When the falconers ask me about my interest in falconry, I don’t say where I work.
I tell them that I trained in biology and am generally interested in nature. I don’t say that for the past twelve years I have worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) helping people around the world to conserve biodiversity and adapt to climate change. I don’t tell them that the new administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are wreaking havoc on USAID’s global programming and workforce, which are dedicated to advancing goals like health, stability, and economic growth for the benefit of both the world’s most vulnerable people and all of us here in the United States. I don’t say that the weeks since the inauguration have brought a ratcheting up of the stakes in the ongoing negotiation of what I do and don’t say as a federal employee, and that this conversation is yet another example. I don’t say that it’s clear my colleagues and I are about to lose our jobs.
It’s a cold, sunny morning in late February 2025, and the falconers and I have run into each other in the parking lot of a mountainside lodge in rural Virginia. I am on a weekend trip escaping the chaos in Washington, DC, and bundled up for hiking. The falconers are dressed in camouflage and brush pants, and a falcon is perched on one of their arms. They are about to go hunting in a nearby field. When I ask them what the falcon catches, they tell me: other birds, rabbits, sometimes a fawn. I am amazed by this, and they ask about my interest. They let me know about a falconry meeting in Northern Virginia. When they drive off, we wave goodbye. Despite our friendly conversation, I feel validated in my decision not to say where I work when I see the right-wing political bumper stickers on their truck. These sorts of omissions are familiar. Until last year, this silence felt safe.
For me, being a federal employee created a complicated relationship with voice. At the agencies where I worked, public speaking was often pre-approved by public affairs officials and logged in a tracker. Language for external communications usually went through multiple levels of clearance. Until modernized in 2013, the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 prohibited the U.S. State Department from distributing its programming material domestically. The 2009 Report on the Smith-Mundt Symposium notes that USAID operated in the “shadow” of this legislation, creating challenges in communicating to the American public what USAID did. For “outside” teaching, speaking, or writing in one’s personal capacity, the Code of Federal Regulations specifies when and how government employees can reference their title or position—namely as one of several biographical details that has no more prominence than other significant biographical details.
Throughout my nearly fifteen years of federal service, I was acutely aware of and dutifully adhered to the constraints on my voice as a federal worker. While some of these parameters promote coherency of messaging and limit use of government positions for private gain, in my observation they also contribute to many federal employees downplaying their professional identities in the public sphere when not representing their agencies, as I did with the falconers. When a coworker wrote a travel essay for a newspaper, I noted that she identified herself in the byline solely as “a writer.” I thought that if I ever published my fiction while still working at USAID, I would do the same. More than the restrictions themselves, I felt the weight of my own hypervigilance. It was a tradeoff for work and colleagues that I loved, though in the back of my mind I wondered for how long I would make that choice, especially as a writer. This question came to the forefront when what once felt like safety came to feel like a trap during USAID’s dismantling.
It went like this: Almost five weeks to the day before meeting the falconers, my colleagues and I stand ready to take direction from the new administration after the inauguration. Instead, incoming leadership orders us to stop work on programming and cease external communication. They suspend foreign assistance globally and place dozens of senior career leaders on administrative leave.
The office in Washington, DC grows very quiet as waiting for further instruction replaces discussion. My incoming emails dwindle to just a handful a day, and the internal chat platform that connects our global workforce goes largely silent. Unlike other presidential transitions, the picture frames for photos of political leadership in the main lobby remain empty. Staff are ordered to remove the art from the walls. When the partners who implement USAID programming write to check in and say they hope we are OK, we are not allowed to respond.
On the bus to the city in the mornings, I scan the winter skies above the Potomac River for birds and wonder what awaits me at the office. I wear a necklace with a mustard seed encased in the pendant—a gift from a poet, a reminder to have faith in the writing, and possibly in whatever is on the other side of now.
DOGE staff arrive at the building, and the official website describing what USAID does and where goes offline. On the first Monday in February, leadership closes headquarters to personnel. Most of us sense this is not out of concern for our safety, even though over the weekend Elon Musk tweeted that “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” Rumors circulate that people are disappearing from videoconferences as their contracts are terminated and network access cut off without warning.
My colleagues and I are informed that by midnight on Friday we too will be placed on administrative leave. At the end of the week, our silent inboxes start populating with goodbye messages. Among these, a coworker re-ups his “favorite chain” from eight years ago when someone accidentally sent an email intended for one person to an agency-wide list. At the time, this had prompted a series of confused reply-all responses and requests to be taken off the distribution, followed by a few hilarious one-liners about our collectively terrible email etiquette.
This time he use[s] the ‘reply all’ button for good and thanks us for our friendship, dedication, and all the good…done in the world on behalf of the American people. Other reply-all messages follow: It’s been an honor and a privilege to serve alongside all of you. Never stop replying all. Please do not remove me from this list-serv. When I later share with another colleague how I was moved by this thread, they say they had tried to respond too but their message bounced back. It appeared that the ability to reply-all had been turned off.
A temporary restraining order delays our being put on leave and then expires two weeks later. That weekend, I head to the Blue Ridge Mountains and meet the falconers. This encounter reminds me of William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.” I recite the first four lines from memory while hiking in Shenandoah National Park later that day and then look up the rest on my phone:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…
As I descend the mountain alongside icy falls, I think about the falling apart of USAID and the iconic books by Chinua Achebe and Pema Chödrön, whose titles echo the poem’s third line. I feel the seduction of extrapolating the poem’s language about the worst’s passionate intensity to the present moment when political figures make strident broadcasts to millions of people while federal workers at USAID are silenced, lacking not conviction but voice.
I return home that Sunday night to an email with a reduction in force notice indicating that I will be separated from federal service in sixty days. The email metadata contains an address that a quick internet search tells me belongs to a twenty-three-year-old DOGE employee. Within days, I am cut off from the network for a month, alongside most of my DC-based colleagues, even though we are supposed to maintain access while on administrative leave.
In the quiet weeks that follow, I can’t stop thinking about who is silenced and who is doing the silencing, about who is and isn’t heard. These thoughts are on my mind at the middle school’s math and robotics night, when I talk to another parent and name what is happening at work—the partnerships ended and the trust broken, the vaccines undelivered and the people turned away from health services, the food aid stuck in warehouses and the salaries abruptly cut off. My elementary school-aged son stands beside me, waiting for us to finish speaking. My friend and I talk for a long time. I am upset, but I do not cry. Then my son is in tears, asking us to please stop talking about my work. As he says this, he places his palms in front of our faces to quiet us. At bedtime, he says that whenever I start talking about what is happening and he tries to speak to me, I cannot hear him.
I am desperate for an organizing principle for this incomprehensible time, and so I turn to writing—both others’ and my own. I reread “The Second Coming” and consider what it means that the falcon cannot hear the falconer. I grasp at this as a possible metaphor for what my colleagues and I are experiencing. I want the metaphor to tell me something about voice and silence, about loss and possibility. I want it to guide me through these days.
I imagine that federal workers are the falconer and the government is the falcon that cannot hear us—but the power dynamic feels off. The government commands federal workers, not the reverse. I flip the roles: federal workers are the falcon and the government is the falconer. Our separation frees us from our tethers and the ways the government has restricted our voices. Yet the metaphor still doesn’t square; I assume that the falconer of the poem calls the falcon to come back, unlike what we are experiencing. A friend suggests that the falconer is all the people around the world whom we were helping through foreign assistance, and the United States is the falcon, unwilling to hear them anymore. All these iterations feel overwrought and unresolved.
I turn to analysis of the poem, hoping to come up with something better, but the language doesn’t hold. The literary critic Harold Bloom writes that a falconer is also every poet, and the falcon is his trope…so that the discipline of falconry represents not only a mastery of nature, but a mastery of language. This representation, either way, is breaking down… I read additional analysis and discover Yeats’ associations with authoritarianism. It is not lost on me that I am just learning this now.
I return to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and notice the presence of raptors—not falcons, but kites and eagles—throughout the book. I read with renewed anxiety for the community, unaware that colonial forces will soon arrive and destroy the world as they know it. I note the government official’s plans to tell this story himself and to be firm in cutting out details. This reminds me of the new administration’s arrival at USAID and their push to shape the narrative—yet the resonance feels misplaced, a categorical error shaped by positionality within the history of colonization.
When I tell a friend from work about meeting the falconers and my ideas about the falcon and falconer as a metaphor for our experience, she asks, “Why do they do it?” “They use the birds to hunt,” I say. “No,” she says. “I mean the birds. Why do they do it?” I don’t have a ready answer. Why do the birds allow themselves to be trained? Why do they come back when they could fly away?
The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (Virginia DWR) website describes how falconers capture young raptors in the fall, train and hunt with them over the winter, and then release them in the spring. In the words of the Virginia DWR, the falconers and the birds have a “business relationship” that increases the birds’ chances of surviving their first year: the falconer locates prey for the bird and carries a piece of meat to encourage it to return, and the bird sees the falconer as a source of food.
I think of all the livelihoods that the government has supported and now dissolved with USAID’s dismantling. I consider the many ways that it has trained us and then let us go. I reflect on all the time and care I spent monitoring my voice while doing work that felt worth that exchange. I read Chödrön’s observation that things come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It is both painful and hopeful, and I try to trust that it is true.
I reread my reduction in force letter and notice the phrasing: …you are being released…
Someone asks me, What might being freed from the tether bring?
I start to write this essay. I think back to that February morning when I met the falconers on that mountainside and imagine doing things differently. I ask if I can join them, and we drive together to the nearby field. The winter sky is clear, streaked by just a single cloud, and they release the falcon. I share my story: civil servant, writer, mother. I say where I work, how much my colleagues and I love our jobs helping people around the world, and how these global efforts connect to our lives back here. I ask the falconers to share their stories too. Above us, the falcon flies in an arc so wide that it can no longer hear us, but we can finally hear each other. Everything has fallen apart.
