On Valentine's Day, I received a note that upended my life. “Due to the restructuring and changes to USDS’s mission, USDS no longer has need for your services,” it read.

As a cybersecurity professional for more than 30 years, I was aware that I was taking a risk when, the night before, I sent a call for volunteers to speak at a rally being organized by the group Federal Workers Against DOGE, to a private list of current and former U.S. Digital Service workers.

I don’t regret my decision. This is not a time for federal workers to be making safe, self-preserving choices. If ever there was a time for dedicated civil servants to act courageously, that time is now.

By writing this, I’m incurring even more risk. I have spent the past few days trying my best to scrub my data from the internet, out of concern that the wealthiest man on Earth might send his minions after me. I am writing this anyway, because I hope that in doing so I can contribute in some way to saving our country from people who want to destroy it.

This is not idle rhetoric — things are as bad as you think, or worse.

I left the private sector to join USDS in 2023 because I believed in its mission, “to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the greatest need,” and its founding idea of bringing private-sector technical expertise into public service to modernize government systems and make them more effective. Given my........

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