Rachel, as she puts it, is the kind of person who rushes in to help. That’s why she used to work at USAID, and why, just 10 days into President Donald Trump’s second administration, she rented a room in a Washington bar for her former colleagues to gather. That evening, Rachel recalls, they shared drinks and “crazy stories” of wandering into “deserted office buildings with no art on the walls, with empty picture frames, trying to figure out what to do.”
Rachel felt compelled to do something to stop Elon Musk’s DOGE from dismantling the agency. That night, she gathered photos like the ones that had once adorned USAID’s walls, showcasing its lifesaving accomplishments, and sent them to others to post online. When Rachel forwarded them to another USAID alum, Veronica, she responded with some ideas for next steps, and to say she “would love to help in whatever way I can.”
The two had crossed paths at USAID but now were both busy moms who might struggle to find time to shower, much less save a federal agency. Still, they grabbed the @FriendsofUSAID Instagram handle and started posting: scripts for voters to call their representatives, data showing how USAID boosted individual state economies, and “very scary” ways Americans are endangered by cuts to foreign aid.
“Do we really want to go back to polio and measles? They’re trying to warn people that this is what’s coming.”
A week into their new project, rumors began to circulate that Musk would drop $40 million on a Super Bowl ad smearing USAID. Rachel and Veronica sent a simple question across the many Signal channels they were using to communicate with the USAID community: What would you have done with that money at USAID? A Musk ad never aired, but they received hundreds of responses and on game day released their own video, racking up more than 1 million views. Their account jumped to 10,000 followers and got a mention in the New York Times.
@FriendsofUSAID continued to grow and soon began to nurture a network of other Instagram accounts anonymously run by federal workers or alumni. Since Trump’s return to power, similar accounts have proliferated across many platforms—a reprise from his first administration, when more than 100 “alt” or “rogue” agency accounts were documented on Twitter alone. It has always been difficult for other users to ascertain whether federal workers actually run such handles; genuine operators, especially those who remain in government, may have good reason to fear reprisal. The people I spoke with asked that their names be changed for this story, but they are known to each other and coordinate in a Signal chat, where they’ve found solidarity in work that might otherwise fizzle under stress and isolation.
If USAID was the first to fall, the Office of Personnel Management wasn’t far behind, as Alex, an employee there, expected. As the government’s human resources agency, OPM stands for merit-based civil service over the kind of personal loyalty Trump favors. And it has a view into every other agency and every federal employee, making it a data-rich target, as a 2014 Chinese hack underscored.
About a decade later, the DOGE bros were after the same stuff. “I remember seeing these younger-looking men wearing walkie-talkies and khakis,” Alex recalls. “It literally did feel like a siege.” Looking to do something, anything, Alex registered the Instagram handle @altusopm. “Marked safe from the purge,” its first post on February 20 read, mimicking Facebook messages letting loved ones know you’ve survived a deadly event.
At the National Institutes of Health, where Sam works as a researcher, a spending freeze meant scientists couldn’t finish experiments and the agency’s research hospital couldn’t complete medical trials, leaving sick patients who had volunteered to help fight diseases in the lurch. On May 5, Sam launched @SaveHealthResearch.
It’s a group effort led by a dozen posters, including NIH workers and alums, who publish contributions from more than 100 people, many of whom also still work in government. They use memes, videos of NIH scientists, and protest livestreams to call attention to the gutting of lifesaving science.
Princeton University sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert in authoritarian takeover, says the accounts serve as powerful reminders of what’s being uprooted by Trump. “Democracies run on popular support and on expertise, both at the same time,” Scheppele explains. “What these alt accounts seem to be doing is trying to keep alive the other pillar on which democracy relies.”
“Do we really want to go back to polio and measles?” Scheppele asks. “They’re trying to warn people that this is what’s coming.”
The Signal chat uniting the account administrators emerged after Saul Levin, a former congressional staffer who had helped unionize Capitol Hill workers, was put in touch with Veronica. Together, they vet new members, who now include administrators of alternative accounts from the departments of Energy, State, and Transportation; FEMA; NASA; NIH; OPM; USAID; AmeriCorps; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Voice of America; the US Digital Service; and Resistance Rangers, a group representing national park workers. (That’s not to be confused with AltNationalParkService, which claims to be the agency’s “official ‘Resistance’ team” but has been criticized for posting cryptic messages that stoke conspiracies. The account didn’t respond to a message seeking comment and the people I spoke with for this story don’t know who’s behind it and consider it an impostor.)
Now, the effort is less lonely, even joyful. “I’ve never worked in a workplace that is this positive and inspiring,” Rachel says. A June Zoom gathering led to their first joint project, a video released on the Fourth of July of current and former federal workers reciting their oath of office. “Just by talking to each other, I think we’re able to produce something a lot better,” says Sam, who credits the people behind the @FriendsofUSAID account. “Maybe just because of who they are as an agency, they’re very generous, very thoughtful, very organized, and they’ve been giving everyone a lot of advice.”
After the DOGE bros arrived with their walkie-talkies and khakis, Alex, looking to do something, anything, registered an Instagram handle.
“There’s such powerful forces trying to irreparably damage our basic public services and institutions,” Levin says. “It’s really sad—and it’s really beautiful to see the way that these folks are just like, ‘Well, I’m really busy, but I’m going to spend my evenings trying to share with the world what’s really going on.’”
It’s all too familiar to Scheppele, who lived in Hungary in the 1990s, studying its constitutional court as the country built a post–Cold War democracy. After autocrat Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, Scheppele’s old friends on the court tried to push back. When the majority caved, dissenting judges and staff published articles in the remaining independent press laying out how a true constitutional court would have ruled. “The goal was to ensure that people didn’t forget what the court had once stood for, to keep the ideas alive in case they could still come back,” Scheppele says. That lasted until Orbán consolidated his hold over the court and then nullified its precedents in 2013. Needing income and with nothing left to write, the dissenting authors had to find new work.
Rachel and Veronica hope it doesn’t come to that. When they launched @FriendsofUSAID, the task felt urgent and they believed the agency could be saved. Rachel’s husband took on child care duties because, she kept reassuring him, it would only be another week before Congress or the courts stepped in. “He was fine with it for a little bit, and then it got to the point where he’s like…‘Oh, you’re not getting paid?’”
“We’ve had some really hard conversations in my house,” says Veronica, chuckling about how they’ve had to shell out more for therapy over unpaid work. But, she adds, “my husband sees how much joy this work has brought me and sense of purpose, and so he, begrudgingly, is very supportive.”
In May, Rachel and Veronica pitched major foundations and donors, which netted them praise, but no checks. But the real payoffs are emotional. Last spring, Veronica was at a gathering of ex–federal workers when she recognized a former USAID mission director. She introduced herself and confided that she was helping run @FriendsofUSAID. “She immediately leapt up from her chair, embraced me in the biggest bear hug, and started to cry,” Veronica recalls. “It made her feel like somebody was in her corner fighting for her at a time when there was just utter and complete silence.”
“I want to be able to tell my kids that I tried,” Veronica says. “In 20, 30 years, when they ask me, ‘Mom, what did you do when our democracy came under fire and rights were being taken away and agencies were being closed? What did you do?’ And I want to be able to give them an answer that I’m proud of.”
