At 11:30 p.m., two hours past our normal bedtime, my fiancé laid his hand on my wrist.
“You’ve got to stop,” he said. “Stop answering them.”
While he was speaking, I felt my iPhone buzz twice: Another two messages, from yet more federal workers who wanted to tell me how President Donald Trump was rewriting their workplace policies, firing their colleagues or transforming their agency’s missions. It was Valentine’s Day weekend, frigid outside, and the government was busy firing tens of thousands of probationary employees for “performance,” without evidence.
Less than two weeks earlier, I had clicked to Reddit, hoping to check out a tip I no longer remember. My colleague, veteran federal affairs reporter Lisa Rein, had suggested sharing my contact information in r/fednews, a forum where some 300,000 federal employees were posting every few seconds to commiserate about their fates under a president determined to downsize the bureaucracy. Expecting little, feeling out of my depth — I was an education reporter — I wrote that I wanted to “speak with anyone willing to chat.” Then I listed my contact on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
The next day, I woke at sunrise to dozens of messages — the ruling pattern of my mornings ever since. I didn’t know it then, but this year would transform me into what one colleague dubbed “the federal government whisperer.” I would gain a new beat, a new editor and 1,169 contacts on Signal, all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories.
That Valentine’s Day, though, the unread message tally on my Signal app was much smaller, if still overwhelming: 256. Thumb hovering over the screen, I lifted my eyes to my fiancé’s face. I extended a pinkie toward the bags under his eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I started to apologize for canceling our dinner plans, and leaving the roses he’d bought me lying on the kitchen table, when my phone buzzed again. I looked down at number 257.
“You can’t even focus on me for five seconds,” he said, and rolled away.
I waited until he seemed to fall asleep. Then I opened Signal and kept typing.
Signal message sent Feb. 4
USAID Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance personnel are on admin leave from tonight. … Admin leave just has a start time and date, no termination date.
Signal message sent Feb. 13
DOGE is at DHS HQ looking at FEMA and CISA. All I can tell you. Best of luck. Deleting this conversation.
Signal message sent Feb. 23
I had no intention of leaving Federal service before the election, but I’m currently applying desperately in an effort to get back to private sector. Everything I liked about my job — telework, stability, serving the greater good — was taken from me.
The messages came from three-letter agencies whose sunglasses-clad agents I’d grown up watching actors play on television, and from a slew of smaller organizations I never knew existed. (America had an Advisory Council on Historic Preservation? An Appalachian Regional Commission?)
Almost everything felt urgent.
A Veterans Affairs worker: “Apparently tonight … employees are getting fired. These are psychologists who see patients. I will know more in the AM.”
A Social Security employee: “Every piece of our data may be at the mercy of unscrupulous people.”
An IRS staffer: There is “a team figuring out how to get … data sent to Doge,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team.
Some of these tips, I realized while scrolling my phone, should become stories — scoops, in journalism parlance — and fast. But these were topics I had never covered, like the potential compromise of hundreds of thousands of internal government records. People were saying our national security was at risk, but I didn’t know how to write about these things, or even who in our newsroom did.
Colleagues told me to join our internal tip-sharing Slack channel #federal-workers, then talk to Washington economics editor Mike Madden, who was coordinating our DOGE coverage. I started copying and pasting tips there as fast as I could, scraping out identifying details. Then, phone buzzing every few seconds, I speed-walked around the building until I found Mike. Skipping with grace over the fact we’d never met (and I didn’t work for him), he ferried me to every corner of the seventh floor: Meet the team covering technology. The team covering national security. The White House editors. Eventually, The Washington Post created a beat for me covering Trump’s transformation of government, and fielding Signal tips became nearly my whole working life.
Throughout those first months, the stories erupted from talented, hardworking colleagues across the newsroom: Trump had ousted 15 independent inspectors general in a late-night purge. DOGE was feeding sensitive Education Department data into artificial intelligence to target spending cuts. Federal officials were privately warning that Musk’s blitz on government was illegal. The government had repressed two reports showing the dire impacts of a U.S. aid freeze on Africa and Gaza, fearing Trump’s wrath.
Many Post pieces broke news the public would never have learned otherwise. Some came from my Signal.
“We just moved markets,” one reporter marveled about a scoop revealing the military planned to cut 8 percent from the defense budget.
“You’ve become the tip-line for The Washington Post,” another colleague joked.
“You look terrible,” my work wife said.
Signal message sent April 3
The plan is to terminate telework agreements the same day it is announced … We aren’t sure how this will be legal.
Signal message sent April 29
I have spent my entire life in government work and this is the first time I have ever done something like this because it has now gotten a bit out of hand. … all internal processes and the rules have been thrown out the window.
Signal message sent April 29
Dismantling of cyber group on [Department of Homeland Security] and other intel groups across federal agencies makes us vulnerable. We are very concerned of the risk we as a Nation is in right now.
I did look bad. I wasn’t sleeping much.
The stories came fast, the tips even faster. I kept worrying: What if I got something wrong? What if I got someone in trouble?
After consulting Post lawyers, I developed what we felt was the safest possible sourcing system. If I planned to use someone in a story, I asked them to send me a picture of their government ID, then tried to forget it. I kept notes from reporting conversations in an encrypted drive, never writing down anyone’s name. To Google-check facts and identities, I used a private browser with no search history. I retitled every Signal chat by agency — “Transportation Employee,” “FDA Reviewer,” “EPA Scientist” — until the app, unable to keep up, stopped accepting new nicknames. (Then I started moving contacts into two-person group chats, which I could still rename.)
I bought a privacy screen for my iPhone and my computer. I carried both with me at all times, even walking between rooms in my house.
I kept posting on r/fednews. I wanted to show people I was making use of what they told me. Every time I published a story, I shared it on Reddit, ending with my Signal and a request to “get in touch.”
And they did — which was becoming a problem. I’m an “Inbox Zero” person: I can’t end my workday until I’ve fielded every single email, Slack, text or Signal message. When I get sick, my fever dreams fill with little red-circled iPhone app notification badges.
I was going to bed answering Signal messages. I was waking up to answer Signal messages.
I spent our weekly dinners with my parents looking at the phone in my lap, copying Signal tips into Slack. Five Saturdays in a row, I canceled plans with the woman who will serve as maid of honor at my wedding.
“You know,” my fiancé said to me one day, as we came back from a dog walk I’d spent stuck to my phone, “I can’t remember the last time you finished a sentence without breaking off to check your Signal.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him. I said The Post was doing important reporting. I mentioned Inbox Zero. I started to cry. “If I don’t respond,” I said, “it feels like I’m letting them down.”
Signal message sent May 17
We really have no idea what is in store. I can’t continue to live like this. I don’t want to work for an entity that doesn’t respect or value me, which is a hard pill to swallow after so many years of just trying to protect human health and the environment.
Signal message sent May 17
I’m so concerned about our nation’s readiness for this upcoming hurricane season with ASPR and FEMA being crippled … due to restructuring and all the known changes but also the mass exodus of career feds.
Signal message sent May 20
The soul of America is at stake.
Later, feeling calmer, I tried again.
It felt stupid and selfish to worry about going to bed late or working weekends, I told my fiancé, when many federal staffers were losing their livelihoods. When people still employed were risking their livelihoods to talk to me.
I showed him our story revealing the U.S. Postal Service’s law enforcement arm was assisting with Trump’s “mass deportation” campaign — and a piece that uncovered how DOGE was trying to pool millions of Americans’ personal information. Shortly after we published an article scooping Social Security’s proposed cuts to phone services, the agency scrapped the idea, I said.
People inside government agencies weren’t supposed to tell me about any of that, I said. But they did. I read him some of their messages explaining why they’d helped.
“I’d never thought I’d be leaking info like this,” a Justice Department staffer wrote. “I’ve always felt a sense of duty to do what’s right for the country and the citizens … I believe in transparency.”
“I want to be able to keep fighting for the rule of law,” a Health and Human Services employee messaged, “even if just in my little slice of the agency.”
“I understand the risks,” a Defense Department worker wrote. “But getting the truth and facts out is so much more important.”
And from someone in the Army: “I am sharing this with you because the public needs to know the real-world consequences of this decision. … I urge you to cover this story before it’s too late.”
My fiancé nodded. I didn’t tell him about the worst messages I got.
Signal message sent Feb. 23
I think about jumping off a bridge a couple times a day.
Signal message sent March 21
I want to die. It’s never been like this.
Signal message sent May 21
I have been looking at how much I am worth alive, as opposed to dead.
Unsure how to respond to people’s despair, I got coffee with my colleague William Wan, whose horrifying, deeply human coverage of mental health I had long admired. “We have to write about this,” he said, so we spent months reporting a feature on federal workers’ struggles. We told the story of a Veterans Affairs manager in the Midwest who doubled her antidepression meds; of a California Forest Service biologist who signed up for therapy; of an NIH staffer in the South who, flooded with self-destructive thoughts, limited medication in her house. I attended the funeral of Monique Lockett, a Social Security employee who died at her desk after suffering a heart attack probably tied to stress. William spent time with the widowed husband and children of Caitlin Cross-Barnet, a federal health researcher who killed herself in February.
Still, the messages kept coming.
One day, a woman wrote to me on Signal, asking me not to respond. She lived alone, she messaged, and planned to die that weekend. Before she did, she wanted at least one person to understand: Trump had unraveled the government, and with it, her life.
I called William, feeling panic rise like hot liquid in the back of my throat.
He told me to stay calm. He told me to send the woman a list of crisis resources, starting with the 988 national suicide hotline. He told me to remember that reporters are not trained therapists or counselors, just human beings doing the best we can.
“You should try to help, but whatever this woman does or doesn’t do, it may happen regardless of anything you say,” William said. “It’s not up to you.”
I did what he said, then fell asleep refreshing the app, checking for a reply. The next morning, a message appeared below her name: “This person isn’t using Signal.”
Signal message sent Dec. 10
It’s been a hell of a year to keep up the “hold the line” mentality, but I am largely still here to keep corresponding with you and being truly helpful to the public.
Signal message sent Dec. 10
Should we stop? Are we wasting time? Should we stay and try to keep things from falling apart or should we try to find another job, even though this public service is what we love?
I still wake up to between 30 and 100 Signal notifications. Some become stories: Trump’s proposed foreign aid plan included a surprising $50 million for Greenland’s polar bears. Amid the buildup of American forces in the Caribbean, the Venezuelan president asked for Russian missiles. The Forest Service recently concluded in a private reportthat staffing losses meant its lands were being “abandoned,” filled with “unpassable trails, unsafe bridges.”
Other messages give updates on post-government jobs: Pet pictures, vacation shots. Good and bad medical diagnoses. A sparkling snowfall.
Still other people have closed their Signal accounts, and I’ll never know why.
Sometimes sources ask me how I’m holding up, as the long year wanes.
“Just grateful,” I write back, “that you’re talking to me.”
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