A Year Later

Gratitude on the anniversary of the DOGE break-in

Admit it. Sometimes you look at your phone in your first waking moments. Before you’ve shaken the sleep from your brain, started breakfast, or said hello to your loved ones, you enter your passcode and scan for texts and emails that arrived overnight.

I woke up on April 3, 2025, to a confusing slew of messages from colleagues around the country. At first, their missives didn’t make sense. They referred to a specific email which I hadn’t received.

“Check your spam folder.”

And so I did, and there I found the duplicate emails informing me that the federal government no longer needed the services of the organization I serve. In bedrooms and offices in every state and territory, people received similar notifications. Their staff, the education of their children, their lifetime of research, their museum, their library, all of it was nothing more than junk mail to the men in charge. The president had other priorities.

In the year that followed, we learned a lot. We learned that our morning of shock was just a drop in the bucket of disasters wrought on unsuspecting Americans by a group of consultants led by the world’s richest man. We were one exchange in a much bigger attack on everything that came before.

As bad as it felt, the loss of our funding paled in comparison to the events that unfolded over the first twelve months.

From the New Bedford Light:

Feb. 13, 2026. NEW BEDFORD — A Guatemalan worker was detained by federal agents Wednesday, leaving his wife, a U.S. citizen, to care for a mother with advanced dementia and two toddlers, one of whom has autism.

Darwing Xitumul Morales, 28, was arrested as he left for work with a local contractor shortly after 8:30 a.m. One of the agents had been waiting for him since 5 a.m., according to Morales’s wife, Nicolette Rand. The operation took minutes, but two days later, the couple’s black Mazda SUV remained yards down the road, partially obstructing traffic near the intersection of Covell Street and Belleville Avenue. 

“I was in shock,” Rand said. “I thought they were just targeting people that were rapists, [in] drug cartels, people that were doing bad things. Not people that were just going to work and taking care of their family.

“I was freaking out,” she added. “I was like: Oh my God! What am I going to do?”

A year ago this week, I was freaking out, too. But I have no idea what it felt like for Nicolette Rand to suddenly lose her partner to masked men.

She said Morales is the household’s sole breadwinner as she finishes course work to become a certified nursing assistant. She said the approximately $6,000 he brought home monthly barely covered their $1,900 rent, necessities, and care for the couple’s toddlers, Darwing, a 2 year old, and Braylen, a 3 year old on the autism spectrum.

Nicolette Rand was born here. She has two kids and takes care of her elderly mother. I don’t know her, but I admire her.

“My fear is: What’s going to happen?” Rand said. “And if something does happen, what am I going to do?”

Our ears ringing with questions like these, it’s fair to ask: So what if that humanities funding is gone? So much has been lost since then, including many lives.

Every day, someone marks the 10-day anniversary, the 3-month anniversary, the 1-year anniversary of a government-led violation that changed their lives while they were going about the business of living, working, and loving in America.

Do the humanities matter in a time this dark?

Yes, they do. But it’s up to us to show that.

There must be not only a record of the events taking place over the last year, not only a vigilant refusal to allow the erasure of the people shuttled off into detention. We must see our neighbors’ plight as central to the ongoing demolition of the ideals and dreams that brought them to this country. If we are who we say we are, that should be the primary job of the humanities and humanists in 2026.

The finest moments for humanities in recent years came when those of us working in this field cast off the hierarchy and recognized the brilliance, wisdom, and historical knowledge that exists in communities. We dedicated ourselves to work that centers the individuals and cultures who were previously left out due to, among other things, structural racism and byzantine rules concerning expertise. Don’t let the magazines fool you: Significant, positive changes took place in the humanities over the decade preceding this catastrophe. As the saying goes, we met people where they lived.

Now those places are riddled with broken doors and broken lives. Just as we did before the government’s beer pong Watergate burglars bungled their way through a destruction binge, we have a responsibility to remember, to resource, and to ally. We need to find the grit, money, and stamina to move forward because the communities and cultures where this violence is unfolding still deserve to be understood, celebrated, and supported.

We who are fortunate, who still have the skills and spaces, we who believe in the humanities—we cannot allow the stories of our neighbors to be ground into the pavement by the motorcade. Their lives cannot be melted down and forged into new statues.

After I found those emails last April, I could still find my wife in the living room, still find my kids asleep in their bed. The next day, I went on the air and vented. Looking back, I regret my moments of self-pity and I wish I could say I wasn’t regularly filled with doubt. But at no time in the last twelve months did I think, Well, that’s it for the humanities, I guess, they’re just not that important anymore.

Never that. There was and is too much work to do, too much evidence that the humanities must remain on the path that made them tools for people in need, people searching for justice.

Since that morning, my team focused on finding the funding to preserve our operation and the will to hold our heads high. I kept working with the amazing people on our team and board, people who experienced their own losses during this time, personally and professionally. We made hard decisions about what we needed to stop doing, and what couldn’t be lost.

The federal cuts have limited our capacity to meet this moment, yet I know we are coming back. I know that humanities programs and events will take place this year in these communities because we didn’t fold last year. I still believe that opportunities to gather and learn together can make a difference, that the humanities are irreplaceable pieces in a larger puzzle we must assemble if this democracy is to be saved.

Above all, I know I am grateful. Yes, I’m still mad at the thieves, but my people inspire me to get up every morning and go to work alongside them. A year later, I know that’s a blessing I should never take for granted.