ago, he didn’t even know that I had taken all this materialdown.What this means is that, by the time a foreigner cleans his social media in preparation for a trip to the U.S., as much of our news media has been urging us to do, it may already be too late.

For me, this mistake was a disaster. Because I’d designed my strategy around passing the standard passport line, I was totally ill-equipped for what happened in the interrogation room. Though I did not know it then, I was participating in an interview that I was never going to pass. It didn’t matter that my views on Israel-Palestine seemed to disappoint Officer Martinez in their lack of divisiveness—I told him it is a conflict in which everyone has blood on their hands, but which can and should be brought to an immediate end by the dominant power. He asked if other Australians feel the same, and I told him that yes, most do. This seemed only to perturb him. When he ran out of questions about Israel, he disappeared into the back room to begin downloading the contents of my phone.

He was gone for a long time. I imagined him, in his office, using some new software to surface all the grimy details of my life. Though I’d deleted a lot of material related to the protests from my device, I’d kept plenty of personal content. Presumably Martinez was skimming through all of this—the embarrassing, the shameful, the sexual.

That fear was confirmed. Martinez came out and said that I needed to unlock the Hidden folder in my photo album. I told him it would be better for him if I did not. He insisted. I felt I had no choice. I did have a choice, of course: the choice of noncompliance and deportation. But by then my bravery had left me. I was afraid of this man and of the power that he represented. So instead I unlocked the folder and watched as he scrolled through all of my most personal content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together.

When he was done, he disappeared again into the other room. I sat there, trying to understand why, despite my hard-won comfort with myself, and with sexuality in general, I felt so violated. I am proud of my life, of who I am. That didn’t seem to help. I realized then I had no privacy left for them to invade.

This time, Martinez was gone for even longer. After fifteen or twenty minutes, the person who had been left in the room to guard me, a lumbersome, goateed man without a name badge, turned to me and said, “God, dude, what do you have on your phone? This normally takes five minutes.”

This is when I truly knew I was fucked—not because the guard was telling the truth but because I sensed he was not. My feeling then was that he was playing his own part, a part designed to mount pressure, to intimidate.

When Martinez finally came out, he was bouncing toward me excitedly, like a kid with a lollipop. He said that they had found evidence of drug use on my phone. Did I realize that I had failed to acknowledge a history of drug use on myESTA?

I moved, in seconds, from a desire to be amiable to a desire not to be found lying. In the gray zone between the arrival gate and passport control you are beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution. You have fewer protections than a criminal metres away, inside the border. People with legal standing are much harder, it turns out, to abuse. In the C.B.P. interrogation room, I had not quite fallen to the level of statelessness, but I had fallen below the criminal.

Were I not fatigued from a long flight and from a long interrogation, and were I not stressed and scared, I would have recalled that my phone doesnothave clear evidence of drug use. A better version of me, the version I like to think I am, would have called bullshit on this bluff. But at that moment I could not account for every single one of the four thousand-odd photos on my phone. I imagined photographs that do not exist, messages that do not exist, proving that I was some sort of drug kingpin. So I admitted that I had done drugs in the past—in other countries as well as in the U.S., where I had bought THC gummies at a dispensary in New York.

Marijuana is legal in New York, but it is not legal federally, and so it seems that, in the eyes of C.B.P., I had broken federal law for purchasing legal weed in New York, and then perhaps again by failing to declare it on myESTA. Martinez, who seemed now to be bubbling over with excitement, went back to his supervisor to, in his words, “pitch this.” When he came back, he told me I would be put on the next flight back to Australia.

Martinez and another officer took me in the back, pushed me against the wall and patted me down. Martinez made sure that I carried no weaponry between my penis and my scrotum. They took the shoelaces out of my shoes and the string out of my elastic pants, presumably so that I would not be able to hang myself. This struck me as overly cautious, but as I entered the detention room I changed my mind. We were so deep in the building, and so clearly underground, that the very notion of a window started to feel like something from a half-remembered dream. Three months ago, a Canadian woman was disappeared into the system for nearly two weeks. I did not know then whether I would be out in one hour, one day, or one month. When I was brought into the room, I encountered a young woman, in tears, begging the guard for information. He told her he had no information to give her and that none would be forthcoming. “Thatwoman,” he said, pointing to a bundle of blankets in the corner, “has been here for four days.”

After that I started to spiral. We detainees were banned from talking to one another. There wasn’t anyone I could communicate with, anyway—a barrier in the room separated the men from the women, and I was the only man. There was food—cup noodles mostly—and a vending machine with M&M’s and Coca-Cola that we could use “if we had brought cash,” one of the guards told me. The room was so cold that all of us were wrapped in C.B.P. blankets.

The bulbs buzzed and the air-conditioning hummed throughout the day, or the night, or whenever it now was. I learned then that the detention room is a place where time itself is detained, that the clock behind the guard, who himself sits behind plexiglass, existed mostly to taunt us. We worked hard not to look at that clock, because, though the hands would move, we had no concept of what they were moving toward. The horror of the thing was that no one knew where we were, and we had no way of telling them. We were isolated from one another and also from the world.

It was then, some hours after first being detained, that I realized C.B.P. must be governed bysomeinternal procedure regarding the distribution of information, and I approached the guard to ask if there was any way I was allowed to get word of my detainment to the outside world.

“You can call your consulate,” he said.

I exercised that right immediately. He dialled the number, and I stood there at his desk, talking loudly so that the others, who I doubted had been informed about their right, could hear me. The woman at the other end of the phone told me that in all likelihood I would be on a plane that evening, about six hours from then, and that, if I knew the number of any of my contacts by heart, she would notify them for me. That’s how my mother found out.

About three hours later, after I passed out on a cot in the detention pen, an officer shouted and woke me up. I was taken to another room and subjected to a second interview, one I did not know was coming, in which all the same questions of the first interview were repeated. I lost my patience with this new guy, Officer Woo. “If you are already going to deport me,” I asked him, “why should I answer any of your questions?”

He seemed shocked at that. “We haven’t decided if we are going to deport you yet,” he said. Then he paused. “But looking at your file . . . I can see why the other officer told you you were going home.”

This second interview had a “Groundhog Day” quality to it, except I was glad for the repetition. We encountered errors in Martinez’s notes. At one point, when I told Woo that the demonstrations at Columbia were “pro-peace” protests, he looked at me with real surprise. “I thought they were pro-Hamas protests?” he asked, quite genuinely. I was stunned by the innocence he brought to a question I found violently absurd. He couldn’t seem to bear the look I gave him then, a look somewhere between horror, exasperation, and fury, and, in embarrassment, he started to laugh.

I was put on a plane, eventually. It was indeed the next Qantas flight out, QF94 at 9:50P.M.on June 12th, roughly twenty-seven hours since I’d first left Melbourne and twelve hours since I’d arrived at LAX. Two heavily armed C.B.P. guards led me out of the detention room and marched me through the bowels of the airport, and then, suddenly, into the bright lights of the duty-free shops, and then finally toward the gate, where, as I stood with guards at the head of the queue, I watched my compatriots board one by one. This gate at LAX is famous to the many Australians who have passed through it on their way home. The armed-guard act from C.B.P. was, I think, supposed to be a kind of shaming, but I felt such a surge of love and respect for my own people that I began to smile and joke with passengers as they passed. The guards did not like this.

When the plane was loaded, I was finally allowed on. The lead guard, Officer Liu, handed an envelope with my passport and phone to the head flight attendant, who, seeing at once what was happening, began to treat me with conspicuous warmth, and the guards, uncomfortable in their contrast, quietly disappeared.

Qantas itself no longer reflects the warmth of its staff—presumably at the request of C.B.P., the airline withheld my phone and passport from me until we landed in Melbourne. In this respect the airline is, in my view, carrying water for the Trump Administration. (Qantas did not respond to a request for comment.) Because I did not have my phone, no one—not me nor the consulate—had informed anyone in Australia that I was on that plane, and I landed back in my home country believing that I would have to make my own way to my house in the bush, nearly two hours from Melbourne.

Every year scores of Australians and thousands of others are denied entry to the United States. C.B.P. has full discretion, after all. There is nothing new about the U.S. ferociously, arbitrarily, and cruelly deploying that discretion in order to keep out people the government does not like. Whatisnew is the politically motivated deployment of that power to exclude speech that the government does not want to hear.

WhenMahmoud Khalilwas detained, I wrote on my blog that the U.S. had pivoted to a new tactic, one I called“the deportation of dissent.” Then it happened to me. C.B.P. ostensibly marked me for denial of entry before I arrived. Its officers told me explicitly why I had been marked. Then it used the powers at its disposal to make sure I did not enter the country.

I do not yet know if I will be allowed back, or if I have been banned, as can happen to travellers accused of misrepresenting their experience with drugs. But I fear that writing about this, and speaking to the media, as I have done, will trigger further reprisals from the U.S. government. I’m afraid that I will be banned for good, if I haven’t been already, or that the information on my phone, which I handed over to them, will be used against me. But I was targeted for writing honestly about what was in front of me—the same thing I’m doing now. That is worth its price. ♦

The Supreme Court was unlikely to strike down a state ban on some pediatric medical treatments, but the Biden Justice Department’s strategy made it even more improbable.

Preventing harm to children is a goal with which most people would agree. But the widening gulf between red and blue states has meant that, in a range of areas, there is no consensus—indeed, there’s extreme polarity—on what “harm” even means. On the issue of gender-affirming medical treatments for trans children and adolescents, both sides have claimed life-or-death stakes. More than half the states have laws that limit doctors from giving such treatments to minors; the remaining states allow this kind of care. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court, in United States v. Skrmetti, held that a Tennessee state ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormones to treat minors’ gender dysphoria does not violate the equal-protection clause of the Constitution. The decision will allow other states to leave in place dozens of similarly restrictive laws.

The LedeReporting and commentary on what you need to know today.

The bid to get the Supreme Court to strike down those bans, as it once did with abortion bans, was a pipe dream. But it’s difficult to imagine a version of legislation more likely to run afoul of the Court’s equal-protection doctrine than what the Tennessee legislature enacted. The statute, SB1, prohibits medical providers from using puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery to enable a minor to identify with a “purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex”—but allows the same medical treatments to be used for other purposes, including to support the “normal development” of a “minor’s sex.” One of the law’s explicitly stated purposes is “encouraging minors to appreciate their sex” and not “to become disdainful of their sex.” SB1 seemed like an obvious, textbook example of a law that “classifies” based on sex, and therefore is supposed to be subject to “heightened” or “intermediate” scrutiny, in which a court asks whether the sex classification is substantially related to the achievement of an important government objective. If the answer is no, the law is unconstitutional. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in a dissent, which was joined by the two other liberal Justices, “Sex determines access to the covered medication.” The state permits the use of puberty blockers and hormones “to help a male child, but not a female child, look more like a boy; and to help a female child, but not a male child, look more like a girl,” Sotomayor wrote. If that is not a sex classification, what in the world is?

Like the dissenters, many students of equal-protection doctrine would immediately have perceived a sex classification here and moved to analyze it under intermediate scrutiny. But Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion, which was joined by the other five conservative Justices, was a master class in reframing the issues to see something entirely different. In his eyes, SB1 was hardly about sex at all and “clearly does not classify on the basis of sex.” Instead, he saw in the law only classifications based on age and “medical use.” That is, when “a transgender boy (whose biological sex is female) takes puberty blockers to treat his gender incongruence, he receives a different medical treatment than a boy whose biological sex is male who takes puberty blockers to treat his precocious puberty.” So, according to the Court, access to the medicine turns not on whether the patient is a boy or a girl, but rather on what medical condition the drug is prescribed for. Banning the medicine to treat gender dysphoria prohibits it equally for both boys and girls, and allowing the same medicine to treat precocious puberty permits it equally for both as well. Ergo, no sex classification, Roberts concluded. These gymnastics make one wonder whether any classification based on sex could, presto chango, turn out not to be.

The Court similarly swatted away an argument that SB1 discriminates against trans people, reasoning that both transgender and cisgender minors are equally unable to receive the medicine to treat gender dysphoria. (To me, this logic is as faulty as that of the case the conservative Justices relied on at length, Geduldig v. Aiello, which, in 1974, found that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is not sex discrimination because some women don’t get pregnant.) Because Roberts did not see the law as classifying based on transgender status, he did not find the need to address the question of whether transgender status is a suspect or quasi-suspect class—like race, national origin, or sex—in which case the law also would have received a higher level of judicial scrutiny. (The Court has not declared a new suspect class in five decades, since it found that sex was quasi-suspect.) JusticesAmy Coney BarrettandSamuel Alito, in separate concurring opinions, went the extra mile to underscore that they do not believe transgender people are a suspect class, asserting, among other things, that being trans is not, like race, “an immutable characteristic.” Barrett added that a suspect class must be a group with a history of discrimination embedded in the law—not just a history of being discriminated against in general—and found that transgender people do not fit that criterion.

Underneath the Chief Justice’s clipped conclusions, the beating heart of Skrmetti was the Court’s subdued but palpable horror at the state of scientific evidence on the efficacy and safety of pediatric gender-affirming treatments. In its 2023 petition to the Court, Biden’s Justice Department came in with overblown claims of scientific consensus—that “overwhelming evidence” supports the use of puberty blockers and hormones for pediatric gender dysphoria, and that it is “the overwhelming consensus of the medical community”—just as the public was starting to learn how much uncertainty lies beneath common practices and recommendations in pediatric gender-affirming medicine. Several Justices’ concurring opinions foregrounded the dearth of reliable studies and conclusive findings about long-term outcomes of the use of puberty blockers and hormones for transgender minors, and cited several European countries’ acknowledgments in the past several years about the insufficient evidence. England’s National Health Service report on the subject, published in April of 2024 and known as the Cass Review, concluded that there is “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress” in trans minors, and that “results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint.” (Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion seemed to get sidetracked in something of a screed against “the expert class” and “elite sentiment” operating “under the guise of scientific judgment,” even citing a favorite medical bugbear, eugenics.)

It was always tough to picture the current Court telling states that they cannot limit pediatric gender-affirming medical treatments. But there had been a chance that Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, would take a surprising stand, as he did inBostock v. Clayton County, in 2020, to form a majority; in that case, the Court concluded that employment discrimination against gay or transgender employees violates Title VII’s ban on discrimination “because of” an individual’s “sex,” reasoning that it is “impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”

Persuading two conservative Justices to extend this highly formalistic reasoning into a constitutional equal-protection case about pediatric gender-affirming medicine required delicacy. But the failure to sufficiently acknowledge medical uncertainty made even knockdown legal arguments to the Court seem untrustworthy. Believing that the petitioner’s legal arguments were more correct than Tennessee’s in light of the sum total of past constitutional sex-equality cases and the gravitational force of Bostock, I had wondered if the loss of credibility regarding medical evidence would push away the possible swing votes. Modesty about the state of the scientific evidence would have been perfectly consistent with a constitutional objection to a sex classification that deprives doctors of the ability to exercise medical judgment and determine what is appropriate for particular patients.

In any event, a Gorsuch-led majority reprising the reasoning of Bostock did not materialize. The Court found SB1 constitutional because it concluded that the state had legitimate concerns about the possible risks of physical and psychological harm to minors, including irreversible sterility and regret. In the face of medical uncertainty, the Court was unwilling to “second-guess” a legislature’s decision. Justice Gorsuch remained notably silent and merely signed onto the Chief Justice’s opinion.

The Skrmetti decision is unlikely to change much in terms of pediatric gender-affirming medicine: red states will continue limiting access to the treatments, and blue states will likely continue to allow them. But a Supreme Court decision declaring that there is no equal-protection right in this context is a significant setback for transgender rights more broadly. State and federal governments may take it as a signal that it is permissible to restrict the freedom and opportunities of transgender people, as the Trump Administration hasaggressively been doing, particularly in the military. No states currently prohibit gender-affirming medical treatment for adults (though some prohibit Medicaid from covering it), but Skrmetti opens the door to the argument that legislatures’ concerns about medical uncertainty may allow them to restrict the care for all ages. Then again, the Justices’ unease about whether children and adolescents can genuinely consent to life-altering treatments would be lacking in the case of adults.

Skrmetti did not adjudicate trans people’s rights to access bathrooms, tocompete in sports, to be addressed by their chosen names and pronouns, and to obtain passports in accordance with their gender identities. Nevertheless, Justice Barrett’s concurrence left little doubt that even laws that are found to classify based on trangender status will not be subject to heightened scrutiny. She seemed to be saying loud and clear that the Supreme Court will not be a good venue for vindicating transgender rights in the foreseeable future. Bringing Skrmetti to the Justices may have been a strategic misstep for trans rights, but it will be hard to know whether doing so caused more harm than not having brought it. ♦

The discovery began, as many breakthroughs do, with an observation that didn’t quite make sense. In 1948, two French researchers, Paul Mandel and Pierre Métais, published a little-noticed paper in a scientific journal. Working in a laboratory in Strasbourg, they had been cataloguing the chemical contents of blood plasma—that river of life teeming with proteins, sugars, waste, nutrients, and cellular debris. Amid this familiar inventory, they’d spotted an unexpected presence: fragments of DNA drifting freely.

The finding defied biological orthodoxy. DNA was thought to remain locked inside the nuclei of cells, and not float around on its own. Stranger still, these weren’t whole genomes but broken pieces—genetic flotsam cast adrift from an unknown source.

Mandel and Métais weren’t sure what to make of it. The scientific community, equally perplexed, largely ignored the paper for more than a decade. But biological mysteries rarely remain buried. Eventually, researchers returned to the question with a simple explanation. Each day, as billions of cells perish, they rupture, spilling their contents—DNA included—into the bloodstream. These fragments circulate briefly before being metabolized or cleared by the kidneys. This “cell-free DNA,” the researchers concluded, was the residue of the body’s ongoing cycle of death and renewal.

DNA seemed to be cast off from dying cells like debris from sinking vessels. What appears as waste may serve as witness—a sock, a spoon, a necklace drifting from a submerged compartment, each hinting at a life once lived. Might these fragments in our blood carry messages from the cells that released them? Could scientists assemble these molecular scraps and reconstruct the identities of the cells they came from?

In the nineteen-sixties, Aaron Bendich, a cancer researcher in New York, proposed that tumor cells, like healthy ones, might shed DNA into the bloodstream. By 1989—four decades after Mandel and Métais’s discovery—researchers had found concrete evidence of tumor-derived cell-free DNA in cancer patients’ blood.

The implications were far-reaching. For generations, scientists had searched for ways to detect cancer early: mammograms, colonoscopies, Pap smears—all designed to catch malignancies before they spread. The idea that cancer cells might be leaking their secrets into the blood suggested a radical new possibility: that we might detect malignancy not through imaging or a physical exam but by a simple blood draw. Scientists would eventually call this a “liquid biopsy,” and, for many, it augured a transformative leap in cancer screening.

The promise of early detection—of catching cancer before it announces itself through symptoms—continues to drive research and investment in the field. But this hope may hide a more complex reality.

“If we are to beat cancer, early detection and diagnosis are arguably the most effective means we have at our disposal,” a group from Cancer Research UK declared in a 2020commentaryinTheLancet Oncology. The case for cancer screening assumes the shape of a simple narrative: a lump forms in a woman’s breast; a mammogram detects it; a biopsy confirms malignancy; a surgeon removes it before it spreads. Her life is saved.

But now imagine two women visiting a mammography clinic. Both are found to have identical-looking lumps. Both are diagnosed with early breast cancer and scheduled for surgery. Each returns home relieved, convinced that modern medicine has intervened in time. As one woman told me, recalling such a moment, “Once I knew it was inside me, I wanted it out as soon as possible. I called the surgeon’s office every hour until they gave me an appointment the next week.”

The trouble is that amammogramreveals only the shadow of a tumor—it cannot divine the tumor’s nature. It shows the body of the cancer, not its mind: that is, a mammogram cannot tell us whether the tumor is aggressive, whether it has already spread or will remain inert. The image holds no clues to intention, to future propensities.

Suppose the first woman undergoes surgery, reassured by the idea of “early” detection, but it turns out that the cancer has sent metastatic cells beyond the reach of the scalpel. The procedure, though exacting, offers no benefit. She has endured harm without gain, the very opposite of the old medical injunction: First,do no harm.

The second woman faces the inverse. Her tumor appears ominous but is, by nature, indolent—slow-growing, noninvasive, never destined to threaten her life. Yet she, too, undergoes surgery, anesthesia, recovery. The procedure removes a tumor that posed no danger. Again: harm without benefit.

This paradox reveals a central flaw in our current model of cancer screening. We have become adept at locating cancer’s physical presence—its corporeal form—but remain largely blind to its character, its behavior, its future. We employ genomic assays and histopathological grading, but many early-stage tumors remain biologically ambiguous. They might be the kind of early cancers that surgery can cure. They might be slow-growing and unlikely to cause harm. Or, most concerning, they might already have metastasized, rendering local intervention moot. Three possibilities—yet we often cannot tell which we’re confronting.

To complicate matters further, false positives abound: tests that suggest cancer where none exists, leading to unnecessary procedures, anxiety, and harm. To begin navigating this treacherous terrain, we might turn to a curious figure—an Enlightenment-era clergyman and mathematician whose ideas now guide us through the darkness.

Thomas Bayes was no physician. Born at the start of the eighteenth century, he was a Presbyterian minister with a side gig in formal logic—an interpreter of uncertainty in an age that craved certainty. In the one portrait traditionally said to depict Bayes (though the sitter may have been misidentified), he appears as a sizable, self-assured man with a Wall Street haircut: Alec Baldwin in a clergyman’s coat. Bayes published only two papers in his lifetime: one a defense of God’s benevolence, the other a defense of Newton’s calculus. His lasting contribution came posthumously, in a Royal Society paper on conditional probability. Its argument still informs the way we assess information.

Imagine a group of a thousand heavy smokers in their sixties. One of them has lung cancer. That one-in-a-thousand chance is what Bayesians call the “prior probability”—the odds of having the disease before we know anything else. Now suppose we use a test that correctly detects lung cancer ninety-nine per cent of the time when it’s present. That’s the test’s “sensitivity.” It also correctly gives a negative result ninety-nine per cent of the time when cancer isn’t present—that’s the test’s “specificity.”

So what does it signify if someone in the group tests positive—what are the chances the person actually has cancer? Bayesian arithmetic gives a surprising answer: the test can be expected to identify the one person who actually has cancer, but it will also wrongly flag about ten people who don’t. That means there will be roughly eleven positive results, but only one of them is accurate. The chance that someone who tests positive has cancer, then, is just over nine per cent. In other words, eleven people would be sent for follow-up procedures, such as biopsies. And ten of them would go through a risky and invasive process—which can involve a punctured lung, bleeding, or other complications—with no benefit.

In short, if you set out to find a needle in a haystack, even with the best detector, you’ll mostly turn up hay. Choose a haystack with thousands of needles scattered among the bales, and you’ll start finding more needles than hay. Posterior probability (the chance that you’ve found a needle) depends on prior probability (how many needles were there to begin with).

Knowledge, in the Bayesian model, is always provisional, a process of updating one’s beliefs in light of new evidence. In a fifty-eight-year-old survivor of breast cancer with a strong family history of the disease, a new lump near the original site likely signals recurrence—intervention is warranted. In a twenty-year-old with no relevant history, the same finding is likely benign—watchful waiting may suffice.

The consequences of ignoring these principles are staggering. In 2021, according to one estimate, the United States spent more than forty billion dollars on cancer screening. On average, a year’s worth of screenings yields nine million positive results—of which 8.8 million are false. Millions endure follow-up scans, biopsies, and anxiety so that just over two hundred thousand true positives can be found, of which an even smaller fraction can be cured by local treatment, like excision. The rest is noise mistaken for signal, harm mistaken for help.

The quandaries of early detection don’t end there. I sometimes pose a question to my interns during morning rounds: “How do we judge whether a cancer-screening test is effective?” An answer usually comes quickly: “If the test detects malignancies at a high rate or at an early stage.”

But, as the mammography story illustrates, merely finding a tumor tells us nothing about what it will do. So I press further. Their next answer also comes quickly: “By dividing a population into screened and unscreened groups, then measuring which group lives longer without cancer.” But this approach invites another fallacy.

Suppose two identical twins develop breast cancer at the same time, in 2025. One undergoes regular screening; her tumor is caught early. She begins treatment—surgery, chemotherapy. The process is gruelling: a blood clot after surgery, an infection during chemo, months of recovery. Four years pass. She endures it all, hopeful for a cure.

Her sister, shaken by an old friend’s treatment ordeal, avoids screening altogether. She moves to upstate New York, tends apple trees, reads books, and shuns medical intervention. By 2029, breast-cancer symptoms appear, but she declines treatment.

In 2030, the first sister learns that her cancer has returned. She’s admitted to a hospital in New York City. That same month, her sister—now visibly ill—is admitted to the same facility. They lie in adjacent beds, reflecting on their choices. They die the same week.

Now comes the illusion. The first twin’s post-diagnosis survival is recorded as five years; the second’s, just one year. Doctors reviewing their cases might conclude that screening extended survival fivefold. But both women were born and died at the same time. The screening had no impact on life span. The apparent benefit is a statistical mirage—an artifact of when we start the clock. This is “lead-time bias,” which inflates survival time without improving outcomes.

Lead-time bias isn’t the only illusion that distorts cancer-screening results. Consider a village where a cancer occurs in two forms—one fast and fatal, the other slow and largely harmless. With annual screening, the slow-growing tumors are more likely to be flagged: they linger longer in a detectable, symptom-free phase. The aggressive ones, by contrast, often produce symptoms between screenings and are diagnosed clinically. (Patients with them can even die between annual tests.) After a decade, the data look promising: more early cancers found, longer survival after diagnosis. But the apparent benefit is misleading. Screening disproportionately detects indolent tumors—those less likely to be lethal in the first place. That’s known as length-time bias.

These twin illusions—lead-time bias and length-time bias—cast a flattering light on screening efforts. One stretches our measurement of survival by shifting the starting line; the other claims success by favoring tumors already predisposed to be less harmful. Together, they have misled cancer researchers for decades.

To determine whether a screening truly works, we have to measure not survival time but mortality. Did fewer people die of cancer in the screened group? This is the outcome that really matters. Yet demonstrating such a benefit is slow, arduous work. As a trialist, you must wait for the final end point: death. That can take decades. And you need a vast number of patients to capture any difference between the screened and unscreened cohorts. The process is relentless—screen, test, treat, repeat, and wait. Rigorous cancer-screening trials are expensive, time-consuming, methodologically thorny, and maddeningly uncertain. They test not only the validity of our methods but the stamina of our convictions.

The point isn’t that screening can’t pay off. The success stories are real. In 2022,The New England Journal of Medicinepublished theresultsof a landmark colonoscopy trial involving 84,585 participants in Poland, Norway, and Sweden. After more than a decade, the data showed an estimated fifty-per-cent reduction in deaths associated with colorectal cancer among those who received colonoscopies. Every four to five hundred colonoscopies prevented a case of colorectal cancer. The benefit was real—but demonstrating it required years of painstaking research.

The effectiveness of screening varies dramatically by cancer type. Consider ovarian cancer, a disease that often remains hidden until it has scattered itself across the abdomen. In 1993, researchers launched a major trial to test whether annual ultrasounds and blood tests could lower mortality. The scale was extraordinary: more than seventy-eight thousand women enrolled, half randomly assigned to screening. For four years, they endured transvaginal ultrasounds; for six years, routine blood draws. Then came more than a decade of monitoring. It was a collective act of generosity—tens of thousands submitting themselves to discomfort and uncertainty in the hope of sparing future patients.

One of them was a woman I knew, Sherry. She was a sharp, funny, full-tilt presence, the kind of person who would light up a room without trying. A bighearted executive with a mile-a-minute mind, she’d dive into a new project or a friend’s crisis with the same restless energy. When she got her negative result, she was relieved. But she kept showing up. Year after year, she endured the awkward ultrasounds, the blood draws, the odd waiting-room silences. She believed in the trial’s promise.

And what did we learn? Among the screened, 3,285 received false positives. More than a thousand underwent unnecessary surgeries. A hundred and sixty-three suffered serious complications—bleeding, infection, bowel injury. But after eighteen years there was no difference in mortality. Even with three to six additional years of follow-up, the results held.

We speak often of a “war on cancer.” But we rarely acknowledge the casualties of our efforts. This was a war story, too—a battle without a victory. Its legacy helps to explain why effective screening remains so elusive, and why the promise of cell-free DNA, of so-called liquid biopsies, is so alluring. What if cancer could be caught not through imaging or invasive exams but through its molecular contrails in the blood? What if we could not only detect a cancer’s presence but divine its intent? Perhaps we could finally build a test that saves lives without wounding so many in the process.

In 2016, a startup named Grail set out to do just that. The name itself—alluding to the holy grail of cancer detection—revealed both the company’s aspirations and the reverence with which it approached the challenge. Backed by a luminous scientific advisory board and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Grail began developing what it termed a “multi-cancer early detection” test, based on the analysis of cell-free DNA.

The approach was ingenious: extract fragments of DNA circulating in the bloodstream—the same shards first glimpsed by Mandel and Métais nearly seven decades earlier—and sequence them to identify abnormalities in the regulation of gene expression that are indicative of cancer. Machine-learning algorithms, attuned to chemical modifications in the DNA, would detect what Grail called the “cancer signal,” and then decode its origin, determining where in the body it might have begun. This was painstaking, rigorous work.

I asked Joshua Ofman, Grail’s president, about the company’s ambitious goals. Currently, he noted, guidelines typically recommend screening for only five cancers: breast, cervical, prostate (though the value of the test is disputed), colorectal, and, in smokers, lung. “This one-cancer-at-a-time approach detects just fourteen per cent of incident cancers in the U.S.—a dismal number,” he told me. “The status quo is unacceptable. We don’t get to choose which cancer we get, and looking for one cancer at a time isn’t addressing over eighty per cent of cancer deaths. Adding more single-cancer screening tests isn’t viable, as each carries a high false-positive rate that would collectively overwhelm the health-care system.”

Grail’s test, though, has identified more than fifty types of cancer. Between August, 2016, and February, 2019, Grail launched what would become a landmark study to assess how well the test—later named the Galleri test—performed. The scale was impressive: more than fifteen thousand participants enrolled at more than a hundred and forty sites, including élite medical centers in the United States. The study was carefully structured into sub-studies, each aimed at answering a specific question about the test’s performance. After five years of data collection and analysis, all the results were out by 2021.

At first glance, the paper read like a scientific tour de force—an elegant fusion of medicine, mathematics, biochemistry, computational biology, and machine learning. I remember poring over it one muggy evening in 2021, as theCOVIDpandemic raged. Armed with an urn of coffee, I sifted through fifty dense pages of tables and text, reading late into the night.

Sub-study 3 stood out: of 4,077 participants, there were 2,823 with known cancer, and 1,254 confirmed to be cancer-free. Grail’s test identified malignancy in 1,453 of the cancer cases, missing it in 1,370. The over-all sensitivity—its ability to detect cancer when it was truly present—stood at 51.5 per cent. For a single blood draw across dozens of cancer types, it was an astonishing result. Few existing methods came close. Most striking was the test’s ability to detect malignancies long considered unscreenable—pancreatic, ovarian, and others that had eluded surveillance. Meanwhile, just six of the 1,254 cancer-free participants received false positives—a remarkably low rate of about half a per cent.

The company’s rhetoric was upbeat, and not without cause. Researchers sounded confident. Investors were jubilant. Patients were hopeful. At last, it seemed, we had a liquid biopsy worthy of the name: a test that could detect multiple cancers from a single vial of blood.

Deeper in the data, though, a sobering number surfaced. The test’s sensitivity for Stage I disease—the benchmark for any screening tool—was just above sixteen per cent. Shouldn’t early detection be the point? Yet early cancers—still local, still operable—often slipped past, shedding too little signal to be heard. The test performed better as cancers advanced, which made sense: advanced tumors shed more DNA. But they are also less responsive to treatment.

The picture varied widely by cancer type. For Stage I pancreatic and ovarian cancers, sensitivity reached fifty and sixty per cent, respectively—genuinely encouraging numbers for two of the most elusive malignancies. For early esophageal and lung cancers, sensitivity dropped to twelve and twenty-one per cent—levels that would severely limit clinical utility.

Even so, the detection of certain early-stage cancers—especially ovarian and pancreatic—was exciting. Early-stage cancers offer more options, more time, and more hope. They are more likely to be curable. The economic and human calculus shifts, too: early cancers cost much less to treat than advanced ones. Surgeries are less extensive; chemotherapy, less punishing. Patients retain more energy, more dignity, more of their ordinary lives.

By the time I finished reading, I was cautiously optimistic. One critical metric for any screening test is its positive predictive value, or P.P.V.—the likelihood that a positive result truly signals disease. For Grail’s test, the over-all P.P.V. stood at roughly forty-five per cent. If you tested positive, that is, your odds of actually having cancer were slightly less than fifty-fifty. Many existing screening tests operate with worse predictive values, often producing more unnecessary interventions than Grail’s approach seemed likely to trigger.

In 2021, after presenting some additional results, Grail began introducing the Galleri test to the public. Before long, Grail’s website featured the story of Rich, a gym owner, perhaps seventysomething, with an avuncular, steadying presence. In a sleekly produced video, Rich recounts how the test detected a cancer signal in his blood. He visited an oncologist and learned that the test had uncovered cancer that had already spread to his lymph nodes. “I felt relief—relief that we caught this early,” he says, his hand resting on his chest. “Even though it’s Stage III, I wouldn’t know about it for another six months to a year, and then it would be too late.”

It’s a moving story. But, as I watched, I couldn’t shake the dissonance between the narrative and the clinical reality. This wasn’t early detection in the traditional sense—a small tumor caught before it could spread. Rich’s cancer had already breached the lymphatic system. If this was a victory for screening, it felt like a qualified one—less a triumph than a brief reprieve.

Two years ago, Grail published theresultsof another study, inThe Lancet. It offered a more textured portrait of the test’s capabilities. From late 2019 through 2020, researchers enrolled more than sixty-six hundred participants, drawing blood from each and submitting those samples to molecular scrutiny. The study was not randomized; it was designed to mimic how the test might perform in everyday medical practice.

As in earlier trials, technicians extracted and sequenced fragments of cell-free DNA from plasma. Machine-learning algorithms sifted through the cellular din for whispered signals. Signals emerged in ninety-two participants—each one, in theory, a life saved or prolonged.

Follow-up testing—scans, biopsies, the full diagnostic arsenal—confirmed thirty-six cases of cancer. Of these, twenty-nine were newly diagnosed cancers; seven were recurrences of previously treated disease. What stirred real hope was that fourteen of the newly diagnosed cancers—roughly half—were in an early stage (Stage I or II) and potentially curable. And the test had identified malignancies for which no standard screening exists: cancers of the small intestine, the pancreas, and a rare spindle-cell neoplasm, a form of bone cancer—all detected at a stage when surgical removal was still possible. These are cancers that typically announce themselves only after spreading widely.

In an accompanyingLancetcommentary, however, the physician Richard Lee and the epidemiologist Hilary Robbins called the test’s over-all sensitivity “somewhat underwhelming.” A comparable number of cancers, they pointed out, had been found through conventional methods. The Galleri test, they concluded, “will probably not replace standard screening,” and theyurged caution, calling for its cost-effectiveness to be analyzed before it was added to existing protocols.

They also flagged a crucial detail: of the fourteen early-stage cancers, only six were newly diagnosed solid tumors—malignancies that could potentially be removed with curative surgery. The remaining eight were liquid tumors—leukemias and myelomas, diffuse diseases not easily contained or “cut out.” As the editorialists noted, “This finding raises important questions regarding the test’s ability to reduce cancer mortality at the population level.”

Even with its limitations, though, Grail had cleared a meaningful hurdle, in that the test had identified cancers in seemingly healthy individuals which might otherwise have gone undetected. But pressing questions remained. Would that early liver tumor—or that pancreatic lesion—have proved fatal without intervention? If such cancers had been regularly caught this early before, their natural histories might be charted. Might some have stayed dormant, even regressed? Or were they all destined to spread?

There was only one way to know. Grail would need to show a reduction in cancer-specific mortality in a properly randomized trial—the elusive gold standard that has undone so many promising screening technologies.

The challenge was immense, requiring the enrollment of large numbers of participants to be followed for many years. In a fragmented health-care system like that of the United States, such studies are also commercially treacherous: investors recoil from timelines this long and outcomes this uncertain. And yet no shortcut currently exists.

Grail was already conducting a study in partnership with the U.K. National Health Service’s English system. The study, announced in late 2020, was vast: more than a hundred and forty thousand participants, enrolled across eleven mobile clinics at a hundred and fifty-one locations throughout England. “The trial was designed with three consecutive years of screening in order to achieve the primary endpoint, which is the absolute reduction in the number of late-stage (Stage III and IV) cancer diagnoses,” Harpal Kumar, who runs Grail’s international operations, wrote. A review of the data from the first round of screening was scheduled for 2024, with final results expected in 2026. If early data proved promising, the Galleri test would advance into a larger pilot program within N.H.S. England.

The partnership stirred immediate controversy among cancer epidemiologists. The N.H.S. occupies a singular place in British life—both a cherished institution and a perennial target of criticism. The idea of a private American company embedding itself in the fabric of the public-health system raised alarm. In a sharply wordedLancetcommentary titled “Grail-Galleri: Why the Special Treatment?,” eight prominent physicians, epidemiologists, and sociologistsissued a blunt warning: “A cancer screening programme that offers no improvement in cause-specific mortality (or quality of life) is only doing harm and wasting money.” In their view, “TheGRAIL-Galleri trial must, as a minimum, show direct benefit in reducing cancer-specific mortality.” No surrogate end point would suffice. They were troubled that the N.H.S. trial had chosen “stage shift”—a reduction in late-stage diagnoses—as its primary metric. The ovarian-cancer-screening debacle that started in the nineties had made it clear that more early diagnoses do not necessarily mean fewer deaths. “Although commercial interests are powerful,” the critics cautioned, “the NHS can ill-afford to be a world leader in the adoption of poorly evaluated interventions that might be of little or no benefit, harm people, and waste resources that could be better used elsewhere.”

In the spring of 2024, I sat at my desk awaiting the N.H.S. announcement about the Galleri’s performance. If the early data were exceptionally positive, the Galleri test was expected to expand into a larger pilot. When the statement finally arrived, it was strikingly terse: “Based on data from the first year of the three-year NHS-Galleri trial, NHS England has decided that it will wait to see final results, expected in 2026, before considering whether an NHS rollout of the Galleri multi cancer early detection test (the Multi Cancer Blood Test Programme, MCBT) should go ahead.”

What did this mean? Had the test fallen short—or had the analysis simply been inconclusive? According to Grail’s own framework, “three robust, ambitious and pre-specified criteria” were to guide the decision: a reduction in late-stage-cancer diagnoses between screened and unscreened groups, the test’s positive predictive value, and the total cancer-detection rate in each cohort.

I contacted Joshua Ofman, Grail’s president. “The N.H.S. was looking for an early sign ofexceptionalbenefit from the first round of screening only, which has not been seen in previous screening trials for the first round of screening,” he told me. His basic message: too little data, too soon to tell. (Grail presumably had different expectations, though, when it agreed to allow the N.H.S. to review the early data.)

Seeking clarity, I reached out to Charles Swanton, the chief clinician at Cancer Research UK. His response was immediate: “As co-chief investigator, I am blinded to any data until the final results.” John Bell, a former Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford and a global authority on genomic medicine, was no better informed. “No clue,” he replied. “I know as much as you do. Maybe ask Peter Johnson.”

Johnson—the national clinical director for cancer at N.H.S. England, and one of the field’s most respected clinical scholars—e-mailed back promptly, too. “The study has completed 3 years of blood sampling, and we are waiting to see the results of this as per the statistical analysis plan and the study protocol, before making further decisions. No analysis of the data has been made as yet.” He clarified that the May, 2024, statement was not a formal interim analysis that would determine the trial’s direction.

I followed up with a set of questions: Had Grail’s “three robust, ambitious and pre-specified criteria” been evaluated? If this wasn’t an interim analysis, what exactly had been assessed? Would promising data lead to a broader rollout funded by the N.H.S.? Why had Grail chosen stage shift, rather than cancer-specific mortality, as the primary end point? And would mortality be measured in a subsequent study?

Then came the key disclosure: “I can confirm that at least one of the three criteria was not met,” he wrote, explaining why the implementation pilot would not proceed in 2024. He acknowledged the glacial pace of cancer-screening research: “Cancer screening trials typically take 10-15 years to publish on mortality, and when positive it typically takes a further 10-15 years before a screening programme with high coverage is rolled out nationally. The approach we have taken to the NHS-Galleri trial and a possible implementation pilot sought to accelerate this process, without losing the methodologic rigour that is essential to the success of any such programme.”

Harpal Kumar chimed in on Grail’s website: “This early look at certain selected metrics provides only a limited view. As demonstrated in previous cancer screening trials, results from the first screening round do not always reflect the final results, especially for reduction in late stage diagnosis.”

In truth, some version of this story could be told about nearly every novel, high-tech cancer-screening test. The contours shift, the technologies evolve, but the core dilemmas remain: identifying which cancers will be of clinical significance, navigating illusions like lead-time and length-time bias, and, ultimately, proving not just that we can detect more cancers but that we can prevent more deaths.

It’s possible that the accelerating forces of cancer genetics and machine learning may yet transform the Bayesian landscape of early detection. For generations, we’ve watched malignancies thread through families—colorectal, ovarian, breast, pancreatic. The pattern is familiar, even if not fully understood. We’ve typically looked for single-gene mutations—BRCA1, BRCA2, MLH1—that signal elevated risk. But most inherited risk isn’t carried by one rogue gene. It emerges from the accumulation of many—a polyphony of small variations, each nudging risk ever so slightly higher. Today, advances in genome sequencing and computational modelling have begun to untangle this architecture. Sophisticated algorithms can scan entire genomes, mapping how thousands of tiny genetic variations interact. One such model, attuned to thousands of genetic loci, can already predict adult height. Nutrition still matters, but the precision of these forecasts represents a remarkable advance.

Similar models are now being trained to predict vulnerability to complex diseases—obesity, heart disease, and, increasingly, cancer. A woman with a family history of breast cancer can now receive a “polygenic risk score”—a composite of dozens or hundreds of gene variants. Soon, such models may be able to account for the role played by environmental exposures and chance—offering a more dynamic, individualized map of risk.

Imagine designing screening trials not for the general population but for people already flagged by genetics—those with high polygenic scores for breast or colon cancer. Add in other risk factors: age, prior diagnoses, exposures. In such a world, screening wouldn’t be universal. Those at high risk would receive focussed surveillance. Those at low risk might be spared unnecessary procedures. Preselecting high-risk individuals dramatically sharpens the predictive power of screening. A suspicious nodule on a CT scan or a positive result from a liquid biopsy would be more meaningful. More signal, less noise. The likelihood of benefit increases; the risk of harm recedes.

Inevitably, this new paradigm carries its own psychological burden. Bayesian risk begets Bayesian anxiety. Patients begin to navigate risk as a terrain—scores, thresholds, probabilities—calibrating and recalibrating their place within it. As one patient put it, “It’s like being under siege”—not by an actual illness but by a prospective one. This phenomenon has given rise to the telling neologism “previvor”—someone living in the long shadow of a disease they have not yet developed but to which they are genetically predisposed. Unlike survivors, who have endured illness and emerged changed, previvors find themselves suspended between health and its anticipated betrayal. Their lives are shaped not by diagnosis but by possibility. The borders of Cancerland—the oncologist David Scadden’s apt term—have expanded dramatically. Once reserved for those with active disease, the territory will soon include millions pulled into it by risk scores alone.

The argument between early-detection advocates and epidemiologic rigorists continues to sharpen. Proponents of emerging technologies—cell-free-DNA assays, novel biomarkers, whole-body imaging—argue that traditional standards set an impossibly high bar. Randomized trials powered to demonstrate reductions in cancer-specific mortality can take decades. Even Bayesian trials targeting high-risk groups face slow enrollment and long follow-up. These studies often conclude like weary medieval caravans, staggering home with hard-won goods—only to find the landscape changed. As Ofman warned, by the time the final results arrive the technology may already be obsolete. What if, after thirty years, a trial yields a modestly positive signal—just as a newer, better test emerges?

“All screening programmes do harm; some do good as well, and, of these, some do more good than harm at reasonable cost,” a team of epidemiologists wrote in 2008. The point still holds. But, once a screening test is widely adopted, it becomes almost impossible to unwind, even when its benefits prove marginal. The political fallout would be fierce. The psychological toll—undoing a sense of protection—would be immense.

Meanwhile, new technologies continue to flood in, each offering the seduction of speed. With them comes the temptation to accept looser surrogates for efficacy: earlier detection, shifts in stage, improved survival curves. The pressure to act is real. But so is the question of whether we can adapt our standards of evidence without compromising them—finding forms of rigor that move at the pace of innovation yet still tell us what we most need to know.

I think of Sherry. She had stayed in the ovarian-cancer trial for years after her negative result—showing up for every scan, every blood draw, believing in the work. She’d felt enormous relief, and she channelled that relief into something larger: fund-raising, advocacy, public support for biomedical research. Then, in 2020, she was diagnosed with metastatic ovarian cancer. Despite surgery and intensive chemotherapy, she died two years later. Would she still be alive had the original screening been more effective? No one can say. But the question lingers.

In 2021, during her final year, I came down with a bad cold. Sherry messengered a container of homemade chicken soup to my apartment. It was a small, characteristic act: practical, generous, unasked for. And it has stayed with me—more immediate than any p-value or hazard ratio. Whenever I return to the statistical puzzles of early detection, I think of her. The subjects of screening trials are not abstractions. They are human beings, with lives that touch others in ways no data point can capture.

Perhaps, in time, we’ll build tools that can not only detect cancer’s presence but predict its course—tests that listen not just for signals but for intent. Early work with cell-free DNA hints at this possibility: blood tests that may one day tell us not only where a cancer began but whether it’s likely to pose a threat to health. For now, we dwell in a liminal space between promise and proof. It’s a space where hope still outpaces certainty and the holy grail of perfect screening remains just out of reach. ♦

This is drawn from the updated fifteenth-anniversary edition of “The Emperor of All Maladies.”

The word “advice” comes from two Latin words: the prefixad, which implies a movement toward something, andvīsum, “vision,” a distinctly vivid or imaginative image. To ask for advice is to reach for a person whose vision exceeds yours, for reasons supernatural (oracles, mediums), professional (doctors, lawyers), or pastoral (parents, friends). It is a curious accident of language that “advice” contains within it the etymologically unrelated word “vice,” from the Latinvitium, meaning “fault” or “sin.” Yet the accident is suggestive. Alexander Pope seized on it to warn poets away from the royal court in a 1735 satire: “And tho’ the court show vice exceeding clear / None should, by my advice, learn virtue there.” The couplet, contrasting the speaker’s good advice with more nefarious influences, reveals the danger of outsourcing one’s moral vision to others. It may expose the adviser as crude, imperious, or immoral, and leave the advisee shrouded in moral stupidity. Pope’s advice? Beware bad advice from bad people.

Of course, this takes for granted that what the advisee wants is to act virtuously. But what if she only wants the adviser to affirm her vision? Pope, clever man that he was, had a couplet for this occasion, too: “But fix’d before, and well resolv’d was he, / (As men that ask advice are wont to be).” The parentheses are an inspired touch, mimicking how an advisee’s true intentions may be concealed. The advisee who feigns receptivity lays a terrible trap; woe to the adviser who does not think to step around it. Jane Austen, who often took Pope’s advice—he was the “one infallible Pope in the world,” she claimed—choreographed an elegant series of steps around advice-giving in “Sense and Sensibility.” In a discussion with the novel’s protagonist, Elinor Dashwood, the vulgar, manipulative Lucy Steele asks if she should dissolve her secret engagement to Edward Ferrars, knowing full well that Elinor loves him:

“But will you not give me your advice, Miss Dashwood?” Lucy asked. “No,” answered Elinor, with a smile which concealed very agitated feelings, “on such a subject I certainly will not. You know very well that my opinion would have no weight with you, unless it were on the side of your wishes.”

Elinor acquits herself well, but her tact accentuates how risky advice can be. The advisee may present herself as a supplicant but end up an aggressor, demanding and scornful. The adviser may begin as a sage only to end up seeming like a fraud—or, worse, an enemy, ruthlessly opposed to the advisee’s desires.

No wonder most of us prefer to give and receive advice in private, narrowing the potential for humiliation. It requires an appetite for recognition to seek or dispense advice in public, whether in newspaper or magazine columns (“Dear Abby,” “Ask E. Jean”), on TV or radio shows or podcasts (“Dr. Phil,” “Loveline,” “We’re Here to Help”), or on online forums (Mumsnet). In this wider advice industry, opinion circulates between and in front of strangers, who become keen observers of others’ shocking revelations. When advice is delivered at a live event, as with the taping of a television show, these strangers make up an audience, as concretely present to the adviser and advisee as the two are to each other. When advice is delivered over the airwaves or in print, these strangers constitute a public—what the theorist Michael Warner, in his book “Publics and Counterpublics,” describes as a virtual relationship among an indefinite number of people, who remain unknown to one another but are united by shared routines of reading and writing, speaking and listening. To pick up a weekly magazine, like this one, and read an essay, like this, is to be part of a public, along with all of the magazine’s other, invisible readers. By paying attention to words and their circulation, one becomes a member of a group, with a shared identity.

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More than any other genre of public speech, advice brings strangers into scenes of intimate exchange. Adviser and advisee may seem to speak only to each other (often through the veil of anonymity), but their remarks will be oriented to the spectators who can read or hear their words, conferring, as Warner writes, “general social relevance to private thought and life.” These spectators evaluate the adviser and advisees on the basis of their rhetoric and their displays of emotion—in short, the styles by which they transform one person’s secret betrayal or broken promise into an impersonal theatre of moral education. Some spectators eagerly leap into the churn, asking questions, making calls, writing letters to the editor, posting comments online. This activity expands the forum of advice-giving, pulling in more voices and points of view. Advice may feel individual, but it can also be a savagely social pleasure, and it has been so for centuries.

The Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury, a single-page broadsheet wholly dedicated to answering anonymous readers’ questions, first appeared in London in 1691 and was published twice a week until 1697. Mary Beth Norton’s book “‘I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer’: Letters on Love & Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column” (Princeton) collects nearly three hundred specimens of the advice that theAthenian Mercury, as it’s usually known, offered. London was at the time Europe’s largest city, a place where crosscurrents of trade, finance, robbery, and prostitution pulled recently urbanized inhabitants into previously unimaginable relationships with strangers. In the age of print, Hamburg was the birthplace of magazine publishing, and Paris the birthplace of the literary review and the gossip rag; but restless, immoral London was where the advice column first transformed people’s private lives into object lessons for ethical behavior. The anonymity of the modern city gave rise to a distinctly modern form.

The founder of theMercurywas a Londoner named John Dunton. The reports of his contemporaries conjure a wild cross between Don Quixote and Don Draper. Descended from a long line of clergymen, he was apprenticed to a bookseller at fifteen, which seems to have decided his professional fate. He was twice married. After his first wife died, he swiftly wooed his second and celebrated his success by publishing a pamphlet titled “A Defense of a Speedy Marriage after the Death of a Good Wife”; when the second wife left him over a property dispute, he devoted himself to his beloved pet owl, Madge. He was described, in his lifetime and after, as “a Lunatick,” “a pietist and imposter,” “a poor crazed silly fellow,” and a “literary hack, with a thousand maggoty projects crowded into his bursting brain.” No doubt he was an eccentric—shady, shifting, self-enamored, and yet so imbued with a manic energy to create that he proved to be an enterprising and often brilliant publisher. He was apparently the first bookseller to publish in Boston and in Dublin, to use periodicals to advertise books, and to recognize how an advice column might organize a social space for London’s increasingly literate, upwardly mobile populace.

In an autobiography he published in 1705, “The Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of London,” Dunton described theMercuryas “a Question-Project,” one of his many wondrous “Children of the Brain.” He called the letter writers “Querists,” and the respondents “Athenians,” an appellation that, he explained, was intended to “distinguish them from the rest of mankind, whom they styledBarbarians.” Rumor had it that there were twelve Athenians, like the twelve gods who presided over the agora, but in truth there were usually only three: Dunton and his two brothers-in-law, a mathematician and a clergyman. Their civilizing ambition was to answer “all the most nice and curious questions” posed by “the Ingenious of Either Sex” about “Divinity, Poetry, Metaphysicks, Physicks, Mathematicks, History, Love, Politicks, Oeconomicks.” Someone with a question could walk to the Stocks Market, in the heart of London, and deposit a letter at Smith’s Coffeehouse, where the Athenians met to collect queries and discuss which ones to answer. Outside, they would have heard the shouts of butchers, fishmongers, poultrymen, and the people Dunton had recruited—“the honest (Mercurial) women, Mrs. Baldwin, Mrs. Nutt, Mrs. Curtis, Mrs. Mallet”—to hawk copies of theMercury, for a penny apiece.

TheMercuryanswered all manner of queries: “Where was Paradise?” “Why some People love Oyl and hate Olives, and why some love Olives and hate Oyl?” But the chief concern that emerged was courtship and marriage. A browse through the broadsheets reveals how profoundly uncertain the English middling classes were about how to go about getting married and how to behave once they did. Marriage, at the time theMercurywas first published, was largely unregulated. As Norton observes, “Canon law after 1604 nominally insisted that people be married by a clergyman in a church, but requirements for place and time were so restrictive that in practice they were often circumvented.” It was another sixty years before Parliament passed the Marriage Act of 1753, “An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage,” which stipulated where people could marry and who could perform the ceremony. In 1691, it was still perfectly common for a couple to marry by private mutual consent, or to visit one of London’s many cut-rate marriage shops, where a disgraced priest would do the honors cheaply and quickly. The acts and ordinances of Parliament provided no guidance as to, say, how long a woman’s husband had to be lost at sea before she could remarry, or whether mutual consent could dissolve a marriage just as easily as it could make one. The obligations of coupledom remained unclear. So did the norms of courtship—the moral status of promises, oaths, and kisses, for instance, or how to value the love of a good man versus the money of a worse one.

Some questions to theMercuryasked for basic information. “Q.A young woman growing into years wishes to know what she shall do to get her a good husband? A.We answer briefly: go to the colonies.” Others were abstract. “Q.Are most matches in this age made for money? A. Both in this age and in all others.” But many Querists spun stories of longing and woe for the Athenians:

Q.I have heard a young lady make such lamentation for want of a husband that would grieve a heart of marble. She has neither father nor mother, but lives with an old miserly uncle, who will not permit any to court the poor creature, hoping in a little time to make himself master of her fortune, which is very considerable. She is to be disposed as her uncle thinks fit or else not to have one farthing. This poor husbandless young creature would be extremely obliged to you for your advice and discretion.

A. Either this poor compassionable lady must try if she can find any romantic knight of a good fortune, who . . . will take her for better or worse, without the encumbrance of a fortune. Or else they must try to be too cunning for the old fellow and trick him into a consent. Or she must patiently . . . live as merry as she can in her sad circumstances, for it is possible she may outlive her good uncle and possess his estate instead of his swallowing hers.

Q.A gentleman that has been married for several years has lately fallen in love with a young gentlewoman so passionately that he says it’s death for him not to see her. . . . However, she thinks it not a good idea to keep him company and desires your thoughts and advice upon it.

A. He may fall in lust, but in love he cannot, being himself married. Every look with such an irregular desire is in our Savior’s opinion a virtual adultery. . . . Our advice therefore is to all that are in such circumstances and temptations to stop their ears and eyes against these he-sirens.

One finds many typical figures in theMercury’sarchives: an unhappy lady and her wicked guardian; a virtuous gentlewoman and a rake; a man torn between two women, a virgin with a fortune of five hundred pounds and a widow with seven hundred; two friends courting the same lady; gaggles of spurned lovers; and, of course, variously dissatisfied husbands and wives. The Querists provided beginnings and middles for these characters’ stories. The Athenians supplied their ideal ends.

The advice they gave was shaped, above all, by their belief in the sanctity of freely and mutually agreed upon contracts. On the one hand, the Athenians believed that people had to choose whether to enter or exit relationships. Children could not be forced to marry by their parents or coerced by a particularly persistent “spark,” a suitor. On the other, once a contract was entered into willingly, it had to be honored; there could be no lying, no cheating, no nagging one’s husband, no beating one’s wife, and no leaving a marriage simply because one fell in love with a wealthier or more pleasant person. The Athenians wrote endings that were the stuff of realism, not romance. One can hear the mockery in their courtly suggestion to the Querist above that the lady find a “knight of a good fortune.” They imagined themselves as counselling a stubbornly sentimental public, who would bristle at their urging of caution and patience, and at their refusal to affirm love as an amnesiac that loosed lovers from their prior bonds.

What remains delightful about theMercuryis the style in which it addresses this resistant public: its little musings and long digressions; its carefree references to Ovid and Shakespeare; its soft, sympathetic appeals to its female readers; its deprecation of their husbands; and its coy solicitation of the lovelorn, who were encouraged to place ads for husbands or to chastise cruel suitors by showing them answers to questions in theMercury. The convergence of reason and gallantry, of irony and affection, struck a teasing tone. TheMercurymay have made the case for thoughtful commitment, but it made it in the voice of the flirt. One suspects that the Athenians picked letters that allowed them to be playful and seductive, arousing readers’ curiosity about who was giving the advice. “Whether the authors of this Athenian Mercury are not Bachelors, they speak so obligingly of the Fair Sex?” demanded one Querist. This was not a request for advice. It was a come-on: Babe, are you single? Elsewhere, such advances were swiftly shut down. Question: “Would the Athenians . . . make singular good husbands?” Answer: “The surest way to resolve the query is to ask their wives.”

Like giving advice, flirtation is a practice of persuasion. It depends on attracting attention, then regularly renewing it. Flirtation must always feel fresh, or it will feel awkward, desperate. By 1695, theMercury’svoice seemed to falter. The Querists repeated questions. The Athenians wrote shorter, more solemn answers, as if they wanted to install “a professor” in everyone’s head, as Daniel Defoe complained when launching his own Question-Project, “Advice from the Scandal Club,” in 1704. The tension between theMercury’sideas about commitment and its transgressive style had slackened. It started to publish poetry and essays instead of advice. But, like all industrious publishers, Dunton had broader ambitions: to seed new publics for his writing. He produced supplemental book reviews, bound the broadsheets into books, sold subscriptions to coffeehouses, and experimented with spinoffs that addressed more specific publics (theLadies Mercury) or varied the style of the answers (thePoetical Mercury, theDoggerel Mercury). He wrote epistolary novels set in the extendedMercuryuniverse—such as “The Secret Letters of Platonic Courtship between the Athenian Society and the most Ingenious Ladies in the Three Kingdoms”—and promoted them in the paper. By the time theMercuryceased publication, Dunton already had a vision for an advice industry.

In the history of the advice column, one can glimpse the history of what can be said in public, and by whom. As literacy expanded to new social strata, and new periodicals circulated among increasingly diverse publics, what letter writers could divulge and columnists could discuss changed. What could not be divulged was sometimes still expressed, through various styles of discretion. “It has been my misfortune to be seduced into a very great sin,” one Querist explained to the Athenians; Norton suggests that his refusal to name his “very great sin” meant that he may have been referring to either gay sex or an illicit affair.

The advice column’s regulation of sex and sexuality meant that it found a natural home in the emerging women’s pages of eighteenth-century newspapers. By the nineteenth century, it was regularly imagined as a sotto-voce conversation between friends—a single-sex space “to promote true womanhood,” as the New YorkFreeman, a leading African American weekly, boasted. When Edward Bok, the editor ofLadies’ Home Journal, started an advice column called “Side Talks with Girls,” he showed how easily men could ventriloquize women’s decorous rhetoric to discuss courtship and chastity. “When your sweetheart comes to see you, don’t be foolish enough to confine your sweetness to him alone,” the columnist proclaimed. “Have him in where all of the rest of the household are.”

Among the main strategies of discretion was anonymity, which permitted the letter writers to retain some trace of privacy and the columnist to mute aspects of his personal identity. Bok wrote the first two installments of his column under the name Ruth Ashmore, before passing the pseudonymic baton to Isabel Mallon, formerly Bab of “Bab’s Babble,” in the New YorkStar. Ann Landers was born Ruth Crowley and died Eppie Lederer. (Lederer won a contest to become Crowley’s successor in 1955.) Meanwhile, Lederer’s twin sister, Pauline Phillips, who originated the Abby of “Dear Abby,” bequeathed the legal rights to her pen name to her daughter, Jeanne Phillips. The variable readership of advice columns made a clear identity undesirable in an adviser. A columnist could become a pseudonymous celebrity, but the celebrity columnist could only be a disappointment. A friend recently showed me Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s advice column forEbony, which urged its readers to “let the man who led the Montgomery boycott lead you into happier living.” To a woman asking for help with her abusive husband, King wrote, “See if there is anything within your personality that arouses this tyrannical response.” To a boy who confessed to having sexual feelings for other boys, King encouraged him to “see a good psychiatrist.” So much for the arc of their moral universe.

Pseudonyms are still used to mediate between the columnist and her public, inviting certain kinds of letter writers and setting readers’ expectations for the style in which advice will be given. “The Ethicist,” “the Moneyist,” and “the Therapist” substitute an area of expertise for a proper name. Other pseudonyms suggest a charged affective relationship between adviser and advisee.Salon’sMr. Blue offered mocking, no-nonsense advice to the two saddest, most self-pitying creatures in the world: lovers and writers. “Dear Sugar,”Cheryl Strayed’s column forThe Rumpus, honeyed its address to soften its severest judgments: “I don’t mean to be harsh, darling.” “It was no one’s fault, darling, but it’s still on you.” Heather Havrilesky’s “Ask Polly,” which began atThe Awland then migrated toNew York, played the diminutive quality of its pen name off its author’s long, ranting sentences and potty mouth. “You know my column is three thousand words long every week, and half of those words are ‘fuck,’ right?” Havrilesky recalled asking the editor who wanted to poach her fromThe Awl. To encounter a consistent style regularly, over a period of months or years, is to develop an affinity for it, whether it flirts, lectures, insults, or coddles you, whether it imagines its reader as a sad girl or a sad sack.

As publics evolve, columnists may revise the way they address them, and these revisions may enable those publics to further shift or expand. When, in 1991, Dan Savage began an advice column, “Savage Love,” for Seattle’s alt-weeklyThe Stranger, he had readers address him with “Hey, Faggot.” Both the casualness of the greeting and the slur, reclaimed by a gay writer, marked the column as being oriented to a readership whose identity was formed in contrast to the dominant culture. The difference wasn’t in the sexual identities of the letter writers; the first installment featured straight people asking banal questions about how to pursue a crush or break a boyfriend’s Dungeons & Dragons habit. It was a difference in the framing and the tone of the advice. As Savage said in an interview, “The idea was it was going to be a joke advice column that treated straight people with the same contempt for heterosexual sex and revulsion that straight people always treated the idea of gay sex with.” So straights were regularly referred to as “breeders,” and Savage’s answers often involved insulting them. Yet it wasn’t long before his seriously bitchy, but seriously good, advice and its associated vocabulary—he coined the terms “pegging” and “monogamish”—were embraced by the dominant culture. Now the joke was on him; “straight people started responding to me,” Savage observed. In 1999, he retired the “Hey, Faggot” salutation, announcing that he had succeeded in not only reclaiming the slur but in becoming mainstream.

At its prime, “Savage Love” was syndicated in theVillage Voice, in New York; the WashingtonCity Paper, in D.C.;Westword, in Denver;City Pages, in Minneapolis; theWeekly, in San Francisco;Now, in Toronto; and many other newspapers that no longer exist. Most of the beloved advice columnists of the past two decades—Polly, Sugar, Savage—live on as thoroughly multimedia brands. They give advice through books, live events, podcasts, personal websites, and newsletters, cultivating more direct points of contact with their readers and monetizing their advice more efficiently, through subscriptions rather than salaries. Now they sit closer to the advice influencers of TikTok and Instagram, such as @erinmcgoff (“your internet big sis”) and @master.menn (“Advice for the Boys”).

Today, the most interesting digital advice forum may be the subreddit r/AmItheAsshole (AITA). Its creator, Marc Beaulac, started it in 2013, after a workplace dispute; he and his female colleagues had argued about whether he should turn down the office air-conditioning or they should wear sweaters. Beaulac wondered: Had he been an asshole? He started the subreddit to ask the question anonymously and encourage strangers to answer it plainly. Over the next few years, AITA grew into a vibrant virtual community, providing what its home page describes as “catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us.” Its philosophers follow strict protocols. The original poster (OP) describes an interpersonal situation in which he may have behaved unethically; he may ask if it was wrong of him to, say, give away his girlfriend’s cat—he is allergic, she is unsympathetic—or rat out his best friend to a professor for plagiarism. AITA members respond to the OP and to one another, opining, debating, upvoting or downvoting other peoples’ responses, and ultimately pronouncing on the OP’s behavior: YTA (You’re the Asshole), NTA (Not the Asshole), NAH (No Assholes Here), ESH (Everyone Sucks Here).

After years of moderating the page, Beaulac remains impressed by its basic dynamic—that its members expect to retain some privacy while divulging an intimate dilemma and asking millions of strangers to weigh in. How these strangers talk is outlined by the AITA rules and its “Frequently Assed Q’s” page. The first rule, “Be Civil,” elaborates a long list of prohibitions on public speech. Posts must describe both sides of a fraught situation, but they cannot ask members to judge the ethics of breakups, sexual encounters, reproductive choices, or medical conflicts. Responses can include no direct insults (“bitch, douchebag, slut, thot, fatty, bridezilla, feminazi, incel”), no indirect insults (“you are acting like a bitch”), no censored insults (“you b!tch”), no insulting memes or emojis. There can be no taunting, no gloating, no petty spats, no bad-faith judgments, and no asking for nudes. There can be no use of A.I. to generate text. All responses must be specific to the post. They cannot invoke a user’s “broad opinion on trans people, neurodivergent people, religions, political parties, social movements, etc.” Although AITA, strictly speaking, frames its project in terms of judgment rather than counsel—“Do not ask for advice” is one of its rules—the OPs tend to describe their dilemmas with such openness and urgency that respondents give advice without being asked for it. Unsolicited advice might be a misstep between friends or spouses, but it is essential to AITA’s ideal of civility: an intensely dialogic, highly regulated style of writing, produced by and for a public of rational human beings divested of their prurient and political interests.

Implicitly, AITA style stands in opposition to the toxic disinhibition of much of the rest of the internet. Its ideal participant emerges as the antithesis of the troll, whose preferred genres of speech—railing, jeering, baiting—would have been familiar to any late-seventeenth-century reader. “Don’t feed the trolls” is excellent advice in general, but AITA recognizes that the troll is a product of the platforms that refuse to regulate a trollish style of writing. “TikTok, Twitter, FB, etc., don’t follow our rules, and, as such, should not and cannot be cited as measures of enforcement,” the page explains. There is considerable irony, then, in the question “Am I the Asshole?” If you are asking the question here, the answer is already no—not when the internet is full of actual assholes, the insulting, harassing people and bots whom other platforms have elevated to positions of influence.

Of course, not everyone who follows the letter of the law embraces its spirit. Many AITA posts are goofy, immature, or simply unbelievable. (“AITA for being pissed at my parents for taking us to Athens Georgia instead of Athens Greece?”) But there are also some that demonstrate expansive ethical deliberation among people with user names like mooseythings and ilovepancakes134. One night, I spent several hours reading thousands of responses to a 2020 post, “AITA for not letting my husband go to the funeral of the baby he conceived with his Mistress?” The OP wondered how she should handle her unfaithful husband’s request to attend his stillborn child’s funeral, organized by the affair partner—“his Mistress”—and her family:

I don’t think he should attend. He never got to meet this child and wasn’t even there at the hospital when everything happened. If this was a child he knew at all, of course my opinion would be different. But as of now, I don’t feel comfortable with him going. He (bizarrely) said maybe I should go with him. That’s a no. I obviously am not going to attend this funeral and make the woman and her whole family uncomfortable. Despite my disdain for her, I am not going to disrupt her mourning. . . . So I’m at a loss, really.

The shock among AITA readers that this stranger had entrusted them with such a painful and complex question had to be exorcised with humor before moral deliberation could begin. “Holllllllyyyyyyyyy shit Uhhhhh, I think this one is aboveReddit’s paygrade,” the most upvoted comment read. Another commenter agreed: “The last post I looked at was about putting a hat on a fucking cat. Kind of a massive jump in difficulty level.” Although these jokes may seem avoidant, they invited responses that encouraged participation by reflecting on AITA’s distinctive features as a public. “These are the situations we excel in,” a third response insisted. One could find cats in hats anywhere on the internet. Only on AITA could a woman narrate the tragic turn her life had taken and expect comprehension.

The shock also helped calibrate the style of the advice that followed. One way to understand “Holllllllyyyyyyyyy shit” is as a cautionary note: this is difficult, tread carefully. “I feel for both of you, more so than I can even express on this anonymous platform,” one respondent wrote. Another, voting No Assholes Here, added, “I wish you both can find solace.” With judgment quieted, the discussion could turn to the ethics of trust, forgiveness, and mourning, articulating what the wife owed her husband and how to honor his grief, painful though it might be for her. Some believed that he should pay his respects to the dead alone, without attending the funeral. Many more argued that if the woman had been willing to forgive her husband for the affair then she should let him bury his child.

Five years later, the people involved may have moved on. But the exchange, even in its archived form, remains remarkably alive—a careful, considered, sympathetic negotiation of distressing thoughts and feelings. Again and again, I was struck by the kindness of strangers, whoever they were. For them, giving advice was not about offering the betrayed woman a clearer vision of her life. It was a way to help her feel less alone in a world of folly and heartache. ♦

An earlier version of this article misidentified Pauline Phillips’s twin sister.

Tina Johnson never had much. She grew up in the sixties, outside of Gadsden, a hilly city in the green mountains of upper Alabama. Johnson’s mother, Katherine, couldn’t read or write, but she knew how to make money. She would leave the house with ten dollars and come back with a hundred, because she had bought a gallon of paint and painted someone’s house. She worked as an electrician—it was a mystery how she’d got her license—and drove diesel trucks. Sometimes she would go to a local warehouse and collect a truckload of potatoes that had been nicked and wouldn’t sell. She’d store them in the basement with lime on them, and the family would eat potatoes for months. “I don’t want to say it like this, baby, but I’m gonna say it—we were like the Black folks,” Johnson told me recently. “We didn’t have the opportunities that white folks had.”

Johnson was a beautiful girl, with blond hair and radiant blue-green eyes that didn’t seem God-given. And she was scrappy. She helped her mother take care of their hog, cows, and goats. The family grew crops on land they leased: one year they planted green peppers, another year sugarcane. They didn’t have farm equipment, so they cut down the cane themselves, stripped it, and took it to the mill to be turned into syrup, then used the money to go on vacation to Disney World and Yellowstone. Johnson and her siblings didn’t play sports or do extracurricular activities like other kids, so they created their own fun. They went to the lake and made mud pies, climbed trees to gather fruit, and busted open the watermelons that their neighbors grew, to eat the flesh. “We thought that if you ate it in the field, it wasn’t stealing,” Johnson said. (To this day, it’s hard for her to eat watermelon, because she ate so much back then.)

She was used to various men moving in and out of their home. Katherine had run off with a d.j. when she was just twelve years old, the first of five men she would marry. She had three kids with him—Johnson’s older half siblings—before the couple split. Johnson was the result of an affair with a married man who owned a local tractor company. He paid for Katherine’s prenatal care, and when Johnson first came home from the hospital she was dressed in brand-new clothes. But she didn’t know that he existed until she was twelve. The man she considered her dad was named Griffin. His family had lost everything during the Great Depression, and he hid money in milk jugs, couch cushions, and spare tires. “A lot of people call crazy people that’s got money ‘eccentric,’ ” Johnson said. “But if you ain’t got no money you’re crazy. Daddy had a touch of crazy.”

Johnson once found a stack of hundred-dollar bills, and started giving them away at school, until a teacher stopped her. Her mother yelled at her for being reckless, but Katherine herself kept Griffin’s money whenever she found it. And it was Katherine who taught Johnson how to get money out of him, through flattery and passive aggressiveness. “I didn’t like playing those games,” Johnson said. “But Mama knew how to use those men.” When her mother felt that a man was no longer bowing to her needs, she was through with him. That was how Johnson learned to be a woman: she was a pretty girl and had a gold mine between her legs, everyone told her. She should never give it up, but she could use the promise of it to get what she wanted.

When Johnson was about four, her uncle William, Katherine’s brother, started sexually abusing her. He would take her to his darkroom, put her on his lap, and rub between her legs. Johnson thought that this must be the way the photos were developed. It made her feel like dirt, and she ran whenever she saw him. This lasted for a few years. At about the same time, another uncle—Katherine’s brother-in-law Claude—started abusing her as well. He touched her at family gatherings while other children played in the same room. He threatened that if she told anybody about the abuse, he would beat her, and hurt her mother, too. She would later discover that William had also abused her sister Robin, and Claude had molested her niece Michelle.

Back then, sexual abuse wasn’t something that you discussed. “It’s drilled in from birth—you don’t talk about sex at all,” Johnson said. Women weren’t supposed to be powerless anymore, exactly; Katherine owned a rifle and showed her kids how to use a shotgun. But you were still supposed to submit to what a man wanted. And there was no such thing as being violated by a man with means: that was a form of flattery. Johnson could get an education and a job, but pleasing the men in her life would always be the ultimate way of proving her value.

The abuse from Claude stopped only because Johnson got mad. She was washing dishes in the kitchen one day when she was twelve, after a family gathering at her house. Everyone else was outside. As Johnson stood at the sink, her uncle came inside and put his hands on her vagina. She happened to be cleaning a cast-iron skillet, and before she knew what she was doing she hit him over the head with it. Seeing him bleeding, she grew terrified: she thought that her mother was going to beat her to death. “I was more scared about getting a whupping than realizing what I had done,” she said.

Johnson went outside with her head down, nearly shaking. Then her uncle told the group that he had accidentally hit his head. He looked scared. It was the first time she truly understood that what he had been doing to her was wrong. He never touched her again. But the rage stayed with her—over the abuse, and over how powerless she had felt. She just knew that she would never put up with that kind of behavior again.

Family cycles are hard to escape, and Johnson repeated her mother’s pattern. She got her first boyfriend, James, when she was thirteen and he was about seventeen. She agreed to sleep with him when she was sixteen, and got pregnant that first time. The couple married, but she soon filed for divorce. The relationship left her with a son, Daniel.

Johnson briefly married a medical student, but it ended when she had an affair with a carpenter named Earl, whom she later married. He was sweet, though after he got home from work he would drink in his truck, then pass out. That marriage lasted a decade. By then, the couple had two daughters, Ashley and Candelyn. In the past, Johnson had made a little money modelling for department stores. Now she got a job managing a convenience store.

In the years that followed, Johnson lost interest in dating. She was afraid that one of the men she brought home might touch her daughters. If she did have a man over, she made sure the girls were out of the house. It was only after she had young daughters of her own that Johnson realized the abuse she had experienced was not her fault. One day when they were four and five years old, she was watching them watch TV, and it came to her: she hadn’t invited the attention, as she once had feared. “It didn’t register till then,” she said. “I’m thinking, Oh, my God, how could you even think that?” She had heard some people minimize child abuse by saying that at least abusers didn’t kill the children. But they might as well have, Johnson thought, because it stopped them from becoming who they might have been. She used to act out in school, and she struggled with depression. She always felt as if she might fall prey to men looking for victims. “They could spot me a mile off,” she said. “All this had been built up for all these years. And it was a dam ready to bust.”

Then it did. Johnson’s mother had helped raise Daniel. He’d lived at her home on and off, and she doted on him, giving him new shoes and toys. In 1991, when Daniel was twelve, Katherine filed for custody. He wanted to go, so Johnson decided not to fight it.

Johnson and Katherine showed up at the office of a prominent lawyer to transfer custody. His name wasRoy Moore. Johnson could immediately tell what kind of man he was. It was more than the way he was eying her; it was his questions about the ages of her two small daughters and the color of their eyes—if theirs were as pretty as hers. He asked her to get a drink with him afterward, which she declined. Katherine liked that Moore was paying attention to Johnson: he had money and influence. Johnson just wanted to leave.

But when she made her way toward the door, she recalled, walking behind her mother, Moore grabbed her so far up the back of her thighs that she felt his fingers on her vagina. One minute she was simply moving through space, and the next minute a stranger’s hand was on her body. “I didn’t even turn around, I just kept going,” Johnson recalled. For a survivor of sexual violence, another assault “brings all that weight and that torture you went through right back, all raw.” She couldn’t remember much else from the meeting. The only thing that stood out was his hand on her body. “You never forget it,” she said.

For a long time, sexual violence was seen as a part of life—something women were told to avoid, and blamed for when they couldn’t. Police departments often did little to investigate claims. Accusers were humiliated in court. But when the#MeToomovement began, in the twenty-tens, something changed. Powerful men likeHarvey Weinsteinwere accused of serially assaulting women and then actually faced punishment. Women came forward with stories of harassment by prominent journalists and Silicon Valley founders, and the internet took up their cause. Men lost their jobs; some went to prison. “The awareness shifted,” Jennifer Mondino, the senior director of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, told me. “For advocates who had been working on gender-based violence and gender-justice issues, that was very exciting.”

At the height of this moment, in 2017, Johnson was surprised to see Roy Moore’s face on her TV. Moore had become the chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court and then been dismissed from the position after refusing to take down a five-thousand-pound monument of the Ten Commandments that he had had erected in the judicial building. He was now the Republican nominee for an open seat in the U.S. Senate. He appeared in public wearing a cowboy hat and riding a horse named Sassy. He was leading easily in the polls. But Leigh Corfman, a fifty-three-year-old woman who worked at a payday-loan center, had just accused him of sexual misconduct.

Corfman said that Moore had initiated a sexual encounter with her in 1979, when she was fourteen and he was thirty-two. He had approached her outside a courtroom, where she was sitting with her mother, and then taken down her phone number after her mother stepped inside. He later brought her to his home twice, where they were physically intimate. The situation felt both exciting and terrifying to Corfman. Only later did she understand that it had been inappropriate. “I got mad about it again as a grown-ass woman,” Corfman told me. “I realized really what had happened and put it in the proper framework of what it was.”

Corfman didn’t want Moore to be her senator. “I wanted people to know what he had done to me, because it was life-changing,” she said. “He caused great harm to me.” She agreed to speak to a reporter at the WashingtonPost. “I called both my children and told them that I had been approached by a writer from theWaPo—and they were, like, ‘What’s that?’ ” she said, laughing. When Moore had run for chief justice, she had considered saying something, but her children had been young, and they were afraid of being ostracized at school. Now they were adults, and encouraged her to speak out.

After hearing Corfman’s story, Johnson also felt compelled to do something. “At first I tried to ignore it,” she recalled. But locals “were getting on national television and saying this girl deserved it, that she shouldn’t have been there. That we were marrying people at fourteen back then. They were, like, ‘Oh, she’s lying.’ Then they started trying to put Roy Moore and her up to Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ! Saying that Mary was a teen-ager when she got impregnated with Jesus. And I’m thinking, These people are willingly ignorant.” She decided she had to support Corfman: “I just wanted someone to know that she wasn’t lying.”

She e-mailed a reporter at the news site AL.com who had written about Corfman’s accusation, and related her own experience. “Once AL.com posted, it just went wild,” Johnson recalled. The press staked out her lawn. Johnson flew to New York to appear on Megyn Kelly’s show. (She refused to do “The View.” “It wasn’t a good platform, ’cause they like to argue too much,” she told me.)

Soon, other women came forward. Beverly Young Nelson accused Moore of sexually assaulting her when she was a sixteen-year-old waitress and he was the deputy district attorney of Etowah County. After offering to drive her home from the restaurant one night, Nelson said, Moore parked his car next to a dumpster and began groping her; when she attempted to escape, he locked her door and tried to force her to perform oral sex on him. “I was terrified. . . . I thought he was going to rape me,” Nelson said at a press conference. Gena Richardson was working at a mall in Gadsden around her eighteenth birthday when, she said, Moore invited her to a movie; he then forced her to kiss him in his car in a way that “scared” her. (Moore was reportedly banned from the mall around that time for bothering young girls.) Becky Gray said that she endured multiple unwanted advances from Moore when she was twenty-two and working at the mall. Gloria Thacker Deason said that she had dated Moore, who was thirty-two, when she was eighteen. According to Debbie Wesson Gibson, Moore asked her out after speaking at her high-school civics class, when she was seventeen and he was thirty-four; they went on a few dates and kissed. Wendy Miller said that she was sixteen when Moore first asked her out, but her mother wouldn’t allow her to go.

Moore declined to comment for this piece, due to pending litigation. But he has denied Corfman’s allegations. “I don’t know Ms. Corfman from anybody. I never talked to her, never had any contact with her. The allegations of sexual misconduct with her are completely false,” Moore said on Sean Hannity’s radio show. “I believe they’re politically motivated.” He has also denied the other women’s stories, including Johnson’s. “I did not date underaged women,” he told a podcast called the Voice of Alabama Politics. “I did not molest anyone. And so these allegations are false.”

Watching the broader #MeToo movement, the women came to feel that they were part of a greater force for justice. “I was scared to damn death when we started this thing,” Corfman told me. “But, as it went on, I gained conviction in what I was doing.” Johnson received encouraging messages from around the world. Corfman was named inTime’s“Person of the Year” issue. The women became friendly, exchanging calls and once going out for dinner. Moore still looked invincible in the polls. No Democrat had won a Senate seat in Alabama in twenty-five years. But, when the election came around, he lost. It seemed as if some kind of justice had prevailed.

The first time Johnson and I met was at her house in a pleasant, mountainside neighborhood in Gadsden. Now in her sixties, Johnson is still beautiful, with frosted blond hair. She and I had spoken briefly on the phone. But when she opened the door she seemed stiff and nervous. As I followed her into the kitchen for a glass of water, I wondered if she was surprised that I was Black; all she knew about me at that point was that I worked atThe New Yorker. In Alabama, my home state, people from different racial groups don’t often spend time in one another’s houses unless they are well acquainted. We sat down on her couch, and I tried to get her to relax by asking about her current husband, Morris. She showed me some photos. Johnson’s husband was Black; so were her stepchildren. She was ill at ease, I realized, because I was a stranger in her house. Her husband is stingy, she told me apologetically, and makes her reuse their red plastic cups and Styrofoam plates.

After Moore lost the election, resentment over the results grew. In 2018, the same day that Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, was being sworn in to office, Johnson’s house in Gadsden burned down. The night before the fire, her neighbor’s dog was going crazy. Johnson got up three times to turn on the floodlights and see if someone was out on the lawn. “There was something out there,” she said. She was not supposed to report to work the next morning, but she went in at the last minute. At about 9A.M., she got a phone call saying that her home was aflame.

Johnson and Morris moved into a motel room while they looked for a place. They had lost everything. Potential landlords were wary once they found out who Johnson was, but the couple eventually found a house owned by a man who said he couldn’t stand Moore. A female tech executive in San Francisco started a GoFundMe campaign for Johnson, and they rented the new place with the donations. But they were still paying down the mortgage on the burned house, and had more than twenty thousand dollars in credit-card debt. “I was numb,” Johnson said. “For weeks, I didn’t eat.” The county sheriff’s office detained a suspect on the day of the fire, but he was later released. An arson task force announced that the incident had nothing to do with Moore, upsetting Johnson. It then said that the investigation into the cause was inconclusive. The blaze could have been purposely started using ignitable liquids that were found in the debris, but the task force couldn’t rule out the possibility that it was started by a heater in the laundry room.

Johnson no longer felt comfortable being out in public. Once, when she was getting her car serviced, she overheard a group of people in the auto-shop waiting room saying that the women accusing Moore had been lying. “And I’m sitting right there! And they don’t even know who I am,” Johnson said. “I was, like, ‘Oh, Lord Jesus, have mercy.’ ” She got up and walked outside.

She didn’t feel welcome at church, either. Normally, when congregants went up to the altar at church to pray, the elders joined and put their hands on them. They no longer did this for Johnson. People seemed cold. Eventually, she and Morris stopped going. “I miss it, but it wasn’t the same,” she said. “People didn’t hug me that hugged me before. It’s like a wall’s built up. It ain’t my imagination, neither.” Johnson wasn’t especially religious, but going to church had given her a sense of belonging. “The Lord meant for me not to be there,” she said. “That’s the way I look at it.”

Moore’s other accusers faced similar treatment. Nelson, the former waitress, had produced a note that Moore left in her high-school yearbook, signed “Love, Roy Moore DA,” as evidence of their entanglement. But she eventually admitted that she had written the date and location under the note at a later time, to better remember the relationship. People started saying that she had made up the whole story, and her young children received threatening notes. “I’m scared to go anywhere,” she said at the time. “Shopping, I have to take someone with me.” A man yelled in Corfman’s face at a restaurant before being told to leave. She received death threats, and threats of sexual violence, so she began carrying a pistol. “I’m a big girl, so I wear big clothes that are flowing,” she told me. “You couldn’t tell I had a .38 shoved down the back of my britches.” She no longer felt safe being in crowds, and found herself scanning rooms for the exits.

In May, 2019, on her birthday, Corfman had lunch with her daughter. Afterward, she drove home in her thirty-year-old Corvette with the top down. On the road in front of her house, she said, a pickup truck swerved into her lane and started racing toward her. She would never be certain of the driver’s motivations, but she believed that she was being targeted. “I had the option of either running underneath the truck and being decapitated or going to the other side of the road,” she said. Instead, she swerved to the right, trying to reach a roadside trail. But her car caught on a rock and flipped, and she landed upside down in a ravine.

She hung there by her seat belt for four hours, in and out of consciousness, before some neighbors found her. She had broken her neck and back, gotten a black eye and contusions on her head, and her cheekbones were fractured. But when the police filed the accident report, she told me, the officers said that they didn’t believe another driver had run her off the road. (The police department toldThe New Yorker, “There was no evidence indicating any other vehicles were involved.”) The officers, she said, suggested that she might have crashed because she was under the influence of alcohol. (She had had a few beers at lunch.) She recovered at her mother’s house for more than five months. “When they found me, they thought I was dead, and I was really close,” she recalled.

Moore had been publicly attacking Corfman. “He called me everything in the thesaurus that’s under ‘liar,’ ” she said. In 2018, she filed a defamation lawsuit to make him stop. “What I wanted was an apology, recognition in a public way that he did what I said he did,” she explained. Moore retaliated with his own defamation suit against her. Then he sued three of the other women, including Johnson, demanding damages. Journalists began calling Johnson’s house at all hours. She and two of her grandkids went to Florida, where her sister lived, to escape for a while. The next year, Moore announced that he was again running for the Senate. He ultimately lost, but Johnson couldn’t believe that his comeback had even seemed possible.

The backlash had begun. The #MeToo movement had created a sense of immense possibility for survivors of sexual violence. But, in time, that sense seemed to fade. Accusers, let down by the justice system, had turned to anonymous Instagram accounts, Excel spreadsheets, and Twitter threads. But these extrajudicial processes failed to offer due process to the accused. Al Franken was forced to resign from the Senate after accusations of sexual misconduct, and he apologized, but many of his colleagues later expressed regret that his case had not been independently investigated. The author Junot Díaz was culturally blacklisted over accusations that he had behaved inappropriately toward female writers, but a review commissioned by the Pulitzer Prize Board found no evidence of wrongdoing. The comedian Aziz Ansari was censured and mocked after an article came out depicting him pressuring a woman to have sex with him on a date. (Ansari said in a statement that he thought the interaction had been “completely consensual.”) A general fatigue with “cancellation” took hold, and conservative media outlets and politicians weaponized this weariness against the movement. The podcaster Joe Rogan recently said that he was “on Harvey Weinstein’s side”: “He would make deals with ladies, like ‘Suck my dick and I’ll get you an Oscar.’ . . . If this had happened in the eighties, they probably would have thrown it out. But in the #MeToo movement, it was a hot witch hunt.”

Men found ways of pushing back against their accusers. In 2018, the actress Amber Heard wrote an op-ed saying that she was a survivor of abuse. Her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, denied abusing her, and filed a defamation suit. The trial, which was live-streamed, became a media circus. Right-wing outlets framed Heard’s allegations as part of a larger assault on men. Memes circulated on social media, amplified by bots, mocking Heard for crying in court and calling her crazy. #JusticeForJohnnyDepp trended globally on social media. (One post read, “Who wants to join me in my expedition to brutally murder Amber Heard.”) So did #AmberHeardIsALiar and #AmberHeardIsAPsycho. Her personal information, and that of her family and friends, was leaked on online forums. In the end, the court determined that Heard and Depp had defamed each other, but Heard was ordered to pay a larger amount. “I defended my truth and in doing so my life as I knew it was destroyed,” she wrote on Instagram. The musician Marilyn Manson sued the actress Evan Rachel Wood, his ex-fiancée, for defamation after she accused him of drugging and raping her during a music-video shoot. He denied wrongdoing and claimed that she was seeking attention and trying to smear him. She soon became the target of online harassment. Manson eventually dropped the suit and agreed to pay Wood’s legal fees. But Wood told a podcast, “To have to go back there over and over again, to be publicly gaslit on a large scale or even a small scale, it’s very, very re-traumatizing.”

Jessica Ramey Stender, the policy director at the nonprofit Equal Rights Advocates, told me, “We were seeing this disturbing pattern emerge: as more survivors came forward, the perpetrators who harmed them were using retaliatory defamation lawsuits to threaten them.” The plaintiffs in such suits didn’t have to win for the efforts to be successful. Powerful men often have more resources to wage legal battles than their accusers. And the suits allowed them to cloud public opinion about even the most verifiable claims. “These retaliatory lawsuits were designed to drain survivors of financial resources, re-traumatize them through lengthy proceedings, and really intimidate them into silence,” Stender said. Some men had the means to hire private investigators to find incriminating information on survivors, to deploy media campaigns designed by public-relations firms, and to mobilize their online followers. In the nineties, Jennifer Freyd, an expert on the psychology of sexual violence, developed a model calledDARVOto explain the ways perpetrators deflect blame: “Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.” “It’s an aggressive denial, usually attacking a person’s credibility,” she told me. “Trump is really good at it.”

Such campaigns can have a chilling effect. Stender has worked with college students and corporate employees who have filed complaints against abusers. Several faced retaliatory lawsuits, couldn’t pay for lawyers, and withdrew their claims. Stender put me in touch with Jess Miers, who, while attending law school at Santa Clara University, filed a sexual-assault complaint against another student. (He denied the allegation.) He sued her, even though she had dropped the complaint by then, and she had to hire lawyers. (The suit was eventually dismissed.) “Once litigation has been brought, for folks who are supporting you, are advocating for you, it becomes a lot more real for them,” Miers, now a law professor at the University of Akron, said. “They take a step back.”

Today,Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by roughly two dozen women and found liable for sexual abuse in one instance, is once again President. The former New York governorAndrew Cuomo, who, according to a Department of Justice investigation, sexually harassed thirteen women, is running for mayor of New York City, and seems likely to win. (Both men have denied wrongdoing in all cases.) Many women have been left feeling betrayed by a public that encouraged them to share their stories. The actress Chloe Dykstra accused the comedian Chris Hardwick of emotional and sexual abuse, and initially enjoyed public support. (He denied the allegations.) “Then the tide kind of shifted,” she said. “I was attacked relentlessly.”Christine Blasey Ford, the Stanford psychology professor who accused the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, has faced harassment and death threats, and has at times had to move her family into a hotel for security. (Kavanaugh, who was later confirmed, denied wrongdoing.) In an interview last year, she said, “If I had known, I don’t think I would have jumped off the diving board.”

In 2017, Pamela Lopez, a lobbyist in California, said that the Democratic assemblyman Matt Dababneh had pushed her into a bathroom, masturbated in front of her, and demanded that she touch him. “It was terrifying,” she told me. “I was afraid that he might try to rape me.” Dababneh denied that the incident had happened, but was forced to resign. The following year, he sued Lopez for defamation and emotional distress. “I want my reputation back,” he said. Lopez had just had a baby, and the emotional toll of the lawsuit was intense. “All sorts of crazy rumors” about her sex life circulated through the state capitol, she said. “His strategy was to discredit and destroy me.” She had panic attacks. A court finally ruled in her favor in late 2021, but the damage was lasting. “It was a terrible, very public, and very humiliating experience,” she said. “I had to bravely stand up for myself.”

In 2021, a lawyer named Elyse Dorsey accused a law professor at George Mason University, Joshua Wright, of initiating a sexual relationship with her while she was a student. Wright resigned two years later, after a university investigation found that he had slept with five students and made advances to two others. He then filed a defamation suit against Dorsey and another former student, seeking more than a hundred million dollars in damages. She had to take several months’ leave from work, and went to a residential program for trauma recovery. In the end, she settled with Wright to avoid accumulating even more legal expenses, paying him three hundred thousand dollars, which was covered by insurance. (Wright said in a statement, “The evidence has made it undeniably clear that the relationships in question were consensual from the start.”) “It felt really gross,” Dorsey said. “To watch the justice system be perverted and weaponized against me like this was so disheartening.”

The second time that I visited Johnson, we talked in her back yard. “Baby,” she would begin a sentence. “You just don’t know,” she would end it. She had been gardening and spending time with a new grandchild. But she was unnerved by the growing resentment toward #MeToo. She thought that Trump was unfit for office. But even her husband liked some of the things the President had done. She had never voted in a Presidential election; she had never felt that it would make a difference. She was beginning to feel differently now.

“I’m fine,” she told me, sighing. She wasn’t fine. She felt that people in town were giving her hard looks. “I had real bad anxiety, nightmares, and always looking over my shoulders,” she said. “It’s just too much.” Once, when she was grocery shopping with one of her daughters, a woman came up to them. Johnson’s daughter was sure that the woman was going to say something rude. But the woman thanked Johnson. She said that she believed her and thought she was brave for coming forward.

Leigh Corfman told me that she had become a “hermit” in the years since making her accusations. “What I’m doing right now is rebuilding me,” she said. “It changed my life. It changed my physicality.” She had severe back pain, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia, and was convinced that the stress surrounding the events had contributed to her ailments. Since her car accident, she was unable to stand long enough even to wash the dishes. She couldn’t work and was living on food stamps. Corfman felt disappointed. “I would have thought there would be follow-up at some point,” she said. “It’s like, once the men started complaining andMAGAgot involved, we can’t talk about this anymore. This has to be swept under the rug.”

Corfman’s legal proceedings took about four years. Once, while on the stand, she pointed to Moore and said that he knew what had happened; he mouthed back to her, “You fucking bitch.” His lawyer described her as a “whore” and a “liar,” and argued that putting your hand in someone’s bra, as she said Moore had done to her when she was fourteen, wasn’t a big deal. In the end, the judge found that no defamation occurred on either side in the case. She was disappointed that Moore wasn’t held accountable. “It was a letdown,” she said. “I think I was very naïve.” Some of Moore’s legal efforts have been more successful. In 2018, he sued a Democratic-alignedPACfor running an ad describing some of his alleged misbehavior, and a jury ruled in his favor, awarding him eight million dollars. (The case is currently being appealed.)

Moore’s suit against Johnson and two other accusers is ongoing. She has hired a lawyer, but has no idea how she is going to pay him. She feels abandoned. “The women that come out—once you come out, it’s all great, but then it’s, like, Who cares?” she said. “I still need you! I need the support. Don’t leave me now!”

Johnson regretted making her story public in the first place. “I have been through hell, you hear me?” she said. “There’s no way in hell I’d go through this again. People shun me like I’m the plague. It’s very hurtful.” But, when I asked her if she ever thought of leaving Alabama, she didn’t stop to think: “My mother instilled in us that you can push me home, but that’s as far as you can push me.” She wasn’t going to be forced out of her town. “You fight,” she said. ♦

This is drawn from “Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama.”

On March 27th, Sahil Lavingia walked into the Secretary of War Suite, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, to attend an all-hands meeting of the Department of Government Efficiency. Lavingia had been aDOGEemployee for two weeks, part of a small team embedded at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So far, it had been an unexpectedly isolating experience. Lavingia communicated over the messaging app Signal with another member of the V.A.’sDOGEteam, but there didn’t seem to be a Signal channel where he could interact with the rest ofDOGE. Instead, Lavingia would watch Elon Musk, who led the initiative, engage with his allies on X. Lavingia told me, “You’d see where the dolphins were swimming—like, now we’re looking at D.E.I. contracts—and so you’d swim there, too.”

Before coming to Washington, Lavingia lived in New York, where he worked at Gumroad, an e-commerce site that he’d founded more than a decade earlier. He wasn’t really aMAGAguy, but he had always thought it would be interesting to work in government, and he admired Musk. In October, at a tech meetup at the New York offices of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Lavingia talked with someone who later introduced him to aDOGEstaffer. The staffer put him in touch with aDOGEengineer, who connected him with aDOGErecruiter. The calls didn’t last much longer than five minutes. “All the questions were about ‘When can you move to D.C.?’ ” Lavingia said. Eventually, Lavingia told me, he talked to Steve Davis, the president of Musk’s Boring Company, who asked if Lavingia could code. Yes, Lavingia said. A few weeks later, he got a text: a job had opened up at the V.A. “I felt like, O.K., finally, that’s some information,” Lavingia said. He started in mid-March, making an hourly wage of about thirteen dollars.

President Donald Trump formally createdDOGEby executive order on his first day in office, rebranding what had been the United States Digital Service, a kind of internal tech consultancy for the federal government. Musk’s allies quickly staffed it: Davis, who had helped Musk overhaul Twitter, effectively became C.O.O., and Chris Young, a Republican political operative who had led Musk’s superPAC, became a senior adviser. On February 2nd,Wiredidentified six young computer engineers, all in their late teens or early twenties, who were working forDOGE. The young coders, collectively dubbed the “DOGEkids,” had set up shop at the Office of Personnel Management and at the General Services Administration, where, according toPolitico, some of them appeared to be living, having furnished four rooms withIKEAbeds. That cinched the cultural image.DOGEwas the tech industry’s outpost in government, the department that would move fast and break things.

Initially, it was hard to know how seriously to take the new venture, whose name derived from a meme coin. A senior figure at a conservative think tank predicted to me thatDOGEwould yield nothing more than a government report that would get stuffed away in a drawer. ButDOGEstaffers were soon identifying contracts to cancel and employees to let go. On January 28th, the Office of Personnel Management sent most federal employees an e-mail titled “Fork in the Road,” which warned of involuntary downsizing to come and offered them the chance to resign with eight months of pay and benefits. (Musk had sent Twitter employees an e-mail with nearly the same subject shortly after he bought the social-media company, which he rebranded as X.) Those who stayed in their jobs were soon required to document, at the end of each week, five things that they had worked on. A series of lawsuits accumulated inDOGE’s wake, but its actions seemed to be producing results. At the end of March, theTimesestimated that the federal government had potentially been cut by twelve per cent.

Lavingia and other members of theDOGEteam at the V.A. had prepared a list of accomplishments to present at the all-hands meeting. There were about fifty people in the room at the Secretary of War Suite, a surprisingly small number, Lavingia thought, if this was all ofDOGE. When Musk walked in, he asked attendees to share their recent victories, and pontificated about how broken the government was. “It was this very surreal scene,” Lavingia said. He tried to engage Musk in a conversation about a project, but “everyone looked at me like I was weird, like, ‘Why are you trying to get feedback from your boss?’ ” At one point, someone asked how many I.T. workers there were at the I.R.S. It turned out to be more than seven thousand. (The agency has a total of around a hundred thousand employees.) A member ofDOGE’s I.R.S. team said that he thought the tax agency needed an “exorcist.” “Elon was, like, ‘Wait, seriously?’ ” Lavingia recalled. After a few hours, Lavingia left, disappointed. “It’s almost like this is one of the things you get for working atDOGE,” he said. “You get to hang out with Elon once in a while.”

Lavingia had already grown skeptical of the effort. At the V.A., he’d initially planned to update what he’d been told was an outmoded and fragmented human-resources system, but it seemed to be working just fine. “DOGEnever had an information flow that was, like, ‘Hey, Elon wants us to do this,’ ” Lavingia said. “You’re asked to give a lot, but you don’t get any access to information.” In April, he returned to New York, working remotely on improving the V.A.’s internal chatbot, VA GPT. In early May, he gave an interview that was published inFast Company, in which he said of the government, “It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” Not long after that, his access to the V.A. systems was cut off; he was fired.

Later that month, Musk announced that he, too, was leavingDOGE, after a run in which he had impressively stretched the definition of what a “special adviser” to the President could do. In Trump’s White House, with its long red ties and compulsory praise circles, Musk wore novelty T-shirts and baseball caps, and attended meetings with his four-year old son, X, whom Trump pronounced “a high-I.Q. individual.” He installed a Starlink satellite system on the White House roof, and sold Trump a red Tesla on the White House lawn. Trump obligingly climbed into the driver’s seat and assessed the car’s interior. “Everything’s computer,” the President observed.

At Musk’s sendoff in the Oval Office, Trump presented him with an oversized White House key and said that his work onDOGEhad “been without comparison in modern history.” But the relationship between the two men, always transactional, had turned into a bad deal for both of them. DOGE had achieved far fewer savings than Musk had anticipated, leaving Trump backing a budget bill that would add trillions to the deficit. Musk’s work for Trump, meanwhile, had alienated liberals and centrists, tanking Tesla’s sales and stock price. In the Oval Office, Musk had a black eye, which he said he’d got after his son hit him in the face. A reporter asked him about a recentTimesstory alleging that he had used ketamine and other drugs extensively on the campaign trail. Musk said, “Let’s move on.”

Within days, Trump announced that he was withdrawing the nomination of Jared Isaacman, Musk’s business associate, to runNASA, after “a thorough review of prior associations.” Musk called the Republican budget bill a “disgusting abomination,” and later started a poll on X asking if it was time to start a new political party. Trump seemed to take this personally, posting that the easiest way to save money in his budget bill would be to “terminate” the “Billions and Billions of Dollars” in government subsidies that Musk’s companies received. “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ ” the President wrote. “I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” Musk responded, “Such an obvious lie. So sad.”

For a few hours on June 5th, the President and the world’s richest man went back and forth, until the fight landed on the subject of many rabid internet disputes—the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Time to drop the really big bomb,” Musk wrote. “@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” (Trump addressed the claim, telling NBC that he was “not at all friendly” with Epstein.)

At that point, many of the most experienced and talented government workers had left their jobs. Those who remained were often forced to pare back the mission and the scope of their work. Jacob Leibenluft, a senior Biden official, told me, “WhatDOGEhas done, what the Administration has done, is cause a remarkable exodus of talent—of people who have built years and years of knowledge that is critical to the government functioning and who would, under normal circumstances, pass that knowledge on to the next generation of civil servants.”

Lavingia thought that the rupture between Musk and Trump had probably marooned many of the remainingDOGEemployees, too, some of whom are still embedded in agencies throughout the federal government. It was also possible, Lavingia told me, thatDOGE’s strength and its weakness had the same source. He’d seen from the inside thatDOGEhad no real internal structure. “At the end of the day,” he said, “DOGEis just Elon.”

Dawn on the Potomac River: rowers, joggers, a quickening column of jets descending toward the runways at Reagan National. Culs-de-sac empty; park-and-ride lots fill; the Beltway clogs hellishly. The federal government is everywhere. It is downtown, in the marble buildings near the White House, a sort of nineteenth-century visual trick to lend the appearance of Greco-Roman permanence to what remains a somewhat tenuous political project. But it is also in the Baltimore suburb of Woodlawn, where ten thousand people work at the Social Security Administration’s headquarters; on the brick campus of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda; and in the sprawl of the defense contractors out toward Dulles. This is not the political D.C., but the projects are vast. I recently asked a former senior official at the S.S.A. if she’d been worried when Trump won. “Not really,” she said. “My focus was on the solvency crisis.”

Conservatives tend to inveigh against the federal apparatus in Washington; liberals mostly defend it. But the operations of government reflect both Republican and Democratic ambitions. Paul Light, a scholar of public service at N.Y.U.’s Wagner School, has estimated that federal contractors outnumber civil servants by two to one. Elaine Kamarck, of the Brookings Institution, has found that the majority of federal employees now work in security-related fields—thirty-six per cent of them at the Department of Defense alone. For the most part, the U.S. government is organized not to pursue transformative change but to create systems of accountability, and the growth of its expenditures is mostly tied to the sheer scale of what it is keeping tabs on. Federal spending has quintupled since the mid-sixties, adjusting for inflation, to about seven trillion dollars a year. The number of federal workers has basically stayed flat.

People cheat the federal government all the time, in all kinds of ways. Waste exists at every level. In 2011, Boeing was found to have been grossly overcharging the Army for spare helicopter parts; a four-cent metal pin, for example, was billed at $71.01. In 2020, Harvard returned $1.3 million to the Department of Health and Human Services after a public-health professor allegedly overstated how much time she’d spent working on an overseasAIDS-relief grant. Jetson Leder-Luis, a professor at Boston University who studies health-care fraud, told me that, within Medicare and Medicaid, “you get everything from doctors reclassifying procedures to, like, organized crime.”

Leder-Luis likes to cite a study that he and some colleagues conducted on fraudulent billing for dialysis transportation. Medicare has long reimbursed patients too sick to get to dialysis on their own for the cost of ambulance rides. But some unscrupulous actors (Leder-Luis thinks they were mobsters in Philadelphia) realized that it was possible to pay kickbacks to relatively healthy dialysis patients for ambulance rides they didn’t need. Word spread; between 2003 and 2017, Leder-Luis and his colleagues estimated, Medicare spent around five billion dollars on fraudulent ambulance rides. “The F.B.I. has videos of some patients walking in and out of ambulances,” Leder-Luis told me. Dialysis costs make up roughly one per cent of the federal budget. If there was that much fraud in dialysis transportation, Leder-Luis said, imagine how much there is across the entire public sector.

In recent years, wonks in both parties have begun to focus on government inefficiency as a problem. On the center left, the so-called abundance movement calls for a thinning of regulation, to allow the country to more easily create housing and clean energy. On the Trumpist right, the prevailing view is that the government has been overtaken by left-wing ideologues and the only solution is to clear-cut the bureaucracy. Trump spent the campaign promising to purge the federal government of wokeism; his advisers were committed enemies of foreign aid, consumer protection, and the Department of Education. Project 2025, a nine-hundred-page playbook for a conservative President to “dismantle the administrative state,” called the independence of the bureaucracy an “unconstitutional fairy tale.”

The last major campaign to remake the Washington bureaucracy was championed by Vice-President Al Gore, during the Clinton Administration, and developed under the name Reinventing Government. The idea was to bring the public sector up to date with the internet. Kamarck, of the Brookings Institution, was its lead staff member. She leveraged the government’s own expertise: teams of civil servants from other departments were embedded with each agency to streamline and improve its processes. Eventually, the Clinton White House got Congress to pass more than eighty separate laws related to the Reinventing Government initiative. “If you want these changes to be permanent,” Kamarck told me, “the only way to do it is to get them in law.”

DOGEwas conceived in something like the opposite fashion. In the spring of 2023, Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who had recently launched a bid for the Republican Presidential nomination, invited a New York lawyer named Philip Howard to meet with him at his campaign headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. Since the nineties, Howard has been a guru for business leaders interested in civil-service reform. Ramaswamy wanted to test out some ideas for remaking the federal bureaucracy. As the meeting progressed, Howard had the sense of an “over-intelligent mind spinning into some new theory that creates a new reality that’s not actually connected to reality.” At one point, he recalled, “Vivek was saying, ‘I think the President can really shut down agencies.’ I said, ‘You know, Congress establishes an agency. Do you really think the President can just . . .’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes, yes, it’s fine.’ ” Howard later told one of Ramaswamy’s advisers, “I really don’t think Vivek should go public with this, because it’s just not credible.”

A week after the election, Trump announced in a formal statement that “the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency.” Initially, the two co-chairs seemed poised to occupy separate spheres. Ramaswamy would spearhead a deregulation effort; Musk would focus on cost cutting. In a joint op-ed in theWall Street Journal, they said that they would work closely with the Office of Management and Budget, which is often described as the federal government’s central nervous system. Before the election, Ramaswamy suggested in an interview that the White House could simply fire all nonpolitical appointees whose Social Security numbers began with an even digit or ended with an odd digit. “Boom, that’s a seventy-five-per-cent reduction,” he said. A month later, Musk was asked how much moneyDOGEmight save taxpayers. “I think we can do at least two trillion,” he said.

But during the transition Ramaswamy and Musk increasingly disagreed about how to make the government more efficient. Ramaswamy, who had apparently come around to the fact that significant cuts would require an act of Congress, began meeting regularly with a small group of legislators. Musk mostly did not attend. A source close toDOGEtold me that Musk seemed to regard members of Congress as irrelevant, sometimes referring to them as “N.P.C.s,”—non-player characters—the often mute and nameless figures who populate the backgrounds of video games.

Musk was more interested in cutting spending via the executive branch, and spoke often, according to the source close toDOGE, of a need to “control the computers.” In meetings, Ramaswamy resorted to using metaphors from the tech world to emphasize the importance of deregulation, calling the government’s rules “the matrix” and insisting thatDOGEneeded to rewrite its source code. Musk was unmoved.

On the eve of the Inauguration, CBS News quoted a White House insider saying, “Vivek has worn out his welcome.” The following day, Ramaswamy leftDOGE. Musk, in the faintly stuffy office he inherited in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, reportedly installed a large-screen TV, so that he could play video games; he sometimes slept there. A prominent conservative told me that, online, people were devising ways to influence Musk’s efforts. “You do it by tweeting at Elon and sucking up to him,” he said. “He’s like a prism, and all of social media kind of feeds to him through X.” The trouble, he said, was that “Elon goes on these destiny quests, sometimes looking for something that isn’t there, and then a lot of the government is on a destiny quest.”

Danny Werfel spent much of his career in the federal government. He worked as a policy analyst in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and as controller at the Office of Management and Budget. Most recently, as Biden’s commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, he was given the rare opportunity to not only run the government but also change it. Congress had pledged eighty billion dollars over ten years to modernize the I.R.S. and bring its collection of taxes up to par with the efforts to evade them. Werfel had expanded the agency’s Large Business and International Division, its enforcement efforts targeting cryptocurrency and high-net-worth individuals, and its investments in artificial intelligence and other technologies. As late as December, 2024, he was still hiring the next generation of civil servants. At the I.R.S.’s annual holiday party, employees were invited to have their photo taken with him; one young man, after the camera clicked, said, “Thank you, Coach!” He was a new hire, right out of college. A decade earlier, he and Werfel’s son had played in the same northern-Virginia Little League. His father, it turned out, also worked at the I.R.S.

After Trump won, Werfel “wasn’t a hundred per cent sure” that the new Administration would continue the I.R.S.’s modernization efforts, but he tried to engage with it in good faith. In early January, representatives from Trump’s transition team andDOGEmet with I.R.S. leaders over Zoom to discuss the handover of power. Werfel’s team had rehearsed the scenario, fine-tuning the language that they planned to use. “We said, ‘Look, we know you have a remit for shrinking government from a people standpoint,’ ” Werfel recalled. “ ‘Do we have that right?’ And they didn’t argue—they agreed. We said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could do that and also improve or maintain the performance of the I.R.S., and its collections?’ And it was, like, ‘O.K., we’re listening.’ ”

Werfel promised the Trump officials that, with a little patience, the I.R.S. could employ fewer federal workers and bring in more revenue. The more effective tax regime that Werfel had been building was not just funded; it was half assembled, like the Death Star. He urged the Administration to give it time to become fully operational. “Think of it as spans across a stream,” Werfel said. “Some of the spans are complete, and you can drive across and automate. Some of them are only halfway complete, so you can’t drive until you finish the span, and some of them you need to build before you begin.” Werfel proposed that the Trump Administration commit to reducing the agency’s personnel in the course of two to four years, and that it “modernize strategically,” to insure that fewer people didn’t mean less revenue or worse service. “That was our pitch,” Werfel said. “It resonated in the moment.”

Hours after being sworn in, Trump signed twenty-six executive orders, restoring the federal death penalty, withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization, placing a ninety-day pause on foreign aid, and eliminating diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs across the federal government. The executive order establishingDOGEseemed, by comparison, to describe a humble purpose: “to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Musk, though a frequent presence in the West Wing, was technically an unpaid adviser.

One area of focus for both Musk and the Administration was eradicating what the Tesla founder called the “woke mind virus.”DOGEsoon boasted of cutting more than a billion dollars in D.E.I. contracts. But what, exactly, qualified as a D.E.I. program was open to interpretation. At Social Security headquarters, civil servants were directed to scrub mentions of “diversity” and “equity” from grants, publications, and performance evaluations. Laura Haltzel, who was the associate commissioner for the Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics, told me, “It was, like, ‘O.K., this is incredibly inefficient. But we’ll get through it.’ ”

For twenty-five years, Haltzel’s office had operated a research-and-grant program to study the effects and the viability of the Social Security system. Recently, the program had been awarding points to potential grantees if they partnered with institutions that served minority populations, such as historically Black colleges and universities. Because of this, Haltzel told me, she was ordered to shut down the entire program, a request that she viewed as absurd. The program was not focussed on race or gender. It predated the term “D.E.I.” by decades. Haltzel’s boss had petitioned the Office of Management and Budget not to end the initiative altogether, to no avail. “They said, ‘You’ve got to kill it,’ ” Haltzel said.

Similar changes were under way at the I.R.S., where workers were deleting references to “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” from the service’s employee handbook. A senior I.R.S. official told me, “If you could measure enforcement actions by month, I bet you’d have seen a significant decline in February, because everyone was worrying about what to do about their jobs.” On February 4th, Musk posted a survey on X: “Would you like @DOGE to audit the IRS?” Two weeks later, seven thousand of the agency’s probationary employees—those who’d been hired in the past year or so—were fired. An I.R.S. employee told ProPublica, “It didn’t matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut.” (A federal court later ruled that the firings were unlawful.)

Many of the fired employees had focussed on curbing tax evasion by the country’s wealthiest people. The Yale Budget Lab estimated “very conservatively” that, ifDOGEcut half the I.R.S.’s employees, as it had reportedly considered doing, the reduced workforce would cost the government four hundred billion dollars in lost tax revenue, far more than the savings in salaries. Werfel used the analogy of a backpack: if you are filling a backpack, you start with the thing that is most important to you, and then find room for the rest. “They didn’t start by filling the backpack with efficiency, or collections,” Werfel said. “They filled it with job cuts.”

One evening, his wife wondered what had happened to the Little League player from the Christmas party. It turned out that he had been fired that day; he’d been given an hour to vacate the I.R.S. headquarters. His father had walked him out the door.

Every incoming Administration enjoys an unusual power in its first weeks, since the new Cabinet secretaries have not yet been appointed, and thus cannot yet object to changes at their agencies. The White House’s pause on foreign aid raised a particular panic in the Kinshasa office of the United States Agency for International Development. The following weekend, rebels from the paramilitary group M23 took control of the Congolese city of Goma, part of an ongoing conflict that Congolese citizens had long blamed on Western nations, including the U.S. There were rumors of protests in the capital. Meanwhile, dozens of senior U.S.A.I.D. officials had been placed on administrative leave, scrambling the aid workers’ lines of communication to Washington and clouding the question of who was running the agency.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 28th, many U.S.A.I.D. workers had already sent their children to school on a bus and boarded a shuttle to the U.S. Embassy when they received messages telling them that the situation in the capital might no longer be safe. The vehicles turned around, bringing their passengers back home. According to a senior U.S.A.I.D. official in Kinshasa who filed an affidavit in federal court under the pseudonym Marcus Doe, one U.S.A.I.D. worker reported that protesters were setting fires outside his residence. A little later, he requested an evacuation—his front gate had been breached. On social media, Marcus Doe could see videos of looting, and outside his own home he could hear protesters chanting. He and his wife called their kids inside and locked the doors.

Leaders at the Embassy decided to evacuate the staff, but the executive order pausing foreign assistance had made it harder for U.S.A.I.D. personnel to figure out how to fund their travel. Staffers were losing access to the agency’s internal payment system, and officials in the Congo were reluctant to authorize an expenditure, for fear that they would be accused of circumventing the executive order. Employees sought a waiver from U.S.A.I.D.’s acting administrator, a career official named Jason Gray. It was approved, but only after Marcus Doe and others had started evacuating. “I began to feel an intense sense of panic that my government might fully abandon Americans working for U.S.A.I.D. in Kinshasa,” Marcus Doe recalled. He and his colleagues began coördinating with contacts at other foreign-aid organizations. They made it across the river to Brazzaville by boat that night, with an allotment of one carry-on-size bag per person.

The new deputy administrator of U.S.A.I.D. in Washington was Pete Marocco, a former marine who, during the first Trump term, had left his job at U.S.A.I.D. after subordinates filed a thirteen-page memo accusing him of mismanagement and workplace hostility. In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers in March, the WashingtonPostreported, Marocco called U.S.A.I.D. a “money-laundering scheme” and said that he was examining whether foreign aid was even constitutional. “What we’re seeing right now is Pete’s revenge tour,” a former senior U.S.A.I.D. official recently told NPR. “This is personal.”

Musk shared Marocco’s dim view of foreign assistance. On January 28th, while U.S.A.I.D. staff were fleeing Kinshasa, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters thatDOGEand the O.M.B. had discovered that the Biden Administration planned to purchase fifty million dollars’ worth of condoms for Gaza. Musk posted on X, “Tip of iceberg.” In recent years, U.S.A.I.D., in its efforts to combat H.I.V. and AIDS around the world, has earmarked around seventeen million dollars annually for condoms, including allocations to the province of Gaza in Mozambique; none of the money went to the Palestinian territories. “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” Musk later said, during an appearance in the Oval Office. “Nobody’s going to bat a thousand.”

By early March, the State Department had announced the termination of more than eighty per cent of U.S.A.I.D. contracts and all but a few hundred of its ten thousand employees. Musk had posted on X that the agency, which was placed under the direct administration of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” But it could be difficult to decipher which parts of its mission were progressive and which were conservative. On February 13th, Andrew Natsios, who had been George W. Bush’s U.S.A.I.D. administrator, testified about the cuts before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Natsios had helped lead a faith-based foreign-aid organization, and as the agency’s administrator had increased grants to religious groups. In his testimony, he stressed that many faith-based organizations would close without U.S.A.I.D. funding. Natsios recalled, “I could see the expressions on the Republicans’ faces: ‘Wait a second. No one told us that before. Are you telling me we’re going after our base with these cuts?’ ” He told me that the night before his testimony he’d had dinner with executives from several of the largest Christian N.G.O.s. They were livid. “Ninety per cent of them are on the verge of insolvency,” he said.

The Trump Administration’s campaign against foreign assistance was widespread. On February 28th, Marocco, accompanied byDOGEofficials, staged an “emergency board meeting” outside the Inter-American Foundation, which supports civil-society organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean; Marocco announced that he was now the president and C.E.O. and moved to dissolve the organization. On March 5th, officials at the United States African Development Foundation, which invests in small businesses on the continent, managed to keepDOGEofficials from coming inside; the next day, the officials returned with U.S. marshals, entered the building, and changed the locks. The following week,DOGEofficials arrived at the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit founded by Congress which works to prevent and resolve violent conflicts around the world. U.S.I.P.’s leadership believed that the institute represented a kind of boundary on theDOGEproject—an organization funded by, but not part of, the federal government. (Although most of the institute’s board members are appointed by the President, it was established as an entity separate from the executive branch.) WhenDOGEofficials presented one of U.S.I.P.’s lawyers with a resolution firing the institute’s president, he rejected it as invalid. A few days later,DOGEreturned with the police and took over U.S.I.P.’s building. (A federal judge later ruled thatDOGE’sactions were unlawful.)

The roleDOGEemployees played in these closures was not especially technical. But they offered the White House a way to avoid potential bureaucratic obstacles. “The reality is thatDOGEhas become the instrument for carrying out the will of the President,” a senior foreign-aid official told me. “The game changer for this Administration has been its ability to use this instrument in frankly unlawful ways to carry out its will.”

BeforeDOGE, U.S.A.I.D. had played a leading role in collecting health data in poorer countries on child and maternal mortality, disease incidents, malnutrition, and access to clean water. Now the ability to gather that information—“the early-warning system for the next pandemic,” as Natsios put it—was gone. A network of aid companies had established a global supply chain for medications, antiretrovirals, and vaccines. It’s now unclear what will happen to the contracts for that system, which cost a few billion dollars a year, paid for by U.S.A.I.D. “There’s no way of doing this stuff without big contractors, because they’re worldwide contracts,” Natsios said. “No N.G.O. can fill that gap.”

DOGEofficials were encountering a simple budgetary truth: radically paring back D.E.I. and humanitarian programs didn’t save that much money. U.S.A.I.D.’s spending in the most recent fiscal year had amounted to around forty billion dollars, less than one per cent of the over-all federal budget. But Natsios emphasized that, as a result of the cuts, the U.S. would be confronted with a more challenging world. In the next two years, he expected to see increased mass migration and instability because of famine. He was, he noted, an avowedly anti-Trump Republican. “But the responsibility for this belongs to Musk,” he said. “He is the one getting away with murder.”

By mid-February, small teams ofDOGEofficials were embedded at most federal agencies. (The original executive order had called for teams of four: one team leader, one engineer, one H.R. specialist, and one attorney.) They were often not a natural fit. A conservative policy analyst who spent time in the Department of Education’s headquarters this winter told me that theDOGEteam was largely siloed off, interacting only with a couple of senior staffers, and that its members seemed particularly worried about the possibility of being doxed online. “Your standard political appointee came out of the Heritage Foundation, and has a family and works nine to five and then goes home,” the conservative analyst told me. “TheDOGEguys are completely different. They are sleeping in some corner of the building, just looking at their computers. So they’re really seen almost as these exotic animals that can’t be touched.”

Erie Meyer, the chief technologist of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was at first cautiously optimistic aboutDOGE. A veteran of the U.S. Digital Service, she had long advocated for more efficiency in government. “I thought, At least the President will have technical people advising him,” Meyer told me. She was a political appointee from the Biden Administration; she had no illusions about her own future. In January, she worked to identify projects that might interest the incoming Administration. Meyer told me, “I basically said, ‘If you want them, here are some easy wins.’ ”

On her last day at the C.F.P.B., Meyer noticed a group of five men wandering around the executive suite; one of them was trying to open the deputy director’s office, but it required a key card. She recognized another from the news—a blond twenty-three-year-old former SpaceX intern named Luke Farritor. Meyer walked out and introduced herself. Were they looking for the printer, she asked, trying to think of an innocuous explanation for jiggling door handles in the executive offices of a government agency. No, a slightly older man, “schlumpy in that D.C. way,” as Meyer put it, told her. It turned out that he was Chris Young, theDOGEleader who’d run Musk’sPAC. He and Meyer made small talk for a minute, and then the group left.

The C.F.P.B., the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren, was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans from financial manipulation. Its databases are filled with details of open investigations, including the names of whistle-blowers and their specific allegations. Meyer became increasingly worried aboutDOGE’s attempts to access the vast stores of personal and corporate data housed at the C.F.P.B. On January 31st, a longtime Treasury official named David Lebryk, who led the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which sends out payments on behalf of government agencies, resigned after clashing withDOGEofficials over their access to the payment system. Lebryk was well regarded across the government, and his resignation reverberated. As a former Social Security official put it, “When it’s, like, ‘Oh,DOGEis trying to get in and Lebryk took a bullet to prevent it,’ that’s pretty concerning, right?”

On February 7th, Musk posted on X, “CFPB RIP.” Later that day, Russell Vought, the director of the O.M.B. and aDOGEally, sent an e-mail to C.F.P.B. staffers saying that he was assuming control of the agency. Vought, an original architect of Project 2025, has been outspoken about his desire to defund government programs and fire career civil servants. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in a private speech in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Vought ordered all C.F.P.B. employees to stop work; eventually, more than a thousand of them were placed on administrative leave. One of the C.F.P.B.’s leaders e-mailed Mark Paoletta, the general counsel at the O.M.B., asking if the agency could at least resume monitoring companies and “was just told no—you have no authority right now.” The union representing most of the agency’s employees sued, winning a preliminary injunction to halt the dismissals. At that point, the C.F.P.B. entered a kind of zombie state, which an enforcement attorney described as “just turning on your computer to stare at it for eight hours with nothing to do.”

The Social Security Administration was under the direction of Michelle King, a career official who had recently been elevated to acting commissioner, when theDOGErepresentatives began to arrive, in early February. First came Michael Russo, a longtime tech executive who was appointed as the S.S.A.’s chief information officer; then came a coder named Akash Bobba, who had recently graduated from U.C.-Berkeley. According to a senior S.S.A. official, Bobba arrived “sort of spilling over with laptops and cellphones belonging to other agencies he was already working with.” King and her team grew wary when Russo asked for direct access to the main Social Security data files—among them the Death Master File, on which the S.S.A. records each number holder who has died. The senior S.S.A. official said, “It just was never totally clear what Mike wanted access to the Death Master File for.”

Russo and Bobba were set up in an office, working with a small group of anti-fraud officials from the S.S.A., but Bobba had not yet received the credentials necessary to access the S.S.A.’s data files. Steve Davis, incensed, started reaching out to senior S.S.A. officials. “It was ‘S.S.A has got to be the worst agency in the whole government,’ ” the former S.S.A. official said. “ ‘There’s no reason that this hasn’t happened yet. Make it happen.’ ” Russo demanded that Bobba be allowed to visit the S.S.A.’s main data center. “There is absolutely nothing to see there—a loading dock, some security, a bunch of computers,” the former S.S.A. official said. “But their view was they didn’t trust any of the permanent staff at S.S.A., so they needed Akash to get directly in.”

On February 11th, Musk joined Trump in the Oval Office and told reporters that his team had found “crazy things” happening within the Social Security system, including benefit recipients who were a hundred and fifty years old. Employees at the S.S.A. were mystified—virtually no one who had been dead more than a month was receiving benefits, and certainly not a hundred-and-fifty-year-old. S.S.A. officials, unable to reach Musk or Davis directly, tried to explain the situation to Russo, hoping that what they said would percolate up to Musk. “What was weird about that period was everything seemed to be coming throughDOGE, rather than from the O.M.B. or from the White House, but it was almost impossible to get any information up the chain,” someone who temporarily led a government agency this winter told me. “They would never let us interface with them directly, since that was sacred. So it was like a really bad game of telephone.”

That Sunday, Musk posted a chart suggesting that there were three hundred and ninety-eight million active Social Security numbers. “Yes, there are FAR more ‘eligible’ social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA,” he wrote. “This might be the biggest fraud in history.” S.S.A. officials were peeved. A week earlier, a few of them had patiently explained to Bobba that the chart contained not the number of people receiving Social Security benefits but, rather, the total number of people without death records. When officials asked Bobba about Musk’s post, he said, “I told him everything you told me. He just tweeted it anyway.”

Meanwhile, the relationship between King and theDOGEteam had deteriorated. On February 14th, S.S.A. leadership placed Leland Dudek, a sixteen-year veteran of the S.S.A., who had been working closely withDOGE, on administrative leave. Dudek posted a defiant message on LinkedIn and spent the weekend searching for a new job. Meanwhile, Davis called another S.S.A. official. “I have the agency’s complete executive roster,” the official recalled him saying. “I’d like you to go through it with me and tell me your thoughts on who should be fired.” King resigned, and Dudek received an e-mail from an official at the Office of Personnel Management notifying him that his administrative leave was lifted and he was now in charge of the entire agency.

Dudek did not think that the S.S.A. should fightDOGEdirectly. “Elections have consequences,” he wrote in an e-mail to Social Security employees. In March, according to a recording obtained byProPublica, he urged the staff to be patient with the “DOGEkids.” But he was also committed to keeping the agency functional. TheDOGEteam wanted to lay off the S.S.A.’s probationary workers. In meetings that included representatives from the O.P.M. and the G.S.A., and congressional staffers, Dudek went through the list of potential layoffs: How many were veterans or military spouses or worked in customer-service positions? Surely, Dudek said, President Trump would not want to let those people go. The total number of cuts dwindled from what might have been fifteen hundred to less than two dozen.

Dudek wanted to keep the checks going out and limit the personnel losses. But, in doing so, he was forced to make compromises. In April, aDOGEofficial named Aram Moghaddassi, an ex-Twitter engineer who was embedded with both the S.S.A. and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, sent Dudek a request to take away the Social Security numbers of sixty-three hundred immigrants who had been allowed to enter the country during the Biden Administration. Doing so would make it impossible for those individuals to work legally, open bank accounts and lines of credit, or access government benefits. In a separate memo, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, explained that the cancellations would “prevent suspected terrorists who are here illegally” from having “privileges reserved for those with lawful status.” Dudek determined that the simplest way to make the change would be to add all the names to the Death Master File, a move he soon authorized. The former Social Security official, who by then had left the agency, told me, “This was the one truly totalitarian thing the agency was asked to do.”

In the five months sinceDOGEofficially began its operations, the scale of its projected savings has steadily dwindled. Musk revised his original promise of two trillion dollars to one trillion. In May, reporters from theFinancial Timeswent through the “wall of receipts” thatDOGEhad been posting online, which now claims a hundred and eighty billion dollars in savings. They concluded that “only a sliver of that figure can be verified.” TheTimes, which has made a series of similar findings, reported, “The group posted a claim that confused billions with millions, triple-counted the savings from a single contract and claimed credit for canceling contracts that had ended under President George W. Bush.”

DOGEhas reportedly cut more than two hundred and eighty thousand government jobs—U.S.A.I.D. and the C.F.P.B. have been effectively eliminated—and the fate of much of the rest of the bureaucracy is now in the hands of federal judges. But even ifDOGE’s accounting is taken at face value, the effort has still slashed less than three per cent of the federal budget. Zachary Liscow, a chief economist at the O.M.B. during the Biden Administration, wasn’t especially surprised by the small numbers. The total cost, including pay and benefits, of all civilian personnel across the federal government, Liscow said, is just four per cent of the budget. The entire non-defense discretionary budget amounts to about nine hundred billion dollars—one-seventh of the total. Liscow, who is now a professor at Yale Law School, said cutting government personnel is unlikely to lead to savings, since fewer people helping with oversight often allows the costs of contracts to balloon: “If, in the name of efficiency, they cut a bunch of I.R.S. employees who pay for themselves many times over, it makes you wonder what motivates them.”

The savings thatDOGEuncovered were supposed to help pay for tax cuts—one Trump operative even conceived of “DOGEchecks,” through which money would be returned to the public. But the Republican budget in Congress would now add three trillion dollars to the national debt. “It’s a lost opportunity,” Howard, the lawyer and conservative regulatory specialist, told me.DOGE“was not focussed on any vision of how to make government more efficient—just on cutting. They didn’t have any vision of duplication, or of how to create more effective operating systems. You can fire the paper pushers, but if the law says you’ve got to push this paper, and there’s no one left to push it, that’s a formula for paralysis.”

Veronique de Rugy, a leading libertarian thinker at the Mercatus Center and one of the thirty-four named authors of Project 2025, also initially supportedDOGE. But she eventually grew disillusioned with what she regarded as its almost singular focus on culture-war issues. In March, she wrote, in an essay forReason, “For all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington.” She was especially concerned by the ways in whichDOGEseemed to be expanding, rather than curtailing, the powers of the executive. “Being a libertarian right now,” she told me, “is like being punched in the face with your own ideas by a drunk teen-ager.”

Even before Musk and Trump’s blowup, some ofDOGE’s main lieutenants, including Davis, were quietly exiting. Their departures offered a reminder of the essential imbalance between the bureaucrats’ enduring stake in the structure of government and the fleeting and contingent interest of Musk’s team. After Musk’s departure, Vought, at the O.M.B., became the face of what remained ofDOGE, which made a certain amount of sense: without the new-new gloss of tech, the project would revert to a more mundane, institutional form.

What, then, wasDOGE? Part of its pitch was that it would infuse government with talent, replacing diversity hires and ineffective workers with more adept ones from the startup industry. The young embeds who moved throughout the government, whom Musk raved about during his Fox News appearances, were an embodiment of this vision. But, in the end, the quickest way forDOGEto cut the government had nothing to do with technology. Lavingia told me that, during his two months at the V.A., he came to the conclusion that there were not actually so many people sitting around doing nothing. “To be honest, it is often worse in the tech industry, where you have venture money and low interest rates,” he said. “It can be pretty inefficient.”

I asked the former S.S.A. official, who had worked closely with severalDOGEcoders, what he thought of their abilities. “In general, they were all pretty talented for their level of experience,” he said. “If we’d taken them on as junior hires, they would probably have progressed pretty quickly in a hierarchical organization.” But, by design, they existed outside the civil service, with little guidance on what to do and why. “They all seemed pretty desperate for Elon to say that they were doing good,” the former official said. “There was a lot of ‘What does E. want?’ ‘Did you see what E. said?’ ” The former official compared the situation to the science-fiction novel “Ender’s Game,” by Orson Scott Card, in which a team of children who are invited by the military to play an elaborate video game are unknowingly operating actual weapons of war.

A conservative influencer familiar withDOGEmade a similar point about Musk, saying that he’d attempted to transfer the partisanship of social media to the weights and measures of the federal government. “It’s true of a lot of people, and it’s definitely true of Elon, that you live on X and your psychology is merged with the cesspool of the modern internet,” the influencer told me. “Going in and deregulating things and cutting costs might have achieved the policy result. But he’s playing a different sport—getting people to hit him really hard and then becoming a savior to everyone who hates those people.” He added, “It’s not that the vitriol from the other side is an unfortunate side effect—it’s actually the point.”

When I spoke with Lavingia, he reflected on whatDOGEhad actually achieved. It had been blamed for mass firings and contract cancellations across the government, but, in reality, it had played the role of technological adviser to politically appointed agency heads. “There’s a lot of power that comes in that first hundred days,” Lavingia said. “ButDOGEand Elon really mostly had soft power—they didn’t have hard power.” The hard power had come from Trump; the soft power depended on Musk’s influence over him. “The premise ofDOGErequires Elon and Trump to really be aligned,” Lavingia said. “And it now seems that was kind of for show.” ♦

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Whether or not Mark Twain ever really said that line, it fits and resonates loudly as President Trump shuttles between the Oval Office and the Situation Room, weighing if he should dispatch bombers on yet another American sortie to the Middle East.

First, the necessary caveats. Since seizing power, in 1979, Iran’s theocracy has menaced its more than ninety million citizens and the wider region. The ayatollahs have deprived the country of a prosperous civil society, channelling resources instead into militarism and messianic fantasy. The regime relies on repression—crackdowns, imprisonment, torture, executions—to maintain control of a stifled and restive population. Many among the country’s educated élite have emigrated. The ranks of the leadership are staffed, in large measure, with satraps and mediocrities. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons in tandem with its nuclear-energy project has proved a pointless catastrophe—most of all for the Iranians themselves. As Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes, the nuclear program has been a practical and a strategic “albatross”; it supplies only about one per cent of Iran’s energy needs but has cost up to five hundred billion dollars in construction, research, and the penalties of international sanctions.

Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—the Supreme Leader since 1989 and now eighty-six years old—pursues his regime’s martial goals and ominous fantasies. In 2015, he vowed that Israel, which shares no border with Iran, would disappear by 2040. The regime has projected force through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and has bankrolled proxy militias throughout the region: Hezbollah, in Lebanon; Hamas, in Gaza; the Houthis, in Yemen; and, in Iraq, the Islamic Resistance. Armed and advised by Tehran, these groups have all carried out lethal operations.

For decades, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the Iranian nuclear enterprise intolerable, both for Israel and for the world. In many ways, Netanyahu is a flagrantly duplicitous politician; there is little he won’t say or do to maintain his coalition and his power. But he is right in this: a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten Israel (which has had nuclear weapons for decades) and could provoke Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and others to pursue such a weapon, too.

No American President has ever disputed the peril of a nuclear-armed Iran. Yet when the Obama Administration managed to forge a nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Netanyahu denounced it as weak. Donald Trump concurred, if only to show disdain for Obama. In 2018, Trump walked away from the J.C.P.O.A.—a heedless move, since he had no alternative to offer. That has left a dangerous vacuum.

In the wake of the Hamas attacks of October 7th, the political psychology of Israel has changed immeasurably. The original promise of the Israeli state was to end, once and for all, the dependency and the powerlessness of an exilic people who had suffered antisemitic persecution for centuries—a dark history that reached its nadir in the Nazi death camps. For Israelis, the Hamas attack represented not only the bloodiest day in the country since its founding but also the nightmarish return of vulnerability. On October 7th, the state failed: intelligence reports on Hamas’s intentions were ignored or dismissed; the Army was largely deployed elsewhere. That day, Hamas sought to inflict maximal suffering on Israel; it also aimed to rouse all of Iran’s proxies, perhaps even Iran itself, to join the fight.

But what Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, hoped would be the final battle for liberation ended in defeat and misery. Israel, in its fury, decimated Hamas and wiped out its leadership—including Sinwar—and also killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Entire cities and towns—Rafah, Khan Younis, Jabalia—have been flattened, or nearly so. Moshe Ya’alon, once Netanyahu’s defense minister, called the operation “ethnic cleansing” and accused the government of abandoning the hostages taken by Hamas and “losing touch with Jewish morality.”

While the Israeli government absorbed international condemnation for its excesses and crimes in Gaza, its forces fought with relative precision in Lebanon, killing nearly all of Hezbollah’s leadership and thousands of its fighters. Not long afterward, the Assad regime in Syria—having slaughtered hundreds of thousands of its own people with Iranian support—collapsed.

This was the moment of weakness in Tehran that Netanyahu had been waiting for. Israeli intelligence appears to have penetrated the Iranian regime and its security bureaucracies even more thoroughly than it had Hezbollah. In the past two weeks, Israel has eliminated the uppermost ranks of Iran’s military and intelligence leadership and of its nuclear scientists. But it did not take long for Netanyahu’s rhetoric and tactics to shift—from a focus on the attacks against military and nuclear sites to broader, more perilous ambitions. Israel has attacked Iran’s main television center and the Greater Tehran Police Command; these are symbols of the government, not military targets. Netanyahu, asked by ABC News if he was targeting Khamenei himself, replied, dryly, “We are doing what we need to do.”

But history insists on its own lessons. The early triumphal days of “overwhelming force” and toppled monuments are nearly always followed by the unforeseen: sectarian conflict, insurgency, terrorism, chaos. We have been here before often enough to have realized that the fantasy of regime change is rarely, if ever, realized. No people, it turns out, welcome their “liberation” by foreign invaders. And, as a recent report in theWall StreetJournalnotes, should Khamenei be toppled or killed, it is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which maintains enormous economic as well as military influence, that could be in position to name a new ruler and “assume unprecedented power.”

So what will Trump do? Israel has already struck and badly damaged the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, the heavy-water reactor at Arak, and other sites. Yet most experts agree that the crucial target is the enrichment center at Fordo, which is embedded deep inside a mountain. It is widely assumed that the sole weapons capable of destroying Fordo are the Massive Ordnance Penetrators—American-made “bunker-buster” bombs weighing thirty thousand pounds each. Only American B-2 bombers are capable of carrying them. Netanyahu has hinted that Israel might have its own ways of degrading Fordo, perhaps with some sort of ground operation, but he clearly prefers that Trump order U.S. pilots to do the job.

There is not an American President—Bill Clinton, George H. W. or George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump—who has dealt with Netanyahu and not, sooner or later, come away with a lingering sense of resentment. Netanyahu exudes preternatural confidence in his powers of manipulation. In 2001, during a meeting with Israeli victims of terrorism, he assured them that he could always bring the United States around. “I know what America is,” he told them. “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.”

It’s not easy to trust Donald Trump to make an optimal decision. For one thing, he is suspicious of nearly every source of information save his gut. He revels in uncertainty. (“Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”) He has hollowed out the staff and the expertise of the National Security Council. He appears to disdain his director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and her conclusion that Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb is not nearly as advanced as Netanyahu claims. He fired his national-security adviser Mike Waltz but, rather than replace him, merely handed the additional duties to the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. Trump’s Metternich is Steve Witkoff, a modestly accomplished New York real-estate developer; his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, formerly a weekend Fox News host, has, at last, struck the President as an empty suit with a pompadour. (According to the WashingtonPost, Hegseth has been sidelined.) In the meantime, Trump must pay attention to the insights provided by rival camps in hisMAGAuniverse: the isolationism of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson versus the interventionism of Mark Levin and Laura Loomer.

Trump has set a deadline of two weeks for rumination and negotiation. History offers cold comfort and little clarity. Philip Gordon, a senior foreign-policy adviser to President Obama and Vice-President Harris, once reflected on the dismal outcomes of recent U.S. military interventions in the Middle East. Writing in Politico, in 2015, he noted:

When implying the United States can “fix” Middle Eastern problems if only it “gets it right,” it is worth considering this: In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster. This record is worth keeping in mind as we contemplate proposed solutions going forward.

Now, a decade later, yet another Middle Eastern crisis is here, and it rests in the hands of the American President and the Supreme Leader. In nearly all things, military matters included, Trump is hardly a model of discernment. He recently dispatched marines to cope with “insurrectionists” protesting his immigration policies in downtown Los Angeles, even as he cast the actual insurrection at the Capitol, four years ago, as “a day of love.” Meanwhile, Khamenei must now consider backing down as never before. His predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, once likened signing a truce with Iraq after a decade of war to “drinking poison.”

The self-intoxication that can accompany the early days of battle––the euphoria of “shock and awe,” the dreams of frictionless regime change—once again stands in the way of rational negotiation. To avoid a wider conflagration in Iran, Israel, and beyond, the American President will have to temper his worst impulses for a “quick win” and negotiate. The Ayatollah, for his part, like his predecessor, will have to lift the chalice to his lips and take a sip. ♦