As you know, my new job is taking care of my neighbor’s dog. As part of my value add when caring for someone else’s pets I like to take pictures of them and send them to the owner. 

Now, the only other pets I’ve taken care of were for my friends who were in the hospital having a baby who did not want to come out so I took care of their cats, but they seemed to really appreciate it so I do it for my neighbor too.

For those keeping tabs, everyone in my agency was fired. I was fired effective April 25. The probationary employees were fired and then won a court case, were reinstated, and then fired again. Then we were all fired again. My new effective date is July 1. We didn’t have access to our email or other systems, and now we do. We are all on administrative leave, meaning we have no work to do but we’re getting paid anyway. 

Monday we got a message inviting us to volunteer to work. You will be astounded that my reaction was mild and did not involve any curse word. 

Today the Africa Bureau held a meeting where we were told that there will be lots of work moving all the files over to the State Department and we will be called in to help. 

A number of us, myself concerned, expressed concerns that, because closing down USAID is illegal, compliance would = participating in an illegal activity. One person suggested giving us a legal document from someone in General Counsel saying that what we are doing is not illegal. Well, they can’t do that, they fired all the General Counsel. We were told there was zero chance the “Political General Counsel” will give us that document. I asked them to communicate to “Political General Counsel” that many of us expressed concern about engaging in illegal activity.

Now I would like to curse. 

They expressed needs in three areas
- HR - helping all the people who want to retire, helping all the people coming from overseas, helping to fire everyone
- helping our local country staff with recommendations and reviewing their resumes
- helping with document retention, which is a very very very big deal in government and part of why Signal Gate is so serious - the system is designed to delete messages and that is absolutely illegal.

If you needed help doing all the HR activity in bringing people back from overseas, maybe you shouldn’t have fired all the HR people? 

I don’t understand the HR bureaucracy as it applies to me, never mind as it applies to all these other people so I can’t help with that.

I’ve already given LinkedIn references to all the local staff I have worked with but I can certainly review their resumes. 

Helping transfer documents is helping to shut down the agency, something that is illegal, and I don’t intend to help with that. 

And bite me.

Speaking of malicious cruelty and incompetence, many of our local staff - staff who are citizens of and live in the countries where we worked - are in danger. They helped the United States to promote democracy, or human rights, or prevent gender based violence. Trump and Elon said we were all felons and lunatics and the entire agency was fraud, corruption, and waste. Now their governments are investigating them for working for the United States and using those comments as justification. 

Being asked to do something illegal is a bit of a plot twist?

Ukraine is about to give its soldiers a new weapon. It is a grenade launcher! It was developed by Ukrainian engineers and meets NATO standards. It has its own tripod. It uses the same ammo as NATO. 

Russia unveiled a T-14 Armata as the most advanced battle tank in the world, a generation ahead of western tanks. It was unveiled in 2015 at a Victory Day Parade. The tank has not seen significant combat. Sanctions restricted access to critical components. While Russia has tried to sell it internationally, no one has bought any.