But it was also unfamiliar.

A kind of chaotic article from the NYT.  A Year After U.S.A.I.D.’s Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss by Elisabeth Bumiller and Eileen Sullivan.  The subheading is People have plowed through savings, cashed out retirement funds and moved in with relatives. Former U.S.A.I.D. workers estimate that less than half have found full-time work.

The core argument for the closing of USAID was that we spent a lot of money to very little measurable effect.  The counter-argument was that it was soft-power and while the benefits could not be measured, the consequences would be catastrophic.  

A year later and the jury is still out.  Even in this sob-story article, they acknowledge:

Others acknowledged that there was bloat and waste in the agency and a need for reform. Much of the $35 billion it managed in 2024 went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to people in need overseas. The success of many projects was hard to measure.

Bumiller and Sullivan are focused on hard the experience has been on the most experienced and highest paid members of USAID management.  I doubt that was quite the argument they intended to make but looking at who they interviewed, the most experienced and highest paid members of USAID management, that it is what they ended up with.  One might assume that those below the top level may have had an easier time finding work based just on what is presented.

It is worth stipulating that all unexpected change can be traumatic on individuals, even if it leads to better things and especially if not.

In the comments there are all the arguments one might expect.  Horrible Trump and Musk.  Useless USAID.  Entitled execs and contractors sponging off the taxes of hard-working Americans.  Money spent with nothing to show for it.  Nobody deserves such hardships.  And on and on.

What struck me was the patent bubble-insularity of Washington.  Something which is well-known but on ready display here.  Time and again, in different words, there is the same regret.  People are sorry they can't continue doing what they enjoyed doing even though people might not have wanted to pay for it and even though there was nothing to show for it.  

The other thing which struck me was more fundamental.  

Nothing being described is unfamiliar to those in the open market.  It was in part traumatic to the USAID employees because they were unfamiliar with the experience of loss and change which everyone else routinely experience.

There is a systems issue which goes by many different names.  In a dynamic environment, systems evolve and adapt.  Some constantly evolve and adapt, making thousands of small adjustments all the time.  Other systems evolve and stabilize.  They cease to adapt until some external event occurs which disrupts everything and forces dramatic and traumatic change.

Some call that punctuated equilibrium.  I like it to geological movement and living on a dynamic plate system.  Do you want the inconvenience of the ground slipping fractions of an inch at a time with thousands of tiny almost unnoticeable quakes or do you want to live in a zone where there is no movement for a century and then there is a massive slip of ten feet.  In both cases, there was always going to be a movement of ten feet.  Do you want it in small incremental but constant changes or in one big event?

The competitive market is like that.  That which cannot continue won't.  Companies are always changing given changes in consumer demand and fancy, changes among competitors, in technology, in supply chains, regulations, etc.  Change is constant and companies have to adapt.  Usually through a thousand small adjustments and occasionally in big events (mergers, closure of a business, etc.)  

In government spheres, where exposure to consequences is more muted and famously, government programs are the closest thing to immortality we can know, there is only the catastrophic change.  Interestingly, in the comments to the article, there are voices arguing that changes was needed, had been needed for decades, but that abolition was the wrong solution.  We should have waited more years without the needed change.  

The stories in the article are perfectly familiar because we all know people who have experienced this sort of thing.  We know many people who have experienced.  Some more than once in their lifetime.  It is tragic and familiar.  

The loss of their livelihoods for the USAID executives was similarly tragic for them.  But it was also unfamiliar.