Anne Romatowski seen a small, smooth one thing within the flesh under her collarbone simply earlier than Christmas. She wasn’t involved. It was a bump on her uppermost ribs, not a lump in her breast. Nonetheless, she figured that she would possibly as properly schedule the routine mammogram she had been pushing aside for 10 months.
By the point her appointment got here round—on a frigid Thursday afternoon, the day earlier than Valentine’s Day—she had different worries. Donald Trump had returned to workplace promising to “drain the swamp” and had arrange a process power to root out extra and incompetence in Washington. Trump and the Division of Authorities Effectivity, headed by Elon Musk, had been focusing on the Client Monetary Safety Bureau, the place she had labored for 3 years remotely from New York. A couple of days earlier, Russell Vought, the appearing director of the company, had ordered all of its workers to halt their work.
The CFPB shielded taxpayers from romance scams, Ponzi schemes, extreme charges, unbreakable contracts, and confiscatory rates of interest. Romatowski specialised in synthetic intelligence. She studied how criminals used deepfaked voices to tear off the aged and the way biased banking algorithms charged Black households extra for mortgages than white households.
The bureau didn’t require a single penny of taxpayer assets. It generated a few of its finances by fines; the Federal Reserve coated the remaining. But DOGE fired 70 newly employed or just lately promoted workers on the CFPB two days earlier than Romatowski’s mammogram, sending every one an electronic mail composed so carelessly that it hadn’t bothered to interchange [EmployeeFirstName], [EmployeeLastName], and [JobTitle] with the recipient’s personal identify and title. “The Company finds that that you’re not match for continued employment,” the typo-laden electronic mail learn.
When the mammogram technologist noticed the bump under Romatowski’s collarbone, she took the scan, referred her for an ultrasound, and advised her to speak to a radiologist throughout the corridor instantly. Romatowski didn’t put her sweater again on, and went into the physician’s closet-size workplace sporting sneakers and slacks on the underside and a material hospital robe on prime.
Two laptop screens obscured the radiologist’s face, and a masks muffled his voice. “I’m sorry,” Romatowski stated. “Are you able to repeat that?” He overenunciated: “You could have a lump … in your left … breast. It’s extraordinarily … doubtless that you’ve got breast … most cancers.” She wanted a biopsy as quickly as potential. “Is there any approach that we are able to do it tomorrow?” she requested, choking again tears. “I work for the federal authorities, and I feel Elon Musk goes to fireside me.”
When she left the appointment, Romatowski despatched a number of texts to associates to ask for help earlier than her telephone died. She stopped within the foyer of a close-by lodge to plug it in. When she turned it again on, she was bombarded with pings on Sign and Slack. Dozens extra of her colleagues had been locked out of their computer systems that afternoon. Her union had despatched her a Zoom invitation to an emergency session for terminated staff. Elon Musk had fired her.
Romatowski joined the assembly from the nook of twenty third Avenue and Eighth Avenue, and ducked right into a Goal to get out of the chilly. She didn’t have headphones together with her, so she listened to the decision within the open, pushing an empty cart by the aisles. She couldn’t determine methods to get taken off of mute to ask what would occur to her medical health insurance.
A biopsy carried out a number of days later confirmed that she had a uncommon and aggressive kind of breast most cancers often called triple-negative. In some unspecified time in the future, a cell within the lining of one in all her milk ducts had adopted the instructions of a broken little bit of DNA and began proliferating at an unhinged tempo. Her physique had did not kill off the cell and its progeny, which grew right into a mass on her chest wall and infiltrated the lymph nodes close by. Docs suggested that she endure chemotherapy, immunotherapy, one other spherical of chemotherapy, and a mastectomy or lumpectomy, in addition to a possible third spherical of chemotherapy and radiation, to eradicate the illness.
On the identical time, functionaries in Washington had been beginning to “crush the deep state,” as Trump put it. The “regular creep of presidency paperwork” had sapped “the vitality and wealth of the folks,” he had claimed, accusing civil servants of leeching taxpayer assets and subverting the desire of the manager. Now he was following by on a promise he’d made on his first day in workplace: “We’re eliminating all of the most cancers.”
I was one of the folks Anne texted that afternoon when she left her mammogram. We’ve been associates for 20 years.
A couple of days later, I introduced a bottle of wine to her house and ordered us Thai meals. Anne picked at her noodles, preoccupied not together with her misfortune, however with planning and logistics. She had already arrange consultations with a number of physicians and networked with fellow breast-cancer sufferers. On the identical time, she was determining methods to go on her work to her colleagues who remained employed on the CFPB and scouring job listings for many who didn’t. Others had it worse than she did, she stated. “Lots of people get fired after they get sick. Lots of people get fired as a result of they’re sick.”
I’m biased, however Anne actually is selfless and levelheaded, dry-witted and good. She labored in what cold McKinsey varieties would possibly name “monetary inclusion,” however what she describes as “coverage work, near folks.” She had helped low-income moms in Washington, D.C., discover protected housing and good jobs. She had assessed anti-poverty applications whereas residing in Kenya. She had directed philanthropic funding in distressed communities within the Bronx and Houston and guarded New Yorkers from monetary swindles. Getting employed by the CFPB was “a dream,” she stated.
The company is the one monetary regulator specializing in direct help to the general public. Over the previous decade and a half, it has capped the late charges charged to 45 million credit-card holders, scrubbed medical debt from 15 million credit score reviews, managed as many as 50,000 complaints per week, returned $19.7 billion to shoppers, and fined corporations and people $5 billion.
Monetary companies require this sort of exacting, assertive oversight, Anne believes. They energy the economic system. However their tendency to interact in predatory lending and frothy hypothesis dangers pitching people into chapter 11 and the entire world into recession. (Certainly, fraud is a number one indicator of downturns; flailing corporations generally attempt to rip-off and swindle their approach again into the black.) The company gave Washington distinctive perception into family funds, and acted as an early-warning service for the nation’s systemic regulators, together with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Anne started her profession through the 2008 monetary disaster. She’d seen the way it devastated folks’s lives. The CFPB, she advised me, existed to “forestall it from occurring once more.”
However banks had lengthy argued that the CFPB stymied good monetary merchandise as a substitute of stamping out unhealthy ones. The American Bankers Affiliation solid it as a “regulator gone rogue.” The Chamber of Commerce accused it of “hurting shoppers by limiting alternative and diminishing competitors.” And Republicans on Capitol Hill had at all times felt that the CFPB was so impartial as to be unaccountable, as a result of Congress has no management over its finances and little management of its operations.
The Trump administration went additional. Vought, the CFPB’s appearing director, described the company as “woke & weaponized.” Musk posted, “CFPB RIP” on X in his first weeks in Washington. Trump known as it a “crucial factor to eliminate.” (Notably, the CFPB has regulatory authority over the president’s crypto token, X’s forthcoming cost system, and Tesla’s auto-lending arm.)
Anne thought her job may be reinstated, she advised me that evening in her house. The administration hadn’t gone by the authorized steps required for mass reductions in power. Plus, the Structure obligates the president to “take Care that the Legal guidelines be faithfully executed.” A legislation Congress handed in 2010, the Dodd-Frank Act, had created the CFPB and tasked it with defending Individuals from “unfair, misleading, or abusive” monetary contracts. Trump was imagined to act as a devoted executor of the company and its mission, whether or not he wished to or not.
The day she was fired, a authorized workforce representing her and her colleagues made that argument to a decide, accusing Vought and Trump of “the illegal dismantling” of a authorities company. “This a tragedy for American shoppers, and it’s lawless,” Deepak Gupta, an lawyer, argued. DOGE was planning to fireside practically the entire CFPB’s remaining workers. The plan was placed on maintain because the case began to work its approach by the courts.
In early March, Anne joined a name to debate her union’s authorized technique, then went to Memorial Sloan Kettering for an MRI of her tumor. An identical rush of appointments and conferences and paperwork consumed the remainder of the month. She had a painful ultrasound-guided biopsy of her axillary lymph nodes and consulted with advocates for the Neighborhood Growth Monetary Establishments Fund, which Trump was additionally making an attempt to close down. She had an echocardiogram and utilized for unemployment insurance coverage. She completed packing up her house in New York and moved again into her childhood bed room in McLean, Virginia, then had a chest port put in for IV infusions.
On the final Saturday in March, she acquired an electronic mail at 9:28 p.m. Choose Amy Berman Jackson had issued a 112-page opinion excoriating the Trump administration, whose intent, a sworn affidavit revealed, was to show the CFPB right into a “room at Treasury, White Home, or Federal Reserve with 5 males and a telephone.” The president was appearing in “full disregard of the choice Congress made,” Jackson wrote—the choice that the CFPB “should exist.”
Anne had her job again. On Monday, she learn the monetary papers. On Tuesday, she went to Georgetown College Hospital for her first spherical of chemo.
It took two weeks for the CFPB to reissue Anne a laptop computer. She went to the company’s headquarters close to the White Home to choose it up, and spent three hours ready within the foyer. The Trump administration had banned her and most different CFPB workers from coming into the constructing. When she lastly received the pc, it will not boot up.
Vought had ordered the company’s civil servants to cease what they had been doing, however he had not given them any directions on what to do as a substitute. Anne wasn’t positive what her job entailed anymore. Nonetheless, if she was drawing a wage, she was going to work. She was not allowed to carry any conferences with business representatives. So she pulled up knowledge on mergers and acquisitions. She couldn’t present technical help to different companies, such because the Securities and Alternate Fee. So she went to as many inside conferences as she may and carried out “statutory” duties particularly required by Dodd-Frank, comparable to monitoring fintech corporations’ public monetary statements. Every Monday, as DOGE required, she despatched an electronic mail to the Workplace of Personnel Administration with 5 bullet factors explaining what she had executed over the previous week.
Getting fired once more may be a “silver lining,” her oncologist advised her; that approach, she may give attention to her remedy. However she would lose her insurance coverage and her earnings. “The entire silver-lining factor wasn’t convincing,” she advised me. She did surprise if she ought to inform her boss that she was sick. She determined in opposition to it. She felt fantastic. She won’t later. The chemotherapy’s uncomfortable side effects—nausea, exhaustion, anemia, mind fog, digestive issues—would intensify over time. The summer time could be worse than the spring, the autumn worse than the summer time, the winter worse than the autumn.
On April 17, she acquired an electronic mail with the topic line “Particular Discover of Discount in Drive.” She would lose entry to her laptop and electronic mail account once more on the finish of the next enterprise day, DOGE advised her, and he or she could be positioned on administrative go away for 2 months. Then she could be let go.
That evening, she joined a digital city corridor with tons of of different laid-off workers. The CFPB had 1,700 staff when Trump got here into workplace, and now had solely 200 left. Even when the courtroom gave Anne and her colleagues their jobs again, the company was disintegrating. Scores of expert civil servants had retired or taken positions outdoors authorities. The Trump administration had canceled contracts for consumer analysis and testing, monetary administration, “inside controls,” and “id entry software program.” The remaining workers didn’t have the talents or capability essential to do the work required by legislation, not to mention the novel work the company had undertaken lately.
After I visited Anne in Virginia in late April, she advised me that she frightened about scammers stealing grandparents’ retirement financial savings, thieves hacking folks’s financial institution accounts, sports-betting apps bleeding younger males dry, and “purchase now, pay later” corporations focusing on poor shoppers. I frightened about her. She had dyed her hair pink, however little of it remained. She moved slowly. I stored asking how she was doing. Dropping your job, getting most cancers, and transferring again in along with your mother and father—it was a heck of a punch line, she advised me, in addition to a intestine punch. The factor that basically upset her was the way in which Vought talked about his personal colleagues in authorities. In a leaked video, he’d stated he wished “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” He wished them “to not need to go to work as a result of they’re more and more considered because the villains.” He wished to “put them in trauma.”
After I noticed Anne, I reached out to Rohit Chopra, who had led the CFPB from 2021 till Trump fired him in February. In non-public, Chopra advised me, many elected Republicans supported the company. It had executed quite a bit for his or her constituents, even when few would say that out loud. Trump was not solely destroying the company, he believed, however destroying state capability and “the human capital that basically powers” the federal government. He couldn’t fairly articulate what it will take for the system to heal.
Chopra has identified Anne for a very long time and he admires her work, he advised me, although he hesitated to linger on her contributions to the company. He frightened about specializing in the plight of civil servants somewhat than the folks they serve. And he frightened about his feedback sounding “nearly obituary,” given her well being standing. The problem is private for him. Chopra was identified with thyroid most cancers days after Trump gained his first presidential contest. He was present process remedy whereas main the CFPB. “You by no means need to really feel prefer it’s over,” he stated.
Two days after my go to, Anne acquired an electronic mail with the topic line “Recission of Particular Discover in Discount in Drive.” (The e-mail misspelled the phrase rescission.) DOGE had ignored a courtroom order requiring it to carry out a “particularized evaluation” of every worker it fired, a whistleblower had testified: “All that mattered was the numbers.” Choose Jackson compelled the Trump administration to reinstate Anne and her colleagues once more.
At the start of June, I went again to Virginia to take Anne to immunotherapy and chemo. The evening earlier than the appointment, at her mother and father’ home, we talked for hours. She confirmed me an electronic mail she had gotten from the Treasury’s human-resources workplace that day, informing her that she had been overpaid and owed $11,292.50 to the federal government. (By her personal calculations, the Treasury truly owed her curiosity on again wages.) I watched as she despatched her weekly electronic mail, distilling her labor into DOGE-mandated bullet factors.
A couple of weeks earlier, I had put her in contact with my buddy Allison Rockey, who had simply accomplished remedy for a similar type of aggressive breast most cancers Anne has, and on the identical hospital. Allison had given Anne particular mitts to carry chilly packs in opposition to her palms and ft throughout chemo, to mitigate the nerve harm the treatment could cause. Anne had been which means to achieve again out to Allison so they might catch up, she advised me.
I sputtered. Allison had thought she was in remission, however the most cancers had metastasized to her mind. She had died two days earlier than. Anne hadn’t heard but. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I stated half a dozen occasions. Anne interrupted me. “I’m sorry,” she stated.
The following morning, I confirmed up with an N95 masks on. We loaded the automotive and commuted throughout the Potomac River. On the hospital, Anne met with a nurse practitioner to debate some gastrointestinal signs she had been having. The nurse ordered a CT scan of her stomach; if it confirmed extreme irritation, she would suggest that Anne skip per week of chemo. The phlebotomist struggled to discover a vein to manage the distinction fluid for the scan. Anne needed to go to a distinct a part of the hospital to have one other supplier entry the port in her chest. It took hours to get the take a look at and the go-ahead.
Within the mid-afternoon, we lastly received settled on the infusion heart. I persuaded her to let me get us lunch. “Actually something,” I advised her. “Actually something you need to eat.” Why not lobster and champagne? She settled on crab muffins, which arrived in a comically fancy field. As she ate, I yapped, making an attempt to cheer her up.
Nurses hooked her as much as a pump, and I helped strap Allison’s chilly mitts onto her palms and ft. They didn’t simply defend in opposition to neuropathy, but in addition lowered the possibility that she would lose a fingernail or toenail and find yourself with an an infection, Anne advised me. “If you happen to get sick whilst you have most cancers, you’ll be able to die,” she stated. “You may get an an infection that your physique can’t battle, after which you could possibly die.”
Because the life-destroying, lifesaving treatment flowed into her, Anne drifted off. I questioned what she could be like the subsequent time I noticed her. I stored occupied with Susan Sontag’s 1978 meditation on most cancers, a illness she described as “spectacularly” caught within the “trappings of metaphor.” On the time, writers used most cancers as an allegory for emotional repression and encumbered it with idioms of disgrace. In 2025, the predominant metaphors contain most cancers’s endogeneity. It’s the illness that comes from inside.
The evening earlier than, Anne had advised me how transferring she’d discovered it to take the oath of workplace. Her grandfathers had enlisted within the navy and fought for this nation; her mom had labored on the Hill and her father for the Justice Division. She felt proud to be a public worker, sworn to “help and defend the Structure in opposition to all enemies, overseas and home.” When she wakened the subsequent day, she would go online to her laptop and do her job. She would attempt to defend shoppers, as her docs would attempt to defend her, as her union would attempt to defend the CFPB, as monetary regulators would attempt to defend the markets, because the courts and the bureaucrats would attempt to defend the Structure and the nation—human beings in human methods making an attempt to heal human faults.
For his half, Elon Musk has given up on making an attempt to manage his radical remedy to the civil servants Trump had described as a metastatic illness. After falling out with the president and failing to make the federal government extra environment friendly, Musk had fired himself from DOGE.
*Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Courtesy of Anne Romatowski; Peter Dazeley / Getty.
