Anne Romatowski noticed a small, soft something in the flesh below her collarbone just before Christmas. She wasn’t concerned. It was a bump on her uppermost ribs, not a lump in her breast. Still, she figured that she might as well schedule the routine mammogram she had been putting off for 10 months.
Anne Romatowski注意到圣诞节前在锁骨下方的肉体下方有一个小而柔软的东西。她并不担心。这是她上排骨的颠簸，而不是乳房的肿块。尽管如此，她仍然认为自己不妨安排她已经推迟10个月的常规乳房X线照片。
By the time her appointment came around—on a frigid Thursday afternoon, the day before Valentine’s Day—she had other worries. Donald Trump had returned to office promising to “drain the swamp” and had set up a task force to root out excess and incompetence in Washington. Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, were targeting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she had worked for three years remotely from New York. A few days earlier, Russell Vought, the acting director of the agency, had ordered all of its employees to halt their work.
到她的约会来临的时候 - 在情人节前一天，星期四下午是一个寒冷的人，她还担心。唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）已返回办公室，承诺“排干沼泽”，并成立了一个工作队，以使华盛顿的多余和无能扎根。特朗普和以埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）为首的政府效率部门针对消费者金融保护局，在那里她从纽约远程工作了三年。几天前，该机构代理主任罗素·沃奇（Russell Vought）命令所有员工停止工作。
The CFPB shielded taxpayers from romance scams, Ponzi schemes, excessive fees, unbreakable contracts, and confiscatory interest rates. Romatowski specialized in artificial intelligence. She studied how criminals used deepfaked voices to rip off the elderly and how biased banking algorithms charged Black families more for mortgages than white families.
CFPB屏蔽了纳税人免受浪漫史上的骗局，庞氏骗局，费用过多，牢不可破的合同和没收利率。Romatowski专门从事人工智能。她研究了犯罪分子如何用深深的声音剥夺老年人的声音，以及与白人家庭相比，有偏见的银行算法对抵押贷款的收费更多。
The bureau didn’t require a single penny of taxpayer resources. It generated some of its budget through fines; the Federal Reserve covered the rest. Yet DOGE fired 70 newly hired or recently promoted employees at the CFPB two days before Romatowski’s mammogram, sending each one an email composed so carelessly that it hadn’t bothered to replace [EmployeeFirstName], [EmployeeLastName], and [JobTitle] with the recipient’s own name and title. “The Agency finds that that you are not fit for continued employment,” the typo-laden email read.
该局不需要一分钱的纳税人资源。它通过罚款产生了一些预算；美联储涵盖了其余的。然而，在Romatowski的乳房X线照片之前的两天，Doge在CFPB上解雇了70名新雇用或最近晋升的员工，向每个雇员发送了一封电子邮件，这是如此粗心地编写，以至于不费心地替换[EmployeeeFirstName]，[applyeelastname]和[JobTitle]和Fexpoctient的名字和标题。“该机构发现您不适合继续就业，''
When the mammogram technologist saw the bump below Romatowski’s collarbone, she took the scan, referred her for an ultrasound, and told her to talk to a radiologist across the hall right away. Romatowski did not put her sweater back on, and went into the doctor’s closet-size office wearing shoes and slacks on the bottom and a cloth hospital gown on top.
当乳房X光检查技术专家看到罗马托夫斯基（Romatowski）的锁骨下方的凹凸时，她进行了扫描，向她推荐了超声波检查，并告诉她马上与整个大厅的放射科医生交谈。Romatowski没有穿毛衣重新穿上，而是穿着底部穿着鞋子和裤子，上面穿着鞋子，顶部穿着鞋子。
Two computer screens obscured the radiologist’s face, and a mask muffled his voice. “I’m sorry,” Romatowski said. “Can you repeat that?” He overenunciated: “You have a lump … on your left … breast. It’s extremely … likely that you have breast … cancer.” She needed a biopsy as soon as possible. “Is there any way that we can do it tomorrow?” she asked, choking back tears. “I work for the federal government, and I think Elon Musk is going to fire me.”
两个计算机屏幕遮盖了放射科医生的脸，口罩掩盖了他的声音。“对不起，”罗马托夫斯基说。“你能重复一遍吗？”他过度识别：“你有一个肿块……左面……乳房。这是非常……您有乳房……癌症。”她需要尽快进行活检。“明天有什么办法可以做到吗？”她问，窒息了眼泪。“我在联邦政府工作，我认为埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）会解雇我。”
When she left the appointment, Romatowski sent a few texts to friends to ask for support before her phone died. She stopped in the lobby of a nearby hotel to plug it in. When she turned it back on, she was bombarded with pings on Signal and Slack. Dozens more of her colleagues had been locked out of their computers that afternoon. Her union had sent her a Zoom invitation to an emergency session for terminated workers. Elon Musk had fired her.
当她离开约会时，罗马托夫斯基（Romatowski）向朋友发送了几条短信，以寻求支持。她停在附近酒店的大厅里插入它。当她重新打开时，她被信号和懈怠的pings轰炸。那天下午，她的数十名同事被锁定在他们的计算机上。她的工会向她发送了Zoom邀请，参加终止工人的紧急会议。埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）解雇了她。
Romatowski joined the meeting from the corner of 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, and ducked into a Target to get out of the cold. She didn’t have headphones with her, so she listened to the call in the open, pushing an empty cart through the aisles. She couldn’t figure out how to get taken off of mute to ask what would happen to her health insurance.
罗马托夫斯基（Romatowski）从第23街和第八大道的拐角处加入了会议，并躲进了目标，以摆脱寒冷。她没有耳机，所以她在公开赛中听了电话，将一个空的购物车推开。她不知道如何从静音中脱下来询问她的健康保险会发生什么。
A biopsy performed a few days later confirmed that she had a rare and aggressive type of breast cancer known as triple-negative. At some point, a cell in the lining of one of her milk ducts had followed the commands of a damaged bit of DNA and started proliferating at an unhinged pace. Her body had failed to kill off the cell and its progeny, which grew into a mass on her chest wall and infiltrated the lymph nodes nearby. Doctors advised that she undergo chemotherapy, immunotherapy, another round of chemotherapy, and a mastectomy or lumpectomy, as well as a potential third round of chemotherapy and radiation, to eradicate the disease.
几天后进行的活检证实，她患有一种罕见且具有侵略性的乳腺癌，称为三阴性。在某个时候，她的一个牛奶管道中的一个细胞遵循了受损的DNA的命令，并开始以一个无关紧要的速度扩散。她的身体未能杀死牢房及其后代，后者成长为胸壁上的肿块，并渗透到附近的淋巴结。医生建议她接受化学疗法，免疫疗法，另一轮化疗以及乳房切除术或乳房切除术以及潜在的第三轮化疗和放射线，以消除该疾病。
At the same time, functionaries in Washington were starting to “crush the deep state,” as Trump put it. The “steady creep of government bureaucracy” had sapped “the vitality and wealth of the people,” he had claimed, accusing civil servants of leeching taxpayer resources and subverting the will of the executive. Now he was following through on a promise he’d made on his first day in office: “We’re getting rid of all the cancer.”
正如特朗普所说，与此同时，华盛顿的工作人员开始“粉碎深层国家”。他声称，“政府官僚机构的稳定蔓延已经削弱了“人民的活力和财富”，指责公务员指责纳税人资源并颠覆高管的意愿。现在，他遵循了他在办公室第一天做出的承诺：“我们摆脱了所有的癌症。”
I was one of the people Anne texted that afternoon when she left her mammogram. We’ve been friends for 20 years.
当她离开乳房X线照片时，我是当天下午安妮发短信的人之一。我们已经成为朋友已有20年了。
A few days later, I brought a bottle of wine to her apartment and ordered us Thai food. Anne picked at her noodles, preoccupied not with her misfortune, but with planning and logistics. She had already set up consultations with multiple physicians and networked with fellow breast-cancer patients. At the same time, she was figuring out how to pass on her work to her colleagues who remained employed at the CFPB and scouring job listings for those who did not. Others had it worse than she did, she said. “A lot of people get fired when they get sick. A lot of people get fired because they are sick.”
几天后，我带了一瓶葡萄酒给她的公寓，命令我们泰国食品。安妮（Anne）挑选了她的面条，并不忙于不幸，而是在计划和后勤方面。她已经与多位医生进行了咨询，并与乳腺癌患者建立了联系。同时，她正在弄清楚如何将自己的工作传递给同事，他们仍然在CFPB工作，并为那些没有工作的人搜寻工作清单。她说，其他人比她更糟。“很多人生病时被解雇。很多人因生病而被解雇。”
I am biased, but Anne really is selfless and levelheaded, dry-witted and good. She worked in what bloodless McKinsey types might call “financial inclusion,” but what she describes as “policy work, close to people.” She had helped low-income mothers in Washington, D.C., find safe housing and good jobs. She had assessed anti-poverty programs while living in Kenya. She had directed philanthropic investment in distressed communities in the Bronx and Houston and protected New Yorkers from financial swindles. Getting hired by the CFPB was “a dream,” she said.
我有偏见，但安妮确实是无私的，水平的，干燥的和良好的。她在麦肯锡流血类型中所说的“财务包容性”的工作工作，但她所说的“政策工作，靠近人”。她曾帮助华盛顿特区的低收入母亲找到安全住房和好工作。她居住在肯尼亚时评估了反贫困计划。她曾在布朗克斯和休斯敦的苦恼社区中指导慈善投资，并保护纽约人免受金融骗局的侵害。她说，被CFPB雇用是“梦想”。
The agency is the only financial regulator specializing in direct support to the public. Over the past decade and a half, it has capped the late fees charged to 45 million credit-card holders, scrubbed medical debt from 15 million credit reports, managed as many as 50,000 complaints a week, returned $19.7 billion to consumers, and fined firms and individuals $5 billion.
该机构是唯一专门为公众提供直接支持的金融监管机构。在过去的十年半中，它已将收取的迟交费用为4500万信用卡持有人，从1500万信用报告中擦洗了医疗债务，每周管理多达50,000个投诉，向消费者返还了197亿美元，罚款公司和50亿美元。
Financial businesses require this kind of exacting, assertive oversight, Anne believes. They power the economy. But their tendency to engage in predatory lending and frothy speculation risks pitching individuals into bankruptcy and the whole world into recession. (Indeed, fraud is a leading indicator of downturns; flailing firms sometimes try to scam and swindle their way back into the black.) The agency gave Washington unique insight into household finances, and acted as an early-warning service for the country’s systemic regulators, including the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Anne began her career during the 2008 financial crisis. She’d seen how it devastated people’s lives. The CFPB, she told me, existed to “prevent it from happening again.”
安妮认为，金融业务需要这种严厉的监督。他们为经济提供了动力。但是，他们倾向于参与掠夺性贷款和泡沫投机的趋势，可能会使个人陷入破产和整个世界的衰退。（的确，欺诈是低迷的领先指标；有时候，骗子的公司有时会试图欺骗并倾斜到黑人身上。）该机构使华盛顿对家庭财政的独特见解，并作为该国有系统的监管机构的早期培训服务，包括财政部和美联储。安妮在2008年的金融危机期间开始了她的职业生涯。她看到了它如何破坏人们的生活。她告诉我，CFPB的存在是为了“防止再次发生”。
But banks had long argued that the CFPB stymied good financial products instead of stamping out bad ones. The American Bankers Association cast it as a “regulator gone rogue.” The Chamber of Commerce accused it of “hurting consumers by limiting choice and diminishing competition.” And Republicans on Capitol Hill had always felt that the CFPB was so independent as to be unaccountable, because Congress has no control over its budget and little control of its operations.
但是银行长期以来一直认为，CFPB阻碍了优质的金融产品，而不是盖章不好的产品。美国银行家协会将其视为“监管机构失去流氓”。商会指控它“通过限制选择和减少竞争来伤害消费者”。国会山上的共和党人一直认为CFPB是如此独立，以至于不负责任，因为国会无法控制其预算，几乎没有控制其运营。
The Trump administration went further. Vought, the CFPB’s acting director, described the agency as “woke & weaponized.” Musk posted, “CFPB RIP” on X in his first weeks in Washington. Trump called it a “very important thing to get rid of.” (Notably, the CFPB has regulatory authority over the president’s crypto token, X’s forthcoming payment system, and Tesla’s auto-lending arm.)
特朗普政府走得更远。CFPB的代理总监Vought将该机构描述为“唤醒和武器化”。马斯克在华盛顿的头几周在X上发布了“ CFPB RIP”。特朗普称这是“摆脱非常重要的事情”。（值得注意的是，CFPB对总统的加密代币（即将到来的付款系统以及特斯拉的自动贷款机构）具有监管权限。）
Anne thought her job might be reinstated, she told me that night in her apartment. The administration hadn’t gone through the legal steps required for mass reductions in force. Plus, the Constitution obligates the president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” A law Congress passed in 2010, the Dodd-Frank Act, had created the CFPB and tasked it with protecting Americans from “unfair, deceptive, or abusive” financial contracts. Trump was supposed to act as a faithful executor of the agency and its mission, whether he wanted to or not.
安妮认为她的工作可能会被恢复，她那天晚上在公寓里告诉我。政府尚未完成大规模减少所需的法律步骤。另外，宪法义务总统“注意忠实执行法律”。《多德 - 弗兰克法》（Dodd-Frank Act）于2010年通过的法律大会创建了CFPB，并要求保护美国人免受“不公平，欺骗或虐待”的金融合同。特朗普本来应该担任该机构及其使命的忠实执行者，无论他是否愿意。
The day she was fired, a legal team representing her and her colleagues made that argument to a judge, accusing Vought and Trump of “the unlawful dismantling” of a government agency. “This a tragedy for American consumers, and it is lawless,” Deepak Gupta, an attorney, argued. DOGE was planning to fire nearly all of the CFPB’s remaining employees. The plan was put on hold as the case started to work its way through the courts.
她被解雇的那一天，一个代表她和她的同事的法律团队向法官提出了这一论点，指责Vorked和特朗普的“非法拆除”政府机构。律师迪帕克·古普塔（Deepak Gupta）说：“这对美国消费者来说是一场悲剧，这是徒劳的。”Doge计划解雇几乎所有CFPB剩下的员工。该案件开始在法院开始工作时，该计划被搁置了。
In early March, Anne joined a call to discuss her union’s legal strategy, then went to Memorial Sloan Kettering for an MRI of her tumor. A similar rush of appointments and meetings and paperwork consumed the rest of the month. She had a painful ultrasound-guided biopsy of her axillary lymph nodes and consulted with advocates for the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which Trump was also trying to shut down. She had an echocardiogram and applied for unemployment insurance. She finished packing up her apartment in New York and moved back into her childhood bedroom in McLean, Virginia, then had a chest port put in for IV infusions.
3月初，安妮（Anne）呼吁讨论她的工会的法律策略，然后去了斯隆·凯特（Sloan Kettering）进行纪念她的肿瘤MRI。在本月剩下的时间里，类似的约会和会议和文书工作也消耗了。她对腋窝淋巴结进行了痛苦的超声引导活检，并与社区发展金融机构基金会的拥护者进行了咨询，特朗普也试图关闭。她有超声心动图，并申请了失业保险。她完成了在纽约的公寓收拾行装，然后搬回了弗吉尼亚州麦克莱恩的童年卧室，然后放了一个胸部港口进行IV液。
On the last Saturday in March, she received an email at 9:28 p.m. Judge Amy Berman Jackson had issued a 112-page opinion excoriating the Trump administration, whose intent, a sworn affidavit revealed, was to turn the CFPB into a “room at Treasury, White House, or Federal Reserve with five men and a phone.” The president was acting in “complete disregard of the decision Congress made,” Jackson wrote—the decision that the CFPB “must exist.”
在三月的最后一个星期六，她在晚上9:28收到一封电子邮件。法官艾米·贝尔曼·杰克逊（Amy Berman Jackson）发表了112页的意见，对特朗普政府发表了审查，其意图是宣誓就职的宣誓书，是将CFPB变成“拥有五个人和电话的财政部，白宫或美联储的房间”。杰克逊写道，总统正在“完全无视国会做出的决定”，这是CFPB“必须存在的”决定。
Anne had her job back. On Monday, she read the financial papers. On Tuesday, she went to Georgetown University Hospital for her first round of chemo.
安妮得到了她的工作。周一，她阅读了财务文件。周二，她去了乔治敦大学医院进行第一轮化学疗法。
It took two weeks for the CFPB to reissue Anne a laptop. She went to the agency’s headquarters near the White House to pick it up, and spent three hours waiting in the lobby. The Trump administration had banned her and most other CFPB employees from entering the building. When she finally got the computer, it would not boot up.
CFPB花了两个星期才重新发行了安妮一台笔记本电脑。她去了白宫附近的代理商总部捡起它，花了三个小时在大厅等待。特朗普政府禁止她和其他CFPB员工进入大楼。当她最终获得计算机时，它不会启动。
Vought had ordered the agency’s civil servants to stop what they were doing, but he had not given them any instructions on what to do instead. Anne wasn’t sure what her job entailed anymore. Still, if she was drawing a salary, she was going to work. She was not allowed to hold any meetings with industry representatives. So she pulled up data on mergers and acquisitions. She could not provide technical assistance to other agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission. So she went to as many internal meetings as she could and performed “statutory” tasks specifically required by Dodd-Frank, such as monitoring fintech companies’ public financial statements. Each Monday, as DOGE required, she sent an email to the Office of Personnel Management with five bullet points explaining what she had done over the past week.
Vought命令该机构的公务员停止他们的工作，但他没有给他们任何有关该做什么的指示。安妮不确定她的工作需要什么。尽管如此，如果她要薪水，她将要上班。她不允许与行业代表举行任何会议。因此，她提取了有关合并和收购的数据。她无法向其他机构（例如证券交易委员会）提供技术援助。因此，她参加了尽可能多的内部会议，并执行了多德 - 弗兰克（Dodd-Frank）特别要求的“法定”任务，例如监视金融科技公司的公共财务报表。正如Doge所需的每个星期一，她都向人事管理办公室发送了一封电子邮件，其中有五个子弹积分解释了她在过去一周中所做的事情。
Getting fired again might be a “silver lining,” her oncologist told her; that way, she could focus on her treatment. But she would lose her insurance and her income. “The whole silver-lining thing wasn’t convincing,” she told me. She did wonder if she should tell her boss that she was sick. She decided against it. She felt fine. She might not later. The chemotherapy’s side effects—nausea, exhaustion, anemia, brain fog, digestive problems—would intensify over time. The summer would be worse than the spring, the fall worse than the summer, the winter worse than the fall.
她的肿瘤学家告诉她，再次被解雇可能是“一线希望”。这样，她可以专注于治疗。但是她会失去保险和收入。她告诉我：“整个银色的东西都不令人信服。”她确实想知道她是否应该告诉老板她生病了。她决定反对。她感觉很好。她可能不以后。化学疗法的副作用（Nausea，疲惫，贫血，脑雾，消化问题）会随着时间的推移而加剧。夏天会比春天更糟，秋天比夏天还要糟糕，冬天比秋天更糟。
On April 17, she received an email with the subject line “Specific Notice of Reduction in Force.” She would lose access to her computer and email account again at the end of the following business day, DOGE told her, and she would be placed on administrative leave for two months. Then she would be let go.
4月17日，她收到了一封电子邮件，其中包含“有效减少的特定通知”。Doge告诉她，她将在接下来的工作日结束时再次失去访问计算机和电子邮件帐户的访问权限，她将在行政假期持续两个月。然后她会放手。
That night, she joined a virtual town hall with hundreds of other laid-off employees. The CFPB had 1,700 workers when Trump came into office, and now had only 200 left. Even if the court gave Anne and her colleagues their jobs back, the agency was disintegrating. Scores of skilled civil servants had retired or taken positions outside government. The Trump administration had canceled contracts for user research and testing, financial management, “internal controls,” and “identity access software.” The remaining employees did not have the skills or capacity necessary to do the work required by law, let alone the novel work the agency had undertaken in recent years.
那天晚上，她加入了一个虚拟市政厅，其中有数百名裁员员工。特朗普上任时，CFPB有1,700名工人，现在只剩下200名。即使法院给安妮和她的同事们退还了工作，该机构也在瓦解。数十名熟练的公务员已退休或在政府以外担任职务。特朗普政府取消了用于用户研究和测试，财务管理，“内部控制”和“身份访问软件”的合同。其余员工没有法律要求的工作所需的技能或能力，更不用说该机构近年来从事的小说工作了。
When I visited Anne in Virginia in late April, she told me that she worried about scammers stealing grandparents’ retirement savings, thieves hacking people’s bank accounts, sports-betting apps bleeding young men dry, and “buy now, pay later” companies targeting poor consumers. I worried about her. She had dyed her hair pink, but little of it remained. She moved slowly. I kept asking how she was doing. Losing your job, getting cancer, and moving back in with your parents—it was a heck of a punch line, she told me, as well as a gut punch. The thing that really upset her was the way Vought talked about his own colleagues in government. In a leaked video, he’d said he wanted “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” He wanted them “to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” He wanted to “put them in trauma.”
当我4月下旬访问弗吉尼亚州的安妮时，她告诉我，她担心骗子窃取祖父母的退休储蓄，盗窃者的银行账户，体育运动的应用程序流血的年轻人干燥，然后“现在购买，稍后再付款”公司，以穷人的消费者为目标。我担心她。她把头发染成粉红色，但几乎没有。她慢慢地移动。我一直问她的状况。她告诉我，失去工作，癌症并与父母一起回去，这是一条拳线，还有一个肠子。真正使她感到不安的事情是，Vought的方式谈论了他自己在政府中的同事。在泄露的视频中，他说他希望“官僚受到创伤的影响”。他希望他们“不想上班，因为他们越来越被视为恶棍。”他想“把它们置于创伤中”。
After I saw Anne, I reached out to Rohit Chopra, who had led the CFPB from 2021 until Trump fired him in February. In private, Chopra told me, many elected Republicans supported the agency. It had done a lot for their constituents, even if few would say that out loud. Trump was not only destroying the agency, he believed, but destroying state capacity and “the human capital that really powers” the government. He could not quite articulate what it would take for the system to heal.
看到安妮后，我与罗希特·乔普拉（Rohit Chopra）接触，罗希特·乔普拉（Rohit Chopra）从2021年开始带领CFPB，直到特朗普于2月解雇了他。乔普拉（Chopra）在私下里告诉我，许多当选的共和党人支持该机构。即使很少有人会大声说出来，它也为他们的选民做了很多事情。他认为，特朗普不仅摧毁了该机构，而且摧毁了国家能力和“真正赋予政府权力的人力资本”。他无法完全阐明该系统治愈所需的需要。
Chopra has known Anne for a long time and he admires her work, he told me, though he hesitated to linger on her contributions to the agency. He worried about focusing on the plight of civil servants rather than the people they serve. And he worried about his comments sounding “almost obituary,” given her health status. The issue is personal for him. Chopra was diagnosed with thyroid cancer days after Trump won his first presidential contest. He was undergoing treatment while leading the CFPB. “You never want to feel like it’s over,” he said.
乔普拉（Chopra）认识安妮（Anne）很长一段时间，他钦佩她的工作，他告诉我，尽管他犹豫要浪费她对该机构的贡献。他担心专注于公务员的困境，而不是他们所服务的人。鉴于她的健康状况，他担心自己的评论听起来“几乎ob告”。这个问题对他来说是个人的。特朗普赢得了他的第一次总统大选后，乔普拉被诊断出患有甲状腺癌。他在领导CFPB时正在接受治疗。他说：“你永远不想感觉已经结束了。”
Two days after my visit, Anne received an email with the subject line “Recission of Specific Notice in Reduction in Force.” (The email misspelled the word rescission.) DOGE had ignored a court order requiring it to perform a “particularized assessment” of each employee it fired, a whistleblower had testified: “All that mattered was the numbers.” Judge Jackson forced the Trump administration to reinstate Anne and her colleagues again.
我访问两天后，安妮收到了一封电子邮件，上面写着“有效减少的特定通知”的主题行。（电子邮件拼写错误。）Doge忽略了法院命令，要求其对其解雇的每个员工进行“特定评估”，举报人作证：“重要的是数字。”杰克逊法官强迫特朗普政府再次恢复安妮和她的同事。
At the beginning of June, I went back to Virginia to take Anne to immunotherapy and chemo. The night before the appointment, at her parents’ house, we talked for hours. She showed me an email she had gotten from the Treasury’s human-resources office that day, informing her that she had been overpaid and owed $11,292.50 to the government. (By her own calculations, the Treasury actually owed her interest on back wages.) I watched as she sent her weekly email, distilling her labor into DOGE-mandated bullet points.
在6月初，我回到弗吉尼亚州接受安妮进行免疫疗法和化学疗法。约会前一天晚上，在她父母的家中，我们聊了几个小时。她向我展示了一封电子邮件，她那天从财政部的人力资源办公室收到了一封电子邮件，告知她她的薪水过高，并欠了政府11,292.50美元。（根据她自己的计算，财政部实际上欠了她的背部工资兴趣。）我看着她每周发送电子邮件，将她的劳动提炼成大型的标准要点。
A few weeks earlier, I had put her in touch with my friend Allison Rockey, who had just completed treatment for the same kind of aggressive breast cancer Anne has, and at the same hospital. Allison had given Anne special mitts to hold cold packs against her hands and feet during chemo, to mitigate the nerve damage the medication can cause. Anne had been meaning to reach back out to Allison so they could catch up, she told me.
几周前，我让她与我的朋友艾莉森·罗基（Allison Rockey）取得了联系，后者刚刚完成了同样的侵略性乳腺癌治疗，安妮（Anne Anne）和同一家医院都得到了治疗。艾莉森（Allison）给了安妮（Anne）的特殊手套，在化学疗法期间将冷包在手和脚上握住，以减轻药物可能造成的神经损伤。她告诉我，安妮一直打算回到艾莉森，以便他们赶上。
I sputtered. Allison had thought she was in remission, but the cancer had metastasized to her brain. She had died two days before. Anne hadn’t heard yet. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I said half a dozen times. Anne interrupted me. “I’m sorry,” she said.
我吐了。艾莉森（Allison）以为她正在缓解，但癌症已经转移到了她的大脑中。她在两天前去世了。安妮还没有听到。“对不起，对不起，”我说六次。安妮打断了我。“对不起，”她说。
The next morning, I showed up with an N95 mask on. We loaded the car and commuted across the Potomac River. At the hospital, Anne met with a nurse practitioner to discuss some gastrointestinal symptoms she had been having. The nurse ordered a CT scan of her abdomen; if it showed excessive inflammation, she would recommend that Anne skip a week of chemo. The phlebotomist struggled to find a vein to administer the contrast fluid for the scan. Anne had to go to a different part of the hospital to have another provider access the port in her chest. It took hours to get the test and the go-ahead.
第二天早上，我戴着N95面具出现。我们装载了汽车，并在波托马克河上通勤。在医院，安妮会见了一名护士从业者，讨论了她曾经遇到的一些胃肠道症状。护士下令对她的腹部进行CT扫描。如果表现出过多的炎症，她建议安妮跳过一周的化学疗法。静脉混血症患者努力寻找静脉来施用扫描的对比度。安妮不得不去医院的另一部分，让另一个提供商在她的胸部进入港口。花了几个小时才能进行测试和批准。
In the mid-afternoon, we finally got settled at the infusion center. I persuaded her to let me get us lunch. “Literally anything,” I told her. “Literally anything you want to eat.” Why not lobster and champagne? She settled on crab cakes, which arrived in a comically fancy box. As she ate, I yapped, trying to cheer her up.
在下午中旬，我们终于定居在输液中心。我说服她让我给我们午餐。“从字面上看，”我告诉她。“从字面上看，你想吃的东西。”为什么不龙虾和香槟？她定居在螃蟹蛋糕上，后者到达一个可笑的奇特盒子。当她吃饭时，我大吃一惊，试图为她加油。
Nurses hooked her up to a pump, and I helped strap Allison’s cold mitts onto her hands and feet. They did not just protect against neuropathy, but also reduced the chance that she would lose a fingernail or toenail and end up with an infection, Anne told me. “If you get sick while you have cancer, you can die,” she said. “You can get an infection that your body can’t fight, and then you could die.”
护士将她挂上泵，我帮助艾莉森的冷手套绑在她的手和脚上。安妮告诉我，他们不仅可以预防神经病，而且减少了她失去指甲或脚趾甲并最终感染的机会。她说：“如果您在癌症的情况下生病，就会死亡。”“您可以感染您的身体无法战斗，然后您可能会死亡。”
As the life-destroying, lifesaving medication flowed into her, Anne drifted off. I wondered what she would be like the next time I saw her. I kept thinking about Susan Sontag’s 1978 meditation on cancer, a disease she described as “spectacularly” caught in the “trappings of metaphor.” At the time, writers used cancer as an allegory for emotional repression and encumbered it with idioms of shame. In 2025, the predominant metaphors involve cancer’s endogeneity. It is the sickness that comes from within.
随着毁灭生命的救生药物流入她的生活，安妮脱落了。我想知道她下次见到她时会是什么样子。我一直在思考苏珊·桑塔格（Susan Sontag）1978年对癌症的冥想，她被描述为“隐喻的陷阱”中的这种疾病。当时，作家将癌症用作情感镇压的寓言，并以羞耻的成语掩盖了它。在2025年，主要的隐喻涉及癌症的内生性。这是来自内部的疾病。
The night before, Anne had told me how moving she’d found it to take the oath of office. Her grandfathers had enlisted in the military and fought for this country; her mother had worked on the Hill and her father for the Justice Department. She felt proud to be a public employee, sworn to “support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” When she woke up the next day, she would log on to her computer and do her job. She would try to protect consumers, as her doctors would try to protect her, as her union would try to protect the CFPB, as financial regulators would try to protect the markets, as the courts and the bureaucrats would try to protect the Constitution and the country—human beings in human systems trying to heal human faults.
前一天晚上，安妮告诉我她如何搬家宣誓就职。她的祖父曾入伍，并为这个国家而战。她的母亲曾在山上工作，父亲在司法部工作。她为成为一名公共雇员而感到自豪，该雇员发誓要“支持和捍卫宪法对所有外国和国内的敌人”。当她第二天醒来时，她会登录计算机并完成工作。她会试图保护消费者，因为她的医生会试图保护她，因为她的工会将试图保护CFPB，因为金融监管机构将试图保护市场，因为法院和官僚们会试图保护宪法和国家 - 人类系统中的人类众生试图治愈人类的过失。
For his part, Elon Musk has given up on trying to administer his radical treatment to the civil servants Trump had described as a metastatic disease. After falling out with the president and failing to make the government more efficient, Musk had fired himself from DOGE.
埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）就放弃了试图对特朗普所说的公务员进行激进的治疗，以此为转移性疾病。马斯克与总统摔倒并没有提高政府的效率后，就把自己从总督中解雇了。
