Laying the groundwork
A few months ago, a few of us started to talk about what we needed to understand the speed and scale of institutional collapse that was suddenly upon us. We knew—from our own lives, and from our experience in journalism, tech, and mutual aid—that it was impossible to grasp what was happening through feeds and updates designed to atomize our attention. We also knew that without that understanding, we wouldn’t be able to respond effectively, or make choices about how to protect ourselves, our families, and our communities. Mapping the damage and its human costs—as well as the pushback and resilience work already underway—is critical groundwork for building and retaining political agency.
What we’re doing
So here we are. Our aim with Unbreaking is to orient and ground our fellow Americans in clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters. To that end, we’re building a set of frequently but not frantically updated pages written by and for ordinary people. Each page will serve as a backgrounder for a specific issue, including essential context, what’s happened so far, and what countermoves are in play.
In some ways, the work is simple: We assemble lists of events, build out contexts and connections, and write explainers for people without specialist expertise.
In other ways, it’s challenging:
- We work together to compile disparate sources, understand and describe the workings of a huge and interconnected government, and make sense of the often chaotic attempts to dismantle those workings.
- Then we try to explain the human effects and the ways people are trying to preserve necessary governmental services and functions, protect their neighbors and communities, and build systems for collective survival.
- Finally, we assemble everything into living, frequently updated resources that ordinary people (like us) can return to over time to understand what’s happening, why it matters, and who’s trying to help.
…while setting up the organizational capacity to do the work in sustainable ways that don’t burn people out or make us vulnerable to ideological capture or editorial drift.
It’s a lot! So we’re starting small, with just a few pages we’ve been using to validate and tune our processes and train our first cohort of volunteers. Our first pages cover:
- The administration’s efforts to eviscerate Medicaid, with proposed cuts of up to $880 billion, likely to result in millions of people losing their sole healthcare coverage.
- The multi-pronged assault on transgender healthcare, including restrictions on gender-affirming care for people under 19, federal workers, service members, veterans, people incarcerated in federal prisons, and people covered by marketplace insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act.
- And how moves to decimate the federal workforce speak to larger scale plans to target workplace equality more generally, with significant consequences for all workers and for Black Americans and veterans especially.
Upcoming pages will dive into food safety, funding cuts to medical research, and threats against the USPS, as well as digging into the additional ways the administration is targeting workplace equality.
If any of this sounds like something you want to help with, please fill out our intake form!
What we’re not doing
We aren’t doing original reporting or compiling data: Our work builds on the crucial efforts of the thousands of reporters, editors, analysts, and organizations working to calculate and contextualize the effects of major changes in governance and policy. If we can serve as a source of coherent overviews and links to deep explanations, we’ll consider our work a success.
We do not and cannot accept leaks or whistleblower disclosures. Please don’t send them to us; we’ll delete them unread.
We don’t cover international affairs, including international aid and foreign policy. We also don’t cover state and local governance except in the most glancing ways, as they interact with federal governance. These areas are vitally important, but covering domestic policy—and the domestic effects of things like trade policy—at the federal level is an enormous undertaking, and we recognize our limitations. We invite teams situated to take on international and state- and local-level work to adopt and adapt our structures and materials whenever they’re useful—everything we make, including our tech and content, will be available under a CC-BY license, and we’ll do our best to document our work in ways that can help other efforts.
What comes next
In the coming weeks, we’re working on publishing additional pages about food safety, the USPS, medical research, and more; refining our processes for updating existing pages; and leveling up our small but growing volunteer crew to build out the structures for us to keep doing this work sustainably and thoughtfully.
—The Unbreaking Team