Welcome to the Unsleeping City, a magical New York overrun with the ghosts of crooked cops and members of a fairy mafia. Seven actors had gathered onstage at Madison Square Garden to occupy the fantasy world designed by Brennan Lee Mulligan, the game master for Dimension 20, a streaming show based around Dungeons & Dragons. This was a live one-off episode. Fireballs erupted around the actors as if they were pro wrestlers rather than a group of improv comedians enacting a tabletop role-playing game. The last time they performed in New York, in 2019, it was for 250 people. Tonight, a sold-out audience of nearly 20,000 fans had filled the Garden, to the cast’s surprise. “Everyone I’ve told about Madison Square Garden is like, ‘Oh, is there a smaller room at Madison Square Garden?’ ” Ally Beardsley, one of the actors, said beforehand.

In the game, Beardsley plays a drug dealer who wears a medical bracelet — from his recent top surgery — that gives him powers. Midway through, Beardsley broke character. “Fun fact,” they said as they rolled a pair of dice. “When I made this character, in his med bracelet was testosterone — which is not in pill form. Now I know.” Beardsley came out as trans shortly after Dimension 20 started. In the intervening years, they learned that testosterone is taken by injection. Their hairstyle changed and their voice deepened. In one episode, they made a joke about a bad dice roll making them so mad it burst their top-surgery stitches. Everyone in the audience had watched Dimension 20 from the beginning and witnessed Beardsleytransition in real time, regularly weighing in online to express how much they adored them. “Every time I cut my hair,” one fan wrote, “I dedicate the hair to Ally and pray to the gender gods that my hair will look half as hot as theirs.”

Premiering in 2018, Dimension 20 was the first breakout success for the independent streaming service Dropout. Unlike the major streamers, which try to offer something for everyone, Dropout is about immersing oneself in a world. In many ways, it can feel like one interconnected show about an expanding cast of -comedians — kind of like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but instead of with superheroes, its world is filled with improvisers with niche interests. Stars such as Jacob Wysocki, Rekha Shankar,and Lou Wilson may be far from household names, but if they were getting a matcha at a coffee shop near the UCB Theatre in L.A., they would be mobbed like they were three Timothée Chalamets. Broadly, Dropout shows are nerdy and lighthearted, living at the intersection of games and improv comedy. Besides Dimension 20, popular ones include Very Important People, a show where host Vic Michaelis interviews a guest in heavily made-up character; Make Some Noise, in which performers improvise based on prompts like “Female Characters Who Just Can’t Seem to Pass the Bechdel Test”; and, by a large margin, Game Changer, wherein the game changes every -episode — in one, a heart monitor is strapped to the contestants as they undertake increasingly intense challenges, winning points only if their heart rate doesn’t rise.

Dropout fans have developed a reputation for being young, progressive, extremely online, and deeply invested in the artists who appear on the platform. Many feel marginalized in their everyday lives and see the Dropout community as a place where they are accepted. Pronouns and content warnings are always displayed. (Got emetophobia, the fear of vomiting? Dropout will give you a heads​-up.) The talent roster is largely made up of elder–millennial comedians who convey the hopeful vibe of the first Obama campaign. The world of Dropout feels a little like being a Harry Potter fan before J. K. Rowling got Twitter.

While the Dimension 20 seven played onstage at the Garden, Dropout CEO Sam Reich watched from above in a luxury box. “You can really compartmentalize the fandom until you see them in person,” he tells me afterward. “It was a bit of an out-of-body experience.” Reich, 40, purchased the service in 2020 along with its sister company, CollegeHumor, at a moment when it was an unwanted asset. The son of former U.S. secretary of Labor Robert Reich (i.e., the only former U.S. secretary of Labor most people would be able to name), he dropped out of high school at 16 and has been working in comedy and theater ever since. A trained improviser, he hosts Game Changer and Make Some Noise. On those shows, Reich plays a somewhat maniacal ham, dressed like, as one comedian joked on a recent season of Make Some Noise, “a mayor of a town where everyone sings.”

I meet Reich at a coffee shop a few blocks from the Garden before the show. In person, he is affable and cerebral. Dropout, he has said, was an attempt to create a company that lived up to his comedic taste and moral standards. At a time when streaming services have grown overstuffed with content, Dropout makes the case for going niche — if you can call close to 1 million subscribers niche. In a poststrike Hollywood defined by widespread unemployment and bloated CEO salaries, it’s also a model for a talent and business relationship that isn’t exploitative, owing to a profit-sharing program that benefits everyone from talent to the people who clean the studios. It has become an institution to believe in for a generation that grew up not believing in institutions. In April, some fans were bothered when the company announced that the monthly subscription cost would increase $1, from $5.99 to $6.99, but would stay the same for any current subscribers: Couldn’t they also pay the higher rate to better support the performers?

This kind of fierce loyalty has been crucial to Dropout’s growth. It has also come with complications: The more your viewers look up to you, the greater the risk of disappointing them. “I don’t like people putting us on a moral pedestal,” Reich tells me. “A lot of people confuse me for an idealist, but I just want more middle-class media companies to exist.”

The story of Dropout can be traced back to Reich’s own dropout story. When Sam was 14 years old, he became severely depressed. He was floundering at the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose notable alumni include Netflix founder Reed Hastings and Mindy Kaling (she went to prom with Sam’s brother). He went on Zoloft and got a therapist, but relief didn’t come until the next summer, when he enrolled in the Walnut Hill theater camp. “It blasted me out of my depression,” Reich tells me. “Then the new school year started, and I plummeted again.” At home, he was surrounded by high achievers. His parents had committed their lives to academia — both had spent many years as Harvard professors. His elder brother, Adam, who was class president, would go on to become a sociology professor at Columbia. “I was like, I think I’ll be over here being a clown,” Sam recalls.

Sam was interested in magic and Monty Python; at 7, he discovered “Weird Al” Yankovic, who became his main obsession until Jim Carrey came on the comedy scene. At 10, he happily joined his father for the Washington, D.C., premiere of Batman Forever. After the screening, then-Secretary Reich was stopped by Newt Gingrich; Sam had picked up at home that he was more or less the enemy. His father was cordial, but when he introduced the Speaker of the House to Sam, Sam folded his arms and turned his back to Gingrich. In that moment, Robert says, he realized his son did have “some deep principles. He just wasn’t motivated.”

Before Sam dropped out, his parents enrolled him in the Center for Interim Programs, an organization that specializes in gap years, which allowed him to finish his sophomore year of high school in Oxford, England. While he was there, he got involved with the Burton Taylor Studio, pitching a staging of Waiting for Godot and casting the leads. When his father asked him if the actors knew how old he was, Sam said, “No, they think I’m an undergrad.”

The semester ended, and Sam returned to America. His parents tried to enroll him at Walnut Hill for the school year, but when the administration wouldn’t let him act in shows, or put on his own, he threw a fit. They tried a public school next, hoping his problems stemmed from the high-pressure environments he was in. Nope. One night, his mother was trying to help him with his homework and said, “This really isn’t working, is it?” “I burst into tears,” Reich tells me, “and we started strategizing how maybe I could get my GED and then figure out if college was something I wanted to do down the road.” (It wasn’t.) His father struggled with the decision. “When I was dropping out, he sat me down,” Reich says, “and he was like, ‘You’re good at so many things. Why does it have to be acting?’ My response was ‘I’m also interested in poetry.’ He replied, ‘Acting sounds good.’ ”

Back in Boston, Sam staged a production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead at the Tower Auditorium. This time, he told everybody he was 26. After a successful run, The Improper Bostonian printed an exposé with the headline “Busted!” revealing Sam had been 17 the whole time. He wrote a letter in response demanding a -correction — he was 16.

“Everything in my body was telling me to make art but also to be entrepreneurial,” says Reich, who takes pains to acknowledge the privilege of his dropping-out story. Since he wasn’t going to college, his parents agreed to help him with the money that would’ve gone to his education: $3,000 a month, gradually reduced over time until it was set to run out in 2006. It helped fund Reich’s move to New York and, in 2005, helped him start Dutch West, a sketch-comedy group with cinematic flair that stood out in the era of pre-YouTube online comedy. His work with the group put Reich on CollegeHumor’s radar, and in 2006, he agreed to take over the company’s nascent video operation at age 22, right around when he would have otherwise been graduating from college.

That year, IAC, Barry Diller’s online-media conglomerate, bought the fun-loving, party-photo-and-beer-chugging tips comedy brand for a reported $26 million. IAC and the founders hoped to grow it exponentially. “My mandate was ‘Go viral,’ ” Reich tells me. And it did. The channel found success splitting its content with dude-centric bait (i.e., 2008’s “Why Girls Don’t Fart”) and videos starring its employees, set at the office, called “Hardly Working.” People were watching, but it wasn’t making enough money. “It was like a muscle that had outgrown its arm,” Reich says. The company spent a dispiriting couple of years trying to sell TV shows and movies to traditional Hollywood companies. Then, in 2017, the same year that Seeso, NBCUniversal’s -comedy-only streaming service, failed to make it to its second birthday, IAC decided a -comedy-only streaming service was going to be CollegeHumor’s last shot at a sustainable business model. It named the service Dropout and would invest between $20 million and $40 million in the company over the next two years. The name was a play on -CollegeHumor — it implied a more rebellious departure than calling it something like Graduate.

While CollegeHumor was a channel on YouTube, Dropout would be its own platform. The thinking was that it would need scripted shows to justify the price of a subscription. Reich put a bunch of shows into development, including See Plum Run, the service’s first big scripted offering upon its launch in September 2018. While these shows were premium compared with what was available on YouTube, they couldn’t compete with what was on Netflix. After three months and modest growth, IAC decided to sell. Meetings were set up with media companies and studios; IAC was reportedly looking for $100 million. A company that “rhymes with Schmiacom,” Reich says, offered $3 million for CollegeHumor and Dropout’s back catalogue. By December, not wanting this to extend into another year, IAC was planning to accept the offer. Production would be shut down on all CollegeHumor and Dropout content, adding them to the list of online-media brands put down before they could ever figure out how to make money.

When Reich heard rumblings of the deal, which would have put him out of work and killed the brand he’d spent most of his adult life cultivating, he came up with a proposal. In its first year of operation, Dropout had launched a small number of unscripted games-related shows, meant to fill out the platform while the scripted stuff generated acquisitions. That included Dimension 20. While Dropout’s scripted content was not premium compared to what else was out there, Dimension 20 was something worth paying for in the actual play space. At the time, this space was dominated by shows like Critical Role, a YouTube and Twitch series in which viewers watch as a group of professional voice actors mount yearslong Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. Unlike its podcast and livestream competitors, Dimension 20 was filmed, allowing for additional camerawork and editing; there were close-ups and reaction shots that made the experience of watching people play the game more intimate. It gave the viewer the feeling of hanging out with their friends. Dimension 20 would be instrumental in sustaining the platform’s 75,000 subscribers in its first two years of operation.

Reich wondered if the company could operate with a spartan staff focused exclusively on unscripted content, which was less costly to produce. He made his pitch: IAC sells CollegeHumor, and thus Dropout, to Reich for $0, divesting itself from any financial commitment, and in exchange keeps a minority stake. Over time, he projected, it would make a modest profit that would exceed the $3 million IAC had been offered. IAC accepted Reich’s proposal two days before Christmas. On January 8, 2020, in an event called by those who were there “the CH-apocalypse,” IAC slashed the 105-person staff down to seven. The deal between IAC and Reich closed in March 2020. Later that week, COVID shut down all production.

COVID turned out to be good for business. That March, Reich quickly decided to get the main cast of players (most of whom had recently been fired) equipment to shoot remotely, so Dimension 20 never went a month without a new episode. Those who had been following Dimension 20 tuned in to Game Changer — which had launched the previous fall — to watch the same performers on that series. Reich started posting Game Changer clips to his personal TikTok account, and he noticed they could garner hundreds of thousands of views this way. In the comments of each post, people were asking, “What’s this show?” Dropout created a Dimension 20 account, which is when things really started to build. By the end of 2022, Dropout had around 350,000 subscribers.

Social media has become central to Dropout’s development decisions. Reich and his team established a checklist of questions for new shows: Will it do well on social media? Is it worth nerding out about? All the shows the platform launched in 2022 — Play It by Ear, Dirty Laundry, and Make Some Noise — fit the criteria, but it’s Make Some Noise that affirmed this strategy. Dropout’s version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? is the platform’s most instantly accessible show. Each episode, three improvisers are given a series of shortform prompts made up by Reich, Elaine Carroll (Reich’s wife and former Dutch West collaborator), and a few other -writers. Individual prompts perfectly slot into TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. For example, Make Some Noise’s Bechdel Test prompt has 10.5 million views on TikTok alone — but if you watch the show on Dropout, it feels like a cohesive episode of television and not a series of clips. Wysocki, a sort of SoCal stoner version of Jack Black, emerged as the algorithm’s favorite Make Some Noise cast member, which motivated the development team t​o make him a fixture of the entire platform. All Dropout shows are now built with clips in mind.

By the end of 2023, the company had grown its subscriber base by 50 percent. One day that year, Michael Schaubach, a freelance director on Dimension 20, suggested to COO David Kerns that it would be nice if Dropout offered royalties. After doing some research, Kerns went to Reich and Andrew Bridgman, the chief digital officer, and said, “Royalties are very tricky to calculate, and maybe we could do that at some point, but what if in the shorter term we did something like it?” They landed on the idea of profit sharing.

Since the end of 2023, Dropout has shared profits with every person it pays a dollar to. How much a person receives depends on how much the individual made over the year and what their day rate is, but Reich says it ranges from a tenth to a quarter of a person’s total earnings. Full-time staff are also given three two-week-long mandatory paid vacations in which the entire company goes on hiatus so no one receives any emails or requests when they aren’t working. (This decision was agreed on by the staff, who preferred better vacation time over the flexibility to plan trips whenever they wanted.) Dropout pays for auditions, which means it also shares profits with up-and-coming comedians who audition but don’t get cast. “Anybody who’s in our business should be invested in how talent thinks of them,” Reich says. Eighty percent of why he decided on profit sharing is to make sure talent wants to work for Dropout. “What loyalty this will inspire among our people,” he says, smiling. “Then it’s 20 percent ‘Fuck you, David Zaslav,’ ” he adds, referring to the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Before it was implemented, Reich ran the idea of profit sharing by his father, who has written extensively on the subject. Robert tells me how Sears Roebuck used to profit-share in the 1910s, when the Department of Labor suggested it “as a way of avoiding the labor-management conflicts that were tearing the nation apart.” Some fans like to describe Dropout’s model as socialist, a characterization both Robert and his son reject. It is, after all, a for-profit company. No, Robert says: “It’s a means of saving capitalism.”

Dropout’s rates are competitive and often higher than the going ones for comparable jobs. Performers on its smaller or newer shows get around $2,000 for an episode. For the bigger shows, like Game Changer and Make Some Noise, it’s around $3,000. Very Important People, which demands guests be put in heavy prosthetics and improvise in character for a whole 30-minuteepisode (like John Early and Kate Berlant, who played zombie megachurch owners, or Saturday Night Live’s Bobby Moynihan as a recently unfrozen man), pays from $5,000 to $10,000 an episode. By comparison, CBS’s After Midnight pays $1,400 an episode (SAG scale). Stand-up Gianmarco Soresi tells me that his half-day of shooting Game Changer paid two and half times more than a role on a new Tracy Morgan show on Paramount+. At least one castmember said the main cast of Dimension 20 makes around $7,000 an episode — in part an acknowledgment of their role in the early success of Dropout.

Dropout also produces comedy specials, for which the pay varies by comedian. It paid at least one mid-level comedian $30,000 for a special, which, in the long run, can be a better deal than the $200,000 Netflix offers most stand-ups for a two-year license — in those cases, the streamer doesn’t cover production and promotion (Dropout does), so the stand-up can end up losing money.

Reich wouldn’t share how much he makes a year as the CEO and the host and showrunner of two of the biggest shows on the network. The first year after he bought Dropout, he says, he made $0 because the taxes he owed from acquiring the asset canceled out anything he’d earned. The second year, 2021, he made close to nothing. The third year, 2022, he made more than $1 million. “Ever since that year,” he says, “we started to try to deliberately reduce the amount that’s going to the top.” Profit sharing started in 2023. Zaslav was paid $52 million in 2024, and he doesn’t own Warner Bros. Discovery, let alone appear in an episode of The White Lotus.

In the fourth episode of Game Changer’s current season, Reich introduces a game built around crowdwork. In it, three stand-ups with sizable online followings — Soresi, Jeff Arcuri, and Josh Johnson — call on audience members wearing shirts printed with prompts like ASK ABOUT MY FAITH and ASK ME ABOUT MY FAMILY. Arcuri picks a woman in an ASK ME ABOUT MY LOVE LIFE T-shirt, who shares that she married her college professor, whom she met when she was 20 and he was 38; the interaction is funny and pleasant enough. But throughout the taping, Soresi kept calling back to the woman’s relationship, dumbfounded by how everyone in the audience was cool with the age gap. Later, Soresi heard that the woman had complained about the experience on the Dropout Reddit. Reich checked in with her afterward and said he would cut anything she was uncomfortable with. She was fine with it, but ultimately, he determined that Soresi’s behavior was “bullyish” and removed his portion of the interaction while keeping Arcuri in the edit. (Crowd Control will be spun off into its own series, hosted by -Jacquis Neal, later this year.)

Reich occasionally wonders if Dropout has taken the instinct to please its fans a bit too far. “The audience has maybe encouraged us to create some stuff that’s a bit more comforting by default,” he says. Performers who are part of the Dropout universe tell me they would like it if the material were a bit more challenging. Not that it should go full edgelord, but, to put it in Dropout-friendly terms, right now it can be very Hufflepuff, and it might benefit from being more Slytherin. The stand-ups I spoke to felt a bit boxed in by the feeling that they had to be kinder and more gentle than they are normally (and these are stand-ups generally considered to be kind and gentle). They brought up Nathan Fielder and Tim Robinsonas examples of the type of comedy they would like to see on the service — which is to say, not necessarily politically transgressive but more willing to make the audience squirm. Multiple successful comedians I spoke to who are familiar with Dropout but have not appeared on the service wondered if it would be possible for it to exist as it does but to be a bit cooler — more ironic, more cynical, more grown-up.

Reich says there would be nothing worse than if Dropout started trying to be cool, but he tells me the company is constantly talking about ways to expand the voice without losing the identity. He wants to get more comedians into the fold but doesn’t want to start pulling from stand-ups in the Joe Rogan–verse. What about someone like Stavros Halkias, the lovable, id-driven former Cum Town co-host, who has emerged as a front–runner for the title of Joe Rogan of the left? Reich says his name comes up a lot. To the Fielder suggestion, Reich says he personally just doesn’t like cringe comedy as a viewer. Even though so much of the comedy on Game Changer stems from getting the performers out of their comfort zone, Reich wants the audience to feel comfortable.

Sometimes that’s impossible. In October 2024, fans called to boycott Dropout after the appearance of a guest on Dirty Laundry whom they believed to be Zionist; 1,474 fans signed a petition calling on the company to denounce Zionism. Earlier in the year, the service had raised more than $218,000 for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Reich thought the backlash might blow over. When it didn’t, the company posted a statement on Instagram: “Where Dropout stands is here: Israel is committing genocide against Palestine, and the people of Palestine deserve to be free and safe.” It went on to say, “If there are individuals who perpetuate speech and actions that go against Dropout’s values, they will not be invited back.” The call for a boycott ended, but, predictably, the statement resulted in an even more intense backlash from pro-Israel viewers. After receiving a number of physical and legal threats, Dropout took down the statement, releasing a more vague one that said, “We stand committed as ever to the safety, freedom and lives of the Palestinian people” and “welcome all to our platform who treat others with respect, empathy, and human dignity.”

Sitting on the main stage at Dropout’s Silver Lake studio, Reich is deeply uneasy when I bring this up. Behind him, production staff are putting up the Pee-wee’s Playhouse–esque background that has helped Make Some Noise’s clips flourish online. He calls the decision to release a statement an error in judgment. “It was a hard lesson in how outspoken and political we can afford to be,” he says. With its growth, he continues, Dropout has lost something. “There are a lot of kids who look up to us, and there’s a grief for me in not being able to be an outspoken idealist in all the ways I would like to be.” He adds, “I’m also CEO of a company. There might be something that a comedian out in the world can say that I can’t say because I’m responsible for a lot of people’s welfare.”

The closeness between Dropout and its fans is in some ways the biggest hindrance to its growth. Still, at the moment, Dropout is continuing to grow. Following a period of relative stasis, Game Changer premiered its new season in April, and Dropout acquired 100,000 new subscribers. Kristen Wiig was in talks with Dropout about appearing on Very Important People, and though a schedule couldn’t be worked out, it’s clear that Hollywood talent is curious to play in the Dropout sandbox. With viewership numbersrivaling those of most network late-night shows, especially when social clips are factored in, Dropout will surely become a stop on celebrity press tours, alongside shows like Chicken Shop Date. Reich imagines a world in which Dropout licenses a big sitcom — say Parks and Recreation — that could both bring subscribers and fit in with the platform’s sensibility. But growth, Reich adds, has a cost. “There are 5 million subscribers out there for Dropout, but are there 10?” he wonders. “The biggest argument for growth is as a hedge against shrinking.”

Right now, he’s more concerned with making sure everything they do feels like it couldn’t exist anywhere but Dropout. He worries about shows seeming like video podcasts or drifting into the bland aesthetic of “high-number cable television,” as he puts it, referring to networks like HGTV: “If you’re looking at just budget, Dropout shows and HGTV are not far away from each other.” He’s been discussing a travel-show concept with Wysocki. “We have a good take on it,” Reich says, but the fear is that it ends up feeling too much like general programming. “How do we make sure what we’re doing feels original and funny and of the internet?”

*This story has been updated to clarify pay information for cast members of Dimension 20.

Spoilers of The Last of Us season two episode two follow.

In the past 24 hours, the world lost its moral compass. No, we don’t mean Pope Francis — we’re talking about Joel on The Last of Us. The begrudging foster father, played by Pedro Pascal, was killed by newcomer Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) in the second episode of the show’s second season. Viewers watched in horror as Abby shot Joel in the leg, beat him with a golf club, then ultimately stuck the broken club in his neck with his surrogate daughter, Ellie, watching. If anyone forgot that this show’s M.O. is “How can we break audience members’ hearts into the tiniest little pieces imaginable this week?” the final tableau, with Ellie curled up next to a dead Joel, is a grave reminder. His death occurs early on in The Last of Us Part II, though Abby explains her reasoning while interrogating Joel instead of later in the game.

seeing joel’s body in that bag at the end of the episode pic.twitter.com/szcZ3rxiz3

— zoë rose bryant (@zoerosebryant) April 21, 2025

Online, people are mourning in ways that haven’t been seen since Ned Stark died in June 2011. “It’s all okay bc he’s gonna wake up right?” one person tweeted. “He’s gonna recover and everything will be fine. Joel and Ellie forever right?” No … not Joel and Ellie forever. At least now people who played the game can talk to those who haven’t without the weight of a giant secret on their shoulders.

#TheLastOfUs game players knew this WHOLE TIME that Joel was gonna die and you didn’t warn me?!? pic.twitter.com/fKXD4IwWSA

— Jarett Wieselman (@JarettSays) April 21, 2025

Me watching Joel die even though I played the game #TheLastOfUspic.twitter.com/8c7Q7ddijC

— kira 🍉 (@shivmcavoy) April 21, 2025

Related

• The Video Game Version of Abby Anderson Thinks HBO Made a Wise Choice
• The Last of Us’s New Beginning
• Meanwhile, in Jackson …

If you have tips about the Trump administration’s efforts to remake American science, you can contact Katherine on Signal at @katherinejwu.12.

For decades, the National Institutes of Health has had one core function: support health research in the United States. But for the past month, the agency has been doing very little of that, despite multiple separate orders from multiple federal judges blocking the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding. For weeks on end, as other parts of the government have restarted funding, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, have pressed staff at the agency to ignore court orders, according to nearly a dozen former and current NIH officials I spoke with. Even advice from NIH lawyers to resume business as usual was dismissed by the agency’s acting director, those officials said. When NIH officials have fought back, they have been told to heed the administration’s wishes—or, in some cases, have simply been pushed out.

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The lights at the NIH are on; staff are at their desks. But since late January, the agency has issued only a fraction of its usual awards—many in haphazard spurts, as officials rushed grants through the pipeline in whatever limited windows they could manage. As of this week, some of the agency’s 27 institutes and centers are still issuing no new grants at all, one NIH official told me. Grant-management officers, who sign their name to awards, are too afraid, the official said, that violating the president’s wishes will mean losing their livelihood. (Most of the officials I spoke with requested anonymity, out of fear for their job at the agency, or—for those who have left—further professional consequences.)

[Read: The erasing of American science]

NIH lawyers have told officials at the agency that to comply with court orders, they must restart grant awards and payments. But HHS officials have handed down messages too, several current and former NIH officials told me: Hold off. Maintain the pause on grants. And the NIH’s acting director, Matthew Memoli, who until January was a relatively low-ranking flu researcher at the agency, has instructed leadership to stick to what HHS says. Memoli, HHS, and the NIH did not respond to requests for comment.

NIH officials are used to following cues from their director and from HHS. But they were also used to their own sense of the NIH’s mission—to advance the health of the American people—being aligned with their leaders’. For weeks now, though, they have been operating under an administration ready to dismantle their agency’s normal operations, and to flout court orders to achieve its own ends.

As the freeze wore on, one former NIH official told me, some people at the agency recalled a mantra that Lawrence Tabak, the NIH’s longtime principal deputy director, often repeated to colleagues: As civil servants, your role is not to call the policies, but to implement them. That is your duty, as long as you’re not doing something illegal or immoral. The NIH’s expert staff might have their own ideas about how to allocate the agency’s funds, but if political leaders chose to pour money into a pet project, that was the leaders’ right. This time, though, many at the NIH have started wondering if, in implementing the policies they were told to, they were crossing Tabak’s line. Over and over, the former NIH official told me, “We were asking ourselves: Are we there yet?”

Without the ability to issue research grants, the NIH effectively had its gas line cut. The agency employs thousands of in-house scientists, but a good 80 to 85 percent of its $47 billion budget funds outside research. Each year, researchers across the country submit grant proposals that panels of experts scrutinize over the course of months, until they agree on which are most promising and scientifically sound. The NIH funds more than 60,000 of those proposals annually, supporting more than 300,000 scientists at more than 2,500 institutions, spread across every state. This system backed the creation of mRNA-based COVID vaccines and the gene-editing technology CRISPR; it supported 99 percent of the drugs approved in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. The agency has had a hand in “nearly all of our major medical breakthroughs over the past several decades,” Taison Bell, a critical-care specialist at UVA Health, told me.

That system ground to a halt by late January, after the Trump administration paused communications across HHS on January 21, and a memo released from the Office of Management and Budget just days later froze funding from federal agencies. The NIH stopped issuing new awards and began withholding funds from grants that had already been awarded—money that researchers had budgeted to pay staff, run experiments, and monitor study participants, including, in some cases, critically ill patients enrolled in drug trials.

Several of the agency’s top officials immediately sought advice from Tabak, who served as interim director from December 2021 to November 2023, and had long been a liaison between the agency and HHS. But Tabak openly admitted, several officials told me, that his power in this moment was limited. Although he had been the obvious choice to act as the NIH’s interim leader after Monica Bertagnolli, the most recent director, stepped down, the Trump administration hadn’t tapped him for the position. In fact, several officials said, the administration had ceased communicating with Tabak altogether. (Tabak declined to comment for this story.)

The role of acting director had instead gone to Memoli, who had no experience overseeing awards of external grants or running a large agency. But, officials said, Memoli had expressed beliefs that seemed to align with the administration’s. In 2021, he had called COVID vaccine mandates “extraordinarily problematic” in an email to Anthony Fauci (then director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and reportedly refused the shot himself; last spring, Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH, praised Memoli on social media as “a brave man who stood up when it was hard.” And last year, Memoli had been deemed noncompliant with an internal review, two officials said, after he submitted a DEI statement calling the term “offensive and demeaning.”

[Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities]

From the moment of his appointment, Memoli became, as far as other NIH staff could tell, “the only person the department or the White House was speaking directly to” on a regular basis, one former official said. And the message he passed along to the rest of the agency was clear: All NIH grants were to remain on pause.

That position was at odds with a growing number of court orders that directed the federal government to resume distributing federal funds. Some of those orders included painstaking, insistent language usually reserved for defendants who seem unlikely to comply, Samuel Bagenstos, who until December served as general counsel to HHS, told me. In written correspondence with senior NIH leadership in early February, current HHS lawyers, too, interpreted the court’s instructions unambiguously: “All stop work orders or pauses should be lifted so contract or grant work can continue” and contractors and grantees could be paid. In other words, put everything back the way it was.

Government lawyers aren’t the final arbiters on what’s legal. But the National Science Foundation, for instance, unfroze its funding on February 2. And the independent lawyers I spoke with agreed with what HHS counsel advised. The continuation of the NIH freeze “is unambiguously unlawful,” David Super, an administrative law expert at Yale University and Georgetown University, told me. The money that Congress appropriates to federal agencies each year is intended to be spent. “If they’re holding it back for policy reasons,” Super said, “they’re violating the law.”

At a meeting on February 6, several of the agency’s institute and center directors demanded that Memoli explain the NIH’s continued freeze. David Lankford, the NIH’s top lawyer, said that the position of the general counsel’s office aligned with that of the courts: Grants should be “awarded as intended.”

But Memoli called for patience, officials with knowledge of the meeting told me. He was waiting for one thing in particular to restart grant funding: He had tasked Michael Lauer, the deputy director of the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, which oversees grants, to draft a formal plan to make the agency’s funding practices consistent with Trump’s executive orders on gender, DEI, foreign aid, and environmental justice. (Lauer declined to comment for this story.)

Squaring those orders with the NIH’s mission, though, wasn’t straightforward. One sticking point, officials said, was funding for research into health disparities: If the administration’s definition of DEI included studies that acknowledged that many diseases disproportionately affect Americans from underrepresented backgrounds, complying with Trump’s orders could mean ignoring important health trends—and broad cuts in funding across many sectors of research. Cancer, for instance, disproportionately affects and kills Black Americans; men who have sex with men are the population most affected by HIV. “To pretend that entire communities don’t exist—in health, that doesn’t make sense,” Bertagnolli, the former NIH director, told me.

In several discussions that followed, officials with knowledge of those conversations said, Memoli assured NIH officials that health-disparity research could continue, as long as the inclusion of diverse populations in studies was “scientifically justifiable.” But given the administration’s disregard of scientific norms up until this point, “nobody was particularly satisfied by that explanation,” one former official told me.

Still, on February 7, Memoli yielded a bit of ground: He green-lighted the NIH to start issuing a small subset of grants for clinical trials. That allowance fell far short of Lankford and other lawyers’ recommendation to resume grant funding in full—but some officials wondered if the ice had begun to thaw.

That afternoon, Memoli acknowledged to other NIH officials that he understood what the agency’s lawyers were telling him, an official with knowledge of the meeting told me. But then, he offered an alternative justification for holding back the agency’s funds. What if, he said, the halt was continuing, not because the agency was adhering to the president’s executive orders, but because it was pursuing a new agenda—a new way of thinking about how it wanted to fund research? Such shifts take time; surely, the agency couldn’t continue its work until it had reoriented itself.

The lawyers were unmoved. At best, they said, that argument came off as a thinly veiled attempt to disregard court orders. Memoli contemplated this. He had no choice, he insisted: He was following the directions of three HHS officials—Dorothy Fink, then the acting secretary; Heather Flick Melanson, chief of staff; and Hannah Anderson, deputy chief of staff of policy—who had told him, in no uncertain terms, that the pause was to continue, save for the few award subtypes he’d already okayed. In other words, the Trump administration’s political leadership at HHS wanted funding to stay frozen, and that overruled any legal concerns.

And, as officials learned later that day, HHS officials had been planning new ways to limit NIH funding. That afternoon, they foisted a new policy on the NIH that would abruptly cap the amount of funding that could be allocated to cover researchers’ and universities’ overhead. The first Trump administration had tried to cut those “indirect cost” rates in 2017; in response, Congress had made clear that altering them requires legislative approval. And so within days, yet another temporary restraining order had blocked the cap.

[Read: The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials]

By this point, NIH lawyers were grim in their prognosis. If the agency moved forward with slashing indirect cost rates, they explained, individual staff members could be prosecuted for failing to comply with a congressional directive. On February 10, Sean R. Keveney, HHS’s acting general counsel, sent a memo to Flick Melanson that included a directive in bold, italicized font: All payments that are due under existing grants and contracts should be un-paused immediately.

Two days later, Lauer, the extramural-research director, issued a memo authorizing his colleagues to resume issuing awards—what should have been the agency’s final all-clear to return to normalcy.

Even then, the staff remained divided on how to proceed. Some institutes immediately began sending out awards: Lauer’s email spurred one institute, a current official told me, to process 100 grants in a single afternoon. Others, though, still held back. “They’re scared out of their minds,” the official told me. Some worry that, despite what Memoli has said, they’ll be held accountable for somehow violating the president’s wishes, and be terminated.

So far, at least 1,200 federal workers—many of them on probationary status—have been fired from the NIH; a new OMB memo released yesterday indicates that more layoffs are ahead. On February 11, HHS also attempted to unceremoniously reassign Tabak, the deputy director, to an essentially meaningless senior advisory position to the acting HHS secretary, with an office in another city, far from the laboratory he ran at the agency—a demotion that several NIH officials described to me as an insult. Tabak chose instead to retire that same day, abruptly ending his 25-year stint at the agency; Lauer, who had worked closely with Tabak for years, announced his own resignation that same week.

Their departures left many at the agency shocked and unmoored, several former and current officials told me: If Tabak and Lauer were out, was anyone’s position safe? And because Lauer left immediately after clearing his colleagues to issue grants, who would ensure that the agency’s core business would continue? “We’re all still terrified for our jobs,” one current official told me. Agency hallways, where colleagues once chatted and laughed, have sunk under an uncomfortable silence: “No one knows who they can trust.”

The administration has also kept up its attempts to block NIH grants. Even after Lauer’s memo went out, HHS continued to bar agency officials from posting to the Federal Register, the government journal that publishes, among other things, the public notices required by law for meetings in which experts review NIH grant applications and issue funds, one official told me. The NIH might have been allowed to award grants, but logistically, it was still unable to. Finally, on Monday, Memoli announced in a leadership meeting that the agency could resume submitting to the Federal Register. But there were limits: Although officials could post notice of some meetings to review grant proposals, meetings to finalize funding recommendations were still off the table—meaning the NIH would still be in a grant backlog. “We can’t go crazy and put all our meetings on,” Memoli told his colleagues. But if agency personnel responded to this new allowance reasonably, he said, they’d be granted more liberty.

[Read: Grad school is in trouble ]

To Super, the administrative lawyer, curtailing posting to the Federal Register constituted yet another strategy intended to circumvent court orders. “These aren’t legitimate workarounds,” he said. “This is contempt of court.” The NIH’s developing plan to align the agency’s strategies with the president’s executive orders—which, officials told me, is still awaiting formal HHS approval—may end up being a legal battleground too: On Friday, a federal judge declared Trump’s executive order attacking DEI programming a potential violation of the First Amendment.

The longer the pause on NIH funding has dragged on, the more the American research community has descended into disarray. Universities have considered pausing graduate-student admissions; leaders of laboratories have mulled firing staff. Diane Simeone, who directs UC San Diego’s cancer center, told me that, should the pause continue for just a few more weeks, dozens of clinical trials for cancer patients—sometimes “a patient’s best chance for cure, and long-term survival,” she told me—could be at risk of shutting down.

Even if courts ultimately nullify every action that the Trump administration has taken, the NIH—at least in its current form—may remain in jeopardy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the leader of HHS, has said that he wants to shift the agency’s focus away from infectious disease and downsize the staff. Some Republicans have been pressing for years to slash the number of institutes and centers at the agency, which depends on Congress for its budget, or to disburse its funding to the states as block grants—a change, Bertagnolli told me, that could mean biomedical research in America “as we know it would end.”

At a meeting with NIH leadership on February 13, Memoli explained to officials that “we are going to have to accept priorities are changing.” He didn’t say what those changing priorities might be, but previewed an era of “radical transparency,” language that would headline an executive order from Trump just days later. In this moment, federal judges were “hampering us” from moving forward, into the agency’s future, Memoli said. But the path before them remained the same: The NIH would do as the nation’s leaders wished.

Six months. Five-hundred-seventy-six applications. Twenty-nine responses. Four interviews. And still, no job. When my younger brother rattled off these numbers to me in the fall of 2023, I was dismissive. He had recently graduated with honors from one of the top private universities in the country into a historically strong labor market. I assured him that his struggle must be some kind of fluke. If he just kept at it, things would turn around.

Only they didn’t. More weeks and months went by, and the responses from employers became even sparser. I began to wonder whether my brother had written his resume in Comic Sans or was wearing a fedora to interviews. And then I started to hear similar stories from friends, neighbors, and former colleagues. I discovered entire Subreddits and TikTok hashtags and news articles full of job-market tales almost identical to my brother’s. “It feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out,” one recent graduate told the New York Times columnist Peter Coy last May.

As someone who writes about the economy for a living, I was baffled. The unemployment rate was hovering near a 50-year low, which is historically a very good thing for people seeking work. How could finding a job be so hard?

The answer is that two seemingly incompatible things are happening in the job market at the same time. Even as the unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent for more than three years, the pace of hiring has slowed to levels last seen shortly after the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was nearly twice as high. The percentage of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs to find new ones, a signal of worker power and confidence, has fallen by a third from its peak in 2021 and 2022 to nearly its lowest level in a decade. The labor market is seemingly locked in place: Employees are staying put, and employers aren’t searching for new ones. And the dynamic appears to be affecting white-collar professions the most. “I don’t want to say this kind of thing has never happened,” Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, told me. “But I’ve certainly never seen anything like it in my career as an economist.” Call it the Big Freeze.

[Jonathan Chait: The real goal of the Trump economy]

The most obvious victims of a frozen labor market are frustrated job seekers like my brother. But the indirect consequences of the Big Freeze could be even more serious. Lurking beneath the positive big-picture employment numbers is a troubling dynamic that threatens not only the job prospects of young college graduates but the long-term health of the U.S. economy itself.  

The period from the spring of 2021 through early 2023, when employees were switching jobs like never before, was a great time to be an American worker. (Remember all those stories about the Great Resignation?) It was also a stressful time to be an employer. Businesses struggled to fill open positions, and when they finally did, their newly trained employees might quit within weeks. “It’s hard to overstate the impact this period had on the psyche of American companies,” Matt Plummer, a senior vice president at ZipRecruiter who advises dozens of companies on their hiring strategies, told me. “No one wanted to go through anything like it again.” Scarred by the chaos of the Great Resignation, Plummer and others told me, many employers grew far less willing to either let go of their existing workers or try to hire new ones.

Even as they were still shaken by the recent past, employers were also growing warier about America’s economic future. In March 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to tame inflation, and the business world adopted the nearly unanimous consensus that a recession was around the corner. Many companies therefore decided to pause plans to open new locations, build new factories, or launch new products—all of which meant less of a need to hire new employees.

Once it became clear that a recession had been avoided, a new source of uncertainty emerged: politics. Recognizing that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election could result in two radically different policy environments, many companies decided to keep hiring plans on hold until after November. “The most common thing I hear from employers is ‘We can’t move forward if we don’t know where the world is going to be in six months,’” Kyle M. K., a talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. “Survive Until ’25” became an unofficial rallying cry for businesses across the country.

By the end of 2024, the pace of new hiring had fallen to where it had been in the early 2010s, when unemployment was more than 7 percent, as Berger observed in January. For most of last year, the overall hiring rate was closer to what it was at the bottom of the Great Recession than it was at the peak of the Great Resignation. But because the economy remained strong and consumers kept spending money, layoffs remained near historic lows, too, which explains why the unemployment rate hardly budged.

Look beyond the aggregate figures, and the hiring picture becomes even more disconcerting. As the Washington Post columnist Heather Long recently pointed out, more than half of the total job gains last year came from just two sectors: health care and state and local government, which surged as the pandemic-era exodus to the suburbs and the Sunbelt generated demand for teachers, firefighters, nurses, and the like. According to an analysis from Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, hiring in basically every other sector, including construction, retail, and leisure and hospitality, is down significantly relative to pre-pandemic levels. Among the hardest-hit professions have been the white-collar jobs that have been historically insulated from downturns. The “professional and business services” sector, which includes architects, accountants, lawyers, and consultants, among other professions, actually lost jobs over the past two years, something that last happened during the recession years of 2008, 2009, and 2020. The tech and finance sectors have fared only slightly better. (The rise of generative AI might be one reason the hiring slowdown has been even worse in these fields, but the data so far are equivocal.)

[David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war]

A job market with few hiring opportunities is especially punishing for young people entering the workforce or trying to advance up the career ladder, including those with a college degree. According to a recent analysis by ADP Research, the hiring rate for young college graduates has declined the most of any education level in recent years. Since 2022, this group has experienced a higher unemployment rate than the overall workforce for the first sustained period since at least 1990. That doesn’t change the fact that college graduates have significantly better employment prospects and higher earnings over their lifetime. It does, however, mean that young college graduates are struggling much more than the headline economic indicators would suggest.

For job seekers, a frozen labor market is still preferable to a recessionary one. My brother, for example, eventually found a job. But the Big Freeze is not a problem only for the currently unemployed. Switching from one job to another is the main way in which American workers increase their earnings, advance in their careers, and find jobs that make them happy. And indeed, over the past few years, wage growth has slowed, job satisfaction has declined, and workers’ confidence in finding a new job has plummeted. According to a recent poll from Glassdoor, two-thirds of workers report feeling “stuck” in their current roles. That fact, along with a similar dynamic in the housing market—the percentage of people who move in a given year has fallen to its lowest point since data were first collected in the 1940s—might help explain why so many Americans remain so unhappy about an economy that is strong along so many other dimensions.

This is a warning sign. The historical record shows that when people are hesitant to move or change jobs, productivity falls, innovation declines, living standards stagnate, inequality rises, and social mobility craters. “This is what worries me more than anything else about this moment,” Pollak told me. “A stagnant economy, where everyone is cautious and conservative, has all kinds of negative downstream effects.”

According to economists and executives, the labor market won’t thaw until employers feel confident enough about the future to begin hiring at a more normal pace. Six months ago, businesses hoped that such a moment would arrive in early 2025, with inflation defeated and the election decided. Instead, the early weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency have featured the looming threat of tariffs and trade wars, higher-than-expected inflation, rising bond yields, and a chaotic assault on federal programs. Corporate America is less sure about the future than ever, and the economy is still frozen in place.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie and Ian on Signal at @cwarzel.92 and @ibogost.47.

Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis.

Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk’s campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running. Federal IT systems facilitate operations as varied as sending payments from the Treasury Department and making sure that airplanes stay in the air, the sources told us.

Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

What exactly they want is unclear. And much remains unknown about what, exactly, is happening here. The contractor emphasized that nobody yet knows which information DOGE has access to, or what it plans to do with it. Spokespeople for the White House, and Musk himself, did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Some reports have revealed the scope of DOGE’s incursions at individual agencies; still, it has been difficult to see the broader context of DOGE’s ambition.

The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, “I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.”

Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.

Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.

Even if DOGE has not tapped into these particular databases, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the group has accessed sensitive personnel data at OPM. Mother Jones also reported on Wednesday that an effort may be under way to effectively give Musk control over IT for the entire federal government, broadening his access to these agencies. Trump has said that Musk is acting only with his permission. “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” he said to reporters recently. “And we will give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, we won’t.” The specter of what DOGE might do with that approval is still keeping the government employees we spoke with up at night. With relatively basic “read only” access, Musk’s people could easily find individuals in databases or clone entire servers and transfer that secure information somewhere else. Even if Musk eventually loses access to these systems—owing to a temporary court order such as the one approved yesterday, say—whatever data he siphons now could be his forever.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

With a higher level of access—“write access”—a motivated person may be able to put their own code into the system, potentially without any oversight. The possibilities here are staggering. One could alter the data these systems process, or they could change the way the software operates—without any of the testing that would normally accompany changes to a critical system. Still another level of access, administrator privileges, could grant the broad ability to control a system, including hiding evidence of other alterations. “They could change or manipulate treasury data directly in the database with no way for people to audit or capture it,” one contractor told us. “We’d have very little way to know it even happened.”

The specific levels of access that Musk and his team have remain unclear and likely vary between agencies. On Tuesday, the Treasury said that DOGE had been given “read only” access to the department’s federal payment system, though Wired then reported that one member of DOGE was able to write code on the system. Any focus on access tiers, for that matter, may actually simplify the problem at hand. These systems aren’t just complex at the code level—they are multifaceted in their architecture. Systems can have subsystems; each of these can have their own permission structures. It’s hard to talk about any agency’s tech infrastructure as monolithic. It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.

Musk’s efforts represent a dramatic shift in the way the government’s business has traditionally been conducted. Previously, security protocols were so strict that a contractor plugging a non-government-issued computer into an ethernet port in a government agency office was considered a major security violation. Contrast that with DOGE’s incursion. CNN reported yesterday that a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern without a background check was given a basic, low tier of access to Department of Energy IT systems, despite objections from department lawyers and information experts. “That these guys, who may not even have clearances, are just pulling up and plugging in their own servers is madness,” one source told us, referring to an allegation that DOGE had connected its own server at OPM. “It’s really hard to find good analogies for how big of a deal this is.” The simple fact that Musk loyalists are in the building with their own computers is the heart of the problem—and helps explain why activities ostensibly authorized by the president are widely viewed as a catastrophic data breach.

The four systems professionals we spoke with do not know what damage might already have been done. “The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of potential fatal compromise increases,” Scott Cory, a former CIO for an agency in the HHS, told us. At the Treasury, this could mean stopping payments to government organizations or outside contracts it doesn’t want to pay. It could also mean diverting funds to other recipients. Or gumming up the works in the attempt to do those, or other, things.

In the FAA, even a small systems disruption could cause mass grounding of flights, a halt in global shipping, or worse, downed planes. For instance, the agency oversees the Traffic Flow Management System, which calculates the overall demand for airspace in U.S. airports and which airlines depend on. “Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one FAA employee who has nearly a decade of experience with its system architecture told us. “‘Upgrading’ a system of which you know nothing about is a good way to break it, and breaking air travel is a worst-case scenario with consequences that will ripple out into all aspects of civilian life. It could easily get to a place where you can’t guarantee the safety of flights taking off and landing.” Nevertheless, on Wednesday Musk posted that “the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

Even if DOGE members are looking to modernize these systems, they may find themselves flummoxed. The government is big and old and complicated. One former official with experience in government IT systems, including at the Treasury, told us that old could mean that the systems were installed in 1962, 1992, or 2012. They might use a combination of software written in different programming languages: a little COBOL in the 1970s, a bit of Java in the 1990s. Knowledge about one system doesn’t give anyone—including Musk’s DOGE workers, some of whom were not even alive for Y2K—the ability to make intricate changes to another.

[Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government]

The internet economy, characterized by youth and disruption, favors inventing new systems and disposing of old ones. And the nation’s computer systems, like its roads and bridges, could certainly benefit from upgrades. But old computers don’t necessarily make for bad infrastructure, and government infrastructure isn’t always old anyway. The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do, such as batch processing for financial transactions.

Like the FAA employee, the payment-systems expert also fears that the most likely result of DOGE activity on federal systems will be breaking them, especially because of incompetence and lack of proper care. DOGE, he observed, may be prepared to view or hoover up data, but it doesn’t appear to be prepared to carry out savvy and effective alterations to how the system operates. This should perhaps be reassuring. “If you were going to organize a heist of the U.S. Treasury,” he said, “why in the world would you bring a handful of college students?” They would be useless. Your crew would need, at a minimum, a couple of guys with a decade or two of experience with COBOL, he said.

Unless, of course, you had the confidence that you could figure anything out, including a lumbering government system you don’t respect in the first place. That interpretation of DOGE’s theory of self seems both likely and even more scary, at the Treasury, the FAA, and beyond. Would they even know what to do after logging in to such a machine? we asked. “No, they’d have no idea,” the payment expert said. “The sanguine thing to think about is that the code in these systems and the process and functions they manage are unbelievably complicated,” Scott Cory said. “You’d have to be extremely knowledgeable if you were going into these systems and wanting to make changes with an impact on functionality.”

But DOGE workers could try anyway. Mainframe computers have a keyboard and display, unlike the cloud-computing servers in data centers. According to the former Treasury IT expert, someone who could get into the room and had credentials for the system could access it and, via the same machine or a networked one, probably also deploy software changes to it. It’s far more likely that they would break, rather than improve, a Treasury disbursement system in so doing, one source told us. “The volume of information they deal with [at the Treasury] is absolutely enormous, well beyond what anyone would deal with at SpaceX,” the source said. Even a small alteration to a part of the system that has to do with the distribution of funds could wreak havoc, preventing those funds from being distributed or distributing them wrongly, for example. “It’s like walking into a nuclear reactor and deciding to handle some plutonium.”

DOGE is many things—a dismantling of the federal government, a political project to flex power and punish perceived enemies—but it is also the logical end point of a strain of thought that’s become popular in Silicon Valley during the boom times of Big Tech and easy money: that building software and writing code aren’t just dominant skills for the 21st century, but proof of competence in any realm. In a post on X this week, John Shedletsky, a developer and an early employee at the popular gaming platform Roblox, summed up the philosophy nicely: “Silicon Valley built the modern world. Why shouldn’t we run it?”

This attitude disgusted one of the officials we spoke with. “There’s this bizarre belief that being able to do things with computers means you have to be super smart about everything else.” Silicon Valley may have built the computational part of the modern world, but the rest of that world—the money, the airplanes, the roads, and the waterways—still exists. Knowing something, even a lot, about computers guarantees no knowledge about the world beyond them.

“I’d like to think that this is all so massive and complex that they won’t succeed in whatever it is they’re trying to do,” one of the experts told us. “But I wouldn’t want to wager that outcome against their egos.”

Our perception of reality is a subjective lived experience, a virtual construct shaped by our senses, biology, and personal history.

Things are not as they are seen, nor are they otherwise.
—”Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra”

It’s always night inside my skull — yours too, unless there are actual gaping holes in it. This proposition would be unremarkable, were it not for my visual experience, which often suggests otherwise. What it suggests right now, with me being awake and aware and my eyes open, is that the place from which I look out at the world is just behind the bridge of my nose. Even more strikingly, I see what I see through what appears to be a large oval hole in the front of my head. But when I feel around with my fingertips in search of it, I find that all is well with my face. This can only mean one thing: that the sensory reality that I inhabit is virtual. To put it less gently, I am living a lie.¹

That the lie is being perpetrated by me on myself is something of a solace, as is the realization that it fits right into the bigger picture of what consciousness is. And I know I can — praise be to evolution — by and large trust my perception not to lead me into grave error, such as stepping off a cliff, or overlooking a pair of watchful eyes in tall grass, or otherwise messing with my chances of having and raising children. The perceived world is an illusion, but it is a useful one.

The predicament of the brain, confined to the perpetual darkness inside the skull, is, after all, not as dire as it sounds. The senses gather and make good use of enough information about what is happening on the outside to keep the virtual reality rig alive and kicking. If there is still any unease left, it comes from too much thinking, and too much worrying, about far-out things like ultimate truth. One such worry that arises out of thinking about perception is this: Given that everything we perceive is a virtual construct, how can we keep believing that our senses reveal to us the world as it really is?

Umwelten

The realization that the perceived world is virtual immediately leads to another one: that what it looks like should depend on the kind of virtual reality engine that one employs. Things are likely to look very different for species whose brain, body, and ecology all differ from the human “standard.” The same goes even for humans who happen to have special abilities. A useful, if fictional, prop for thinking about these matters is Zatōichi, the hero of a long-running action film series in Japan, whose prowess with a sword was not in the least impaired by his blindness. The trope, which the viewers loved, was that the Blind Swordsman leveled the playing field against sighted opponents by making better use of his remaining senses and his other skills. (He did not always play fair: In some fight scenes, he would first cut off the wicks of the candles, plunging everything into darkness.)

A key insight into Zatōichi’s situation is that light is of no use to him, nor is it even present as such in his perceptual world; and yet he acts as if the scene were brightly lit. Imagine this: Zatōichi and a sighted human walk into a barn. Make it a dark barn. Inside, the two of them meet a bat and an owl. There are now four qualitatively different kinds of perceptual worlds in play; five, if we count the mice scurrying on the floor; six, if the cat wanders in. Jakob von Uexküll, the ethologist who was among the first to realize the inevitable idiosyncrasy of each “lived world,” or Umwelt, remarked that “the dog is surrounded by dog things and the dragonfly is surrounded by dragonfly things.” When a human and a dog go for a walk, the leash between them has each end in a different virtual world.

How things really are

If different species, or even different individuals belonging to the same species, inhabit different perceptual worlds, what can we know about what the real world is like? Clearly enough to make action possible; apart from that, not much. Amazingly, the more basic a question about that real world seems, the more difficult it is to get a definitive answer to it. Is it dark at night? The sense in which it is for us is of little concern to a bat, and of no concern to a mole. Is air thick? Not really to us, but sufficiently so for a swallow to push against during its aerial acrobatics. Is water wet? Not to a duck or a water strider. In the face of such differences, it seems silly to insist that our perceptual world is somehow privileged or that what we perceive is how things really are.²

How things look and feel depends not only on who is doing the looking and feeling, but also on what action or other purpose it serves, as well as on the perceiver’s experiential history (and therefore on memory) and bodily and emotional state. I may see a rock outcropping encountered on a hike as a human face or as a battering ram, depending on where my mind was wandering as I was walking up to it (arguably, the best hiking experience requires that the hiker practice just seeing instead of seeing as).³

When I am hungry, a mountain track that I am facing looks steeper than right after a meal. The prospect of jumping at six o’clock in the morning into the indoor pool, in which the water is kept cool to prevent lap swimmers from overheating, feels discomforting to different degrees, depending on whether it is summer or winter outside, as I found out, having been doing this three times a week for many years. Luckily, it helps to think about other matters while swimming. For example, anticipating how the chapter that I am working on is going to end literally warms me up: It distracts me from the initial feeling of cold and I also swim faster, so that it takes me a couple of minutes less to do my usual 3,200 yards.

As we find ourselves compelled to doubt the very notion of objective truth about what the world is like, can science help? Yes, as long as we don’t expect it to do the impossible. Whatever the world is “really” like, evolution has been clearly successful — in an endless variety of strange and beautiful ways — in coming up with effective means of dealing with it. Science, which operates on much the same principles of variation and selection, can be at least equally successful. But evolution has no use for questions of ultimate truth and scientists too are supposed to shun them. In some disciplines, they have learned to do so. Is the electron really a wave or a particle? Quantum mechanics, an epitome of theoretical and practical success in physics, rightly refuses such questions.

The complexity of the human brain greatly exceeds that of any other physical system that we know of, so that in perception science it is even more important not to waste time on arguing about absolutes. What color is this banana? Purple (it’s my favorite variety from Costa Rica), but there is no matter of objective fact about this observation, because color has no physical definition: It is entirely the construct of the observer’s visual system in its interaction with the environment.⁴ At least as far as color is concerned, things are neither as they seem, nor otherwise.

There is a philosophical tradition out there that holds this — the essential emptiness of all things — to be an ultimate truth in its own right; indeed, the only ultimate truth. Some find this notion liberating — the religious tradition that is built around that philosophy holds this to be the only liberating notion. Others, like the reluctant hero of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Lathe of Heaven,” find it hard:

There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

But now that we have seen it, bear it we must.

Shimon Edelman is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He is the author of several books including “The Consciousness Revolutions: From Amoeba Awareness to Human Emancipation” (Springer) and “Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realist’s View of the Human Condition,” from which this article is excerpted.