The Dark Vibes of DC

Notes from the fin-de-siècle of American hegemony.

Photo by Raph Howald on Unsplash

This past week, in my capacity as the Fletcher School’s Associate Dean for Research, I ventured down to Washington, DC with Dean Kelly Sims Gallagher to participate in a variety of meetings and events with think-tankers, journalists, alums, prospective students, and one current U.S. Senator. The weather while I was down there was bitterly cold — the kind of cold that forces you to hunch your shoulders the moment you step outside to brace for the wind chill.

The atmosphere inside was barely more tolerable. Barely.

In discussion after discussion, people told me that the vibes in DC were dark. Unemployment in the DMV region has surged in the wake of mass firings and furloughs. The ability of all these people to find jobs in the private and nonprofit sectors at the same time are pretty grim, especially with slumping consumer confidence in the U.S. economy.

Some of my friends and former students have already lost their jobs; some are hunching their shoulders, bracing for a notice of dismissal in the coming weeks. Even the ones who are well ensconced have a haunted look in their eyes. They are rattled by the extent of the purges that have already happened, despite the illegality of so many of the firings and funding freezes. It is not just civil service employees who are facing job loss and job uncertainty. A whole host of civil society groups and nonprofits rely on federal funding that has been frozen by the Trump administration despite being authorized by Congress. That sector is facing layoffs and hiring freezes as well.

This is the wish fulfillment of Russell Vought, Trump’s OMB Director, who stated prior to the election that he wanted “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” Well, mission accomplished.

That trauma is hardly limited to those losing their jobs or in danger of losing their jobs, however. What truly enraged the folks I talked to in DC was the needless destruction of institutional memory and knowledge from DOGE’s mass purges. Individual after individual mentioned some research program or data repository that had been erased or taken down from public view for no good or obvious reason. Those familiar with USAID’s programs lamented the gratuitous suffering that the aid cutoffs had created. The ability to reconstitute these reservoirs of expertise after Trump’s term will range from difficult to impossible.

As so many folks pointed out, if one were genuinely interested in trimming the fat from the federal government then the proper thing to do would be to audit first and then take action. DOGE’s “move fast and break things” is the opposite of that — to the point that even those sympathetic to DOGE’s stated mission are recoiling in horror at the carnage being wreaked. Little wonder that their math doesn’t add up and both foreign policy observers and intelligence officials consider DOGE to be an insider threat.

Trump’s complete 180 on the war in Ukraine, not to mention his reckless and counterproductive tariff policies, have also left DC’s foreign policy community in a state of shock. One person joked that the C in CFR no longer stands for “Council” but for “Counseling.” Talking with so many foreign policy experts, I was able to observe the different stages of grief all at once: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The stages varied from individual to individual depending on where they were in processing the past month’s shocks.

Speaking of anger, another thing I did in DC was participate in a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace event with Senator Chris Coons of Delaware about whether a bipartisan U.S. foreign policy was possible in the Age of Trump. You can watch all of it here:

I’ll let the video speak for itself.¹ The main thing I’d note is that, in case this was not clear in the video, Coons was pissed off at the start of the event — not at us, not at Carnegie, but at the feckless state of the GOP caucus in Congress right now.

GOP passivity will be the topic of another newsletter. For now, all I will note is that Trump’s policy blitzkrieg has succeeded in blindsiding much of Washington. It has also succeeded in dismantling an awful lot of the administrative state.

For his diehard supporters, this is the dream. But has I have said before and will likely say again, the probability of a preventable catastrophe has increased by an order of magnitude. It was that, more than anything else, that has depressed do many workers in the District of Columbia.

1. A note about my socks — yes, they clashed with the rest of my outfit but I apologize to no style maven for representing the Fletcher School!