#ServiceMembers

[thefinancialbootcamp]

A Journey from Financial Instability to Bitcoin Stability

I was once someone who constantly chased the next big thing in the world of crypto, always searching for that golden opportunity that would finally change my financial future. My portfolio was a chaotic mix of speculative investments—some in promising altcoins, others in fleeting trends—and I thought a diversified portfolio of alts was the answer. But it felt like I was always on the brink of…

[alfred123]

Exploring Military Direct Access with Dr. Troy McGill

Join us for an enlightening conversation with Dr. Troy McGill as we delve into the world of Military Direct Access. Explore the benefits, challenges, and evolving landscape of military healthcare, where direct access to medical services can be crucial for service members and veterans.

[chunmeista-thoughts]

Dear US servicemembers-- see how the empire will decide to treat you if it sees you as a threat? Just like the rest of us.

Even if you are a part of the military. Even if you are literally burning to death.

I know a lot of you do it for the money. That's fair. But please, make a decision here.

US weapons, created by US corporations, are maiming and killing Palestinian, Yemeni, and Lebanese people in the name of a US puppet state. Is this what you fight for?

It should be said you don't need to take such drastic action as self-immolation. There's a whole list of reasons why and I think crimethinc puts it best:

https://crimethinc.com/2024/02/26/this-is-what-our-ruling-class-has-decided-will-be-normal-on-aaron-bushnells-action-in-solidarity-with-gaza

But you should decide, sooner rather than later, whether you're prouder to be "American", or human.

[bearsinpotatosacks]

you know you're in deep in top gun special interest when you're doing quizzes to find out if Carole would be eligible for medicare and tricare. And you're british, so don't have to deal with healthcare

[cryptidcurrencies]

Sat in the exit row between a former marine and an active duty army dork on a plane on the way home. Forcibly engaged them in conversation as a form of torture for about an hour, during which I told them I was some kind of "literacy consultant" for the military in a new program they were running at Grissom (i am absolutely not doing that at all, I just wanted to tell them that I teach marines how to read and see how they reacted). I told the army dork that I might end up working with him soon. I was as obnoxious as I was capable of being without making it obvious that I was trying, and I considered it a public service to do that because they were both as kitted out as possible (army dork had a 'one shot one kill US ARMY' patch on his backpack, YUCK, and former marine had a leatherneck MC shirt AND phone background. Get a life idiots etc etc)

[erebusvincent]

Our military is struggling, but she was fired for being a woman. It’s silly to pretend otherwise. It will be interesting to what Hegseth does regarding women in the military. He wants them out, but I doubt it will be anything as direct as a ban. I suspect he’ll do everything possible to make serving so unpleasant that women will choose to leave or not enlist in the first place.

[hachama]

There's a story I like about a Jewish servicemember who wanted to wear a kippah in uniform. He goes to his rabbi, who happens to be a chaplain, and tells him "rabbi, I want to wear a kippah, but I'm worried my chain of command won't let me."

Rabbi asks "what kind of kippah do you want to wear?"

"Just a little black one that fits under my cover"

"Excellent, here's what you do. Get a Bukharan kippah, the more colorful the better, and wear it tomorrow."

"But rabbi, I don't want to wear a Bukharan kippah, and I don't want to wear a colorful kippah."

"Trust me."

So the servicemember wears the brightly colored Bukharan kippah.

Later that day, an officer comes to see the rabbi.

"Rabbi, you have to help me. There's a servicemember at my command who started wearing a kippah, and it's so big and brightly colored. Please, rabbi, you've got to talk him down."

"Ill handle it."

And the servicemember switched to the little black kippah he'd wanted all along, and everyone thought they'd come out ahead.

I mention this, because we've got a design at work that's failing some tests, but the customer won't let us make very reasonable updates. My job is to come up with a proposal that they'll really hate, to make the updates we want look much more palatable.

[elumish]

I think one of the most fundamental plot failures I see across a lot of books is that the person chosen to solve a problem is not a person who it makes sense to choose to solve this problem.

This ends up being true for a lot of YA books where the teenager is the chosen solution to a problem because they need to be for plot reasons, but there is no actual logical reason why anyone would be relying on them to solve this problem (or often even letting them get close to this problem). No, this kid can't work for the FBI or the Secret Service. No, this twelve-year-old won't be a more accomplished soldier than a fully-trained servicemember. No, this kid isn't allowed to practice medicine.

And you can work around this by presenting a reason for them to be involved despite being less qualified--usually that they put themselves in a situation, despite the adults around them, but also that there is something else that makes them suited to a job/role despite their other lack of qualifications (we need someone who can blend in, etc.).

But it's also true for a lot of adult books. I'm reading a book where the ER doctor/medical professor First Gentleman is going to lead the response to a plane full of people who potentially have Marburg virus, and even ignoring the fact that he wouldn't be allowed within a thousand feet of that plane by the Secret Service, that also fundamentally just does not make sense with how U.S. pandemic and quarantine response work (or even how medicine works--an ER doctor is generally not an infecious disease specialist). It's waved away for plot reasons--but it also represents a failure of the plot as a whole.

Why is your character the one who is trying to solve this problem? Is it their job? If it's not their job, what does it mean for the story for them to be trying to solve a problem that they aren't qualified for, may not have access to, and/or aren't allowed to deal with?

If your only answer is "it works because it needs to work for plot reasons" then it doesn't work at all.

[thefinancialbootcamp]

Understanding Annuities: A Financial Tool for U.S. Service Members’ Retirement

Annuities are a topic that often comes up in discussions about retirement planning. Essentially, they are products sold by insurance companies designed to provide a steady income stream until death, which can make them an attractive option for those looking to secure their financial future post-service. Let’s explore how annuities can be particularly relevant and beneficial for service…

[batboyblog]

This year’s Trans Day of Visibility hits differently than in years past. This is a frightening time for trans people. I know many of you are scared. Truthfully, I am, too.

Since day one of this administration, they have pursued a crusade of cruelty against trans people – hurting us for the sake of hurting us. They’re requiring our forced outing on several identity documents. They’re summarily firing qualified federal workers who are disproportionately LGBTQ, Black, women, and veterans. They’re trying to purge patriotic transgender servicemembers. They’re trying to insert government between patients, parents, and providers to stop medically necessary care and support. They’re targeting students for bullying and invasive inspections. And they’re trying to make it harder for us to participate in public life by making it difficult and dangerous to use necessary facilities.

The stakes couldn’t be higher and, because of that, we need allies now more than ever before. We’re understandably worried and vigilant for any evidence that our defenders won’t be there when we need them. After a lifetime of pushing progress, from passing nondiscrimination protections in Delaware to helping to draft the Equality Act federally, I won’t stop fighting for the dignity of every person I represent, including my trans constituents. I've been trying to fight hard and smart since taking office in January. I won’t always be perfect. But from joining my trans constituents at rallies in Delaware to joining my colleagues in DC in opposition to this administration’s anti-equality actions, it’s going to take all of us speaking out publicly and speaking with people one-on-one to meet this moment.

Those conversations, sometimes uncomfortable, can lead to critical solidarity precisely when we need it most. In this Congress, nearly every House Democrat voted against the only anti-trans bill that has come before us – laying the foundation for the Senate Democrats to block its passage. I’m grateful for the allyship of my colleagues.

We must remain firm in our values and our vision in this moment – and, just as importantly, we should never give up on our ability to win over more people to more fully see our humanity and support our rights. It’s not always fair work, and it’s certainly not always easy work, but through the power of our proximity we can still open the hearts and change the minds of imperfect or unlikely allies.

It has been through the power of our proximity that we find our superpower. We exist in families and communities across every region and race, across every income and ideology. We are organic changemakers when we live lives of joy, humor, brilliance, and kindness in view of — and for some of us, in difficult conversation with — people who have more to learn. And while we won’t win everyone over, when we both build community among ourselves and forge a coalition beyond us, no amount of progress is impossible.

That’s what we celebrate on this Trans Day of Visibility. Our visibility not only has the ability to inspire one another. It also has the capacity to push past the caricatures to invite more people in, to grow the tent of allies, to defeat the hateful attacks, and to lay the foundation for freedom and safety for trans people in every corner of our country and every part of our globe.

-Congresswoman Sarah McBride Democrat, Delaware 3/31/2025

[probablyasocialecologist]

THE REGIONAL WAR in the Middle East now involves at least 16 different countries and includes the first strikes from Iranian territory on Israel, but the United States continues to insist that there is no broader war, hiding the extent of American military involvement. And yet in response to Iran’s drone and missile attacks Saturday, the U.S. flew aircraft and launched air defense missiles from at least eight countries, while Iran and its proxies fired weapons from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

[...]

While the world has been focused on — and the Pentagon has been stressing — the comings and goings of aircraft carriers and fighter jets to serve as a “deterrent” against Iran, the U.S. has quietly built a network of air defenses to fight its regional war. “At my direction, to support the defense of Israel, the U.S. military moved aircraft and ballistic missile defense destroyers to the region over the course of the past week,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Saturday. “Thanks to these deployments and the extraordinary skill of our servicemembers, we helped Israel take down nearly all of the incoming drones and missiles.” As part of that network, Army long-range Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense surface-to-air missile batteries have been deployed in Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and at the secretive Site 512 base in Israel. These assets — plus American aircraft based in Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — are knitted together in order to communicate and cooperate with each other to provide a dome over Israel (and its own regional bases). The United Kingdom is also intimately tied into the regional war network, while additional countries such as Bahrain have purchased Patriot missiles to be part of the network. Despite this unambiguous regional network, and even after Israel’s attack on Iran’s embassy in Syria earlier this month, the Biden administration has consistently denied that the Hamas war has spread beyond Gaza. It is a policy stance — and a deception — that has held since Hamas’s October 7 attack. “The Middle East region is quieter than it has been in two decades,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an ill-timed remark eight days before October 7. “We don’t see this conflict widening as it still remains contained to Gaza,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the day after three U.S. troops were killed by a kamikaze drone launched by an Iran-backed militia at a U.S. base in Jordan. Since then (and even before this weekend), the fighting has spread to Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen.

[odinsblog]

When I was a little boy, the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor. It was a surprise attack, and thousands of U.S. servicemembers perished. As a nation, we were stunned. And we vowed to strike back. Revenge was understandably on everyone’s mind, including many Americans of Japanese descent who opposed the emperor and were peaceful and law-abiding U.S. citizens and residents.

In its zeal to exact that revenge, however, the U.S. government overreacted, out of fear and bigotry. They targeted everyone who happened to look like the people who had carried out the attack. Those of us who had done nothing wrong were forced to pay the consequences for the decisions of others far away and disconnected from us. We were interned for years, in open-air prisons, while America went off to fight Japan, Germany and Italy.

It’s so important that we carry the lessons of the past through to today. Merely because one group commits atrocities and acts with depravity does not mean vast hundreds of thousands or even millions of others should be lumped together with them and made to suffer. We must never paint with the brush of justice and retaliation too broadly, or the toll of human suffering will rise immeasurably.

—George Takei

[gemmahale]

Okay, I'm home, I've been on the road for the better part of 4 hours today due to a miscommunication and a cancelled event, and I've had this rant brewing.

Being Anti-Military and Pro-Veteran are stances that can mutually exist.

Games like CoD and whatever other FPS/Military Simulation game is out there is propaganda. It’s meant to make you want to sign up or support military action.

The military (I’m speaking specifically to the US, as I am most familiar with them by proxy) uses some incredibly underhanded techniques to ensure they have the warm bodies soldiers they need to keep the system working as intended.

This includes but is not limited to: promises of paying for education, aspirations of “seeing the world”, provision of job security, access to healthcare, a stable job and housing, etc. They use things like “patriotism” and “glory” and “security” to lure people in.

And then, when that person is wholly and completely reliant on the military - for a paycheck, housing, healthcare, you name it - they spit them back out into the world with a "thanks a lot and good fucking luck."

Into a world where:

Financial support for care has been axed and axed and axed again under "budget cuts"

Care is secured with red tape so thick you can tightrope walk across it

Care is denied for things the military caused (by saying "it didn't happen while you were serving".) *Yes, that's a direct quote from a doctor to one of Kallen's peers. When assessing a life-altering injury sustained while they were in country overseas, it was deemed as "non-service related injury”.

In comparison to civilians:

Veterans are ~40% more likely to be homeless.

Veterans are ~80% more likely to suffer from untreated mental and physical health issues - PTSD, hearing loss, nerve damage, etc.

Veterans are ~60% more likely to turn to addictive substances - alcohol, drugs, etc.

Veterans are ~70% more likely to commit suicide.

This isn’t limited to combat vets. Logistics specialists, administrative specialists, IT specialists all get screwed when they leave.

Ask just about any veteran that has served, they are incredibly likely to be staunchly anti-military.

The military causes a tremendous amount of damage to every person involved, even if they aren't aware of it at the time.

It’s a cult, it’s an abusive relationship, it’s predatory. Treat it as such.

Support veterans, advocate for their care. They made choices you may not agree with, but they made them because of what they thought the military was offering to them. Many thought they were doing the right thing for their country - that was the lie they were fed from 9/11 on (in the US). Then they were chewed up, spit out, and left for dead by the same people that made all those promises to them.

Here are some US-based, apolitical Veteran Support groups (many have International chapters/members):

22 Until None - 501-C3 that provides support to veterans by veterans. There are local chapters on Facebook that are all active and are listed on the website

Disabled American Veteran - Veteran help association; involved in legislation and local assistance, connections to VA advocates to help navigate the VA

Wounded Warrior Project - 501-C3 charity supporting disabled veterans.

Note: I am absolutely not doing the "not all servicemembers" thing here. I'm saying "veterans are living with their choices, and still deserve access to care."

[scarwasright]

Asking white people why we feel the urge to portray the Elrics as brown.

To nip this bad faith reading in the bud: No, I'm not speaking against the re-imagining of protagonists as people of color because a fan might want to see themselves in a work of art where they are underrepresented.

I'm speaking to the very specific recent (last ~5-10 years or so) fandom trend of giving Ed and Al darker skin and changing absolutely nothing about the context under which they move through their fictional world.

Any person with even some faint trace of a critical pulse can smell the stink on FMA's, particularly the manga's and PARTICULARLY BH's, racial politics. The protagonists are descended from a mythologized dead race of pale blond people from the desert, and Edward is also posited as the ultimate moral compass on which the series' thematic logic turns. The latter is archetypal of a Shounen. From jump, if we're delivering A Lesson, Edward is always right. The series generally doesn't think there's anything wrong with the militaristic status quo (so long as we rout the shadow cabal living under the capital (don't think about that too hard)), so Edward also thinks there is nothing wrong with it. This causes him, from time to time, to butt heads with survivors of a genocide perpetrated by the army that he works for. Because FMAB wants to have its cake and eat it, too: It postures as being about Serious Things, like industrialized imperialism, but it also abjectly refuses to shed its Shounen trappings, lest it come to the not-so-feel-good conclusion that it was the militaristic status quo that enabled horrific violence in the first place. The protagonist is a willful member of an elite class of soldiers who were deployed in recent living memory to wipe an indigenous population off the map, but he is ideologically opposed to using guns because they kill people. The protagonist must always win with friendship, might, and vague niceties about how all lives matter.

Making Ed brown does not alleviate this contradiction. It only highlights the insecurity of the white people in the room who can tell that something is Off, but aren't willing to engage with it in a meaningful way.

The knee-jerk reaction to make Xerxians darker isn't an unreasonable one. The canon as it is presented could have been lifted from one of many white supremacist pseudo-histories about mystical ancestral white people. The fact that FMA wasn't created by a white person does not negate this, especially when that person is of the majority within her own imperial nation. Hiromu Arakawa is not Ainu, and she has never claimed to be. The idea that she is comes from a game of fandom telephone based on an interview where she mentions that she has relatives who are. This erroneous extrapolation fits within the same bubble of white comfort as redesigning Ed to be brown: If Arakawa is indigenous, she has implicit authority on the subject of indigeneity within her fiction. If Edward is brown, then all the Ick that self-proclaimed progressive people get when he is talking down at Scar or Miles goes away.

But both of these sentiments are self-comforting fallacies.

Making Edward brown within the fiction of Fullmetal Alchemist while changing nothing about his worldview and experiences does nothing but provide a notion of legitimacy and authority to his moral stances that clash with other brown characters who have less favorable views on the military status quo. He is still a willing servicemember in an army that only a decade ago wiped an entire ethnic region off the map.

Brown Edward is just another entry in fandom's long legacy of "brown paper doll" characters-- Characters who are visibly people of color, but who have no cultural or ideological grounding that might reasonably stem from their racialization within the fiction. Characters who are palatable to white people because they do not force us into discomfort, whose suffering is Noble because it does not move them to hatred or violence against the systems and people who oppress them. Characters who very often have skin that's been eyedropped a shade darker, but who lack any other features deemed unfavorable by white supremacy.

I don't engage much with fandom critique these days, because after so much time here, I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people would rather dig their heels in and continue to pretend that an anime they like is something that is simply is not. That a cartoon "likes women" (whatever the fuck that means) simply because it has more women in it than others of a similar genre. That it is "anti-imperialist" because the imperialists who have more power when the curtain closes than they did when it opened Feel Bad about the genocide they did. This post is already written from the assumption that the reader is aware of the reactionary undercurrents of FMAB's themes and political messaging, which means it's already going to miss a lot of people who are, frankly, ignorant, be it because they lack the critical framework to deconstruct a story's contradictory or problematic elements, or because they simply don't want to or don't care. I know I'm not reaching them. I haven't even gotten into how glaring it is that the vast majority of fandom would rather put a coat of paint on Good Golden Edward than meaningfully engage with the characters of color who already exist in the show and whose identities are not so toothlessly convenient for a white audience's comfort.

My hope is only to encourage that, rather than shoving the discomfort out of sight and mind with a performance of progressivism, we face it down in our art. Edward Elric is a racist dickhead. How can we meaningfully explore that? How does he become a better citizen of the world? And by extension: How do we? Certainly not by reframing our thematic mouthpieces in the facsimile of a marginalized identity to lend legitimacy to everything they say in support of the oppressive status quo.

[mariacallous]

Scott grew up in Baltimore, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, “thinking that the government was an honorable place to work.” His grandfathers were Westinghouse engineers who conducted state-funded research. His parents were public-school music teachers. “Kids used to make fun of me for carrying a violin,” he told me. In college, he joined the R.O.T.C. and later entered the Air Force. He met his wife, a nuclear missileer, at their shared duty station in California. They both left active duty, but he continued to serve in the Air Force Reserve and went on to law school.

In 2013, he got a job as an attorney-investigator at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency that monitors and investigates banks, payday lenders, debt collectors, and other businesses. The C.F.P.B. was established in 2010, under the Dodd-Frank Act, which sought to prevent the kinds of mortgage scams and unregulated investments that had led to the Great Recession. “My specialty was delinquent-loan services, people struggling to get mortgage modifications,” Scott said. (He asked to use a pseudonym because he is not permitted to speak with the press.) Later, he joined a team that focusses on servicemembers, a population that’s particularly vulnerable to predatory practices because of the nature of their work—modest but dependable income, frequent relocation, peer pressure to buy “the biggest truck.” A lot of enlisteds get married young and have kids young, or have to support their parents. “They are getting money for the first time,” he told me. “They get preyed on.”

Scott liked the idea of helping the military community, and knew that his own status as a veteran had given him an advantage at the C.F.P.B. “It got me in the door,” he said, though he still had to take an entrance exam. Veterans often receive a preference in government hiring and promotions, which partly explains why they make up about thirty per cent of the federal workforce. “The preference tries to put us back where we would be, had we not served,” Scott said. “It levels the playing field.”

He has worked for the C.F.P.B. ever since. The agency has sued companies for persuading veterans to sell their pension and disability payments, for charging military families more than thirty-six per cent interest on pawn loans, and for misleading servicemembers to take costly cash-out refinance loans on their homes. He recalled cases in which a debt collector had lingered outside someone’s house, pretending that his cellphone was a police walkie-talkie, or gone through the drive-thru of a Taco Bell to harass someone working the window. Since its founding, the C.F.P.B. has recovered more than three hundred million dollars in damages to military personnel and veterans.

I visited Scott last week at his home about an hour away from D.C. He looks the part of an airman: tall, fit, and fastidiously groomed. The house was also big and spotless, save for the area occupied by two yappy Chihauahas. He showed me the dining room, which doubles as his office. Next to his work laptop was a bound copy of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, whose worn lime-green cover was signed, in Sharpie, by one of the creators of the C.F.P.B.:

Keep ’em honest Elizabeth Warren

In early February, the Trump Administration had shut down the agency headquarters. Elon Musk pronounced it dead—“RIP CFPB,” he wrote on X—as his DOGE operation dug into the computer systems. “Employees should not come into the office,” Russell Vought, an outspoken critic of financial regulation and the C.F.P.B.’s new acting director, wrote in an “AllHands” e-mail. “Employees should stand down from performing any work task.” He then fired ten per cent of the bureau and oversaw a “wholesale termination of the contracts needed to keep the C.F.P.B. running,” a procurement staffer stated in a recent affidavit. Vought’s plan to terminate nearly everyone at the agency “within 36 hours” was halted by a federal judge.

Scott was spared but put on administrative leave. He could do little more than check his e-mail and wait. Normally he would be analyzing the complaints submitted by servicemembers, organizing outreach events, and discussing emerging concerns with colleagues at the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Now nothing was getting done.

Several time zones west, in Honolulu, a financial coach and military spouse named Heidi Clemons was feeling alarmed by the news about the C.F.P.B. The packet of materials she gave to servicemembers and families was filled with links and references to the agency. “We’re trying to point our servicemembers to the most trusted information—historic, government-backed, lasting, not scam-based or profit-based,” she told me. Suddenly, in February, the links led to a “Page Not Found” message. All the YouTube explainers were gone. “It was a hot mess,” she said. “We had to pull the C.F.P.B. from all our resourcing.” Though the website was later restored, she didn’t want to take the risk of sending people to “a dead-end link.” “The impact of shutting down the C.F.P.B. on our servicemembers—it’s huge,” she said.

Scott had been to that part of Oahu for military exercises. Fort Shafter sits between the misty, dark-green mountains of the Ko’olau Range and the Ke’ehi Lagoon. “There’s a lot of sleazy businesses,” he said. Cash for gold, title loans, pawnshops. There are high-tech temptations, too: crypto and various money-making schemes on Venmo, Zelle, and other peer-to-peer payment apps.

Military personnel have long been vulnerable to shady enterprises and cons. Twenty years ago, the Government Accountability Office conducted a study for the Defense Department, based on “continuing concerns about servicemembers’ use of predatory consumer loans.” The report found that these products could lead to “severe negative consequences for the military as a whole (e.g., decreases in unit readiness and morale) as well as for the servicemembers themselves (e.g., criminal and adverse personnel actions, including possible discharge from the military).” Clemons told me that she had one client whose husband had stolen her identity; that another, a Reservist, owed money to a loan shark; and that apartment complexes near the base were having military applicants “waive away their rights” under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which allows active-duty renters to break their lease when necessary. In 2023, of the eighty-four thousand or so complaints submitted by servicemembers to the C.F.P.B., the second-highest number came from Hawaii.

Earlier this year, a unit based at Fort Shafter—the 9th Mission Support Command of the Army Reserve (motto: “Pride of the Pacific”)—had asked for a C.F.P.B. representative to staff a booth at an upcoming resource fair for soldiers and their families. Scott arranged for a co-worker to be there with plenty of bureau literature and swag. The event took place on March 1st, but the rep never showed up—because no one was allowed to work. “They didn’t know where we were,” Scott said.

On Sunday, March 2nd, Scott and other remaining staffers received a confusing e-mail from Mark Paoletta, the C.F.P.B.’s chief legal officer:

On behalf of Acting Director Vought, I am writing to you to ensure that everyone is carrying out any statutorily required work, as he set forth in his February 8th email. … Employees should be performing work that is required by law and do not need to seek prior approval to do so.

A month earlier, Vought’s message had clearly said not to perform “any work” at all. Scott and other C.F.P.B. employees concluded that this new directive was an attempt to rewrite the story for purposes of litigation. A lawsuit filed by the workers’ union alleged that by issuing a stop-work order to all staff the Administration had violated the Dodd-Frank Act. A hearing was scheduled for the following day. “They’re trying to develop cover for the court case,” Scott told me.

Meanwhile, the invitation to do what was “statutorily required” let him resume some of his work. “I currently have three hundred and twenty-three unread e-mails,” he told me. “Usually, I try to clear them out as fast as I can.” We were in his dining room, sitting at a table covered in delicate white lace. He sipped coffee from a Pentagon mug. The complaint system for servicemembers and veterans had continued to function through the pause, though with noticeable glitches, and Scott was finally able to download the latest data. “Our all-time record is ten thousand complaints for any month,” he said. “And then January was nineteen thousand!” A lot of the submissions had to do with credit reporting. Late last year, the C.F.P.B. had forced Navy Federal, a credit union with a large presence on military installations, to return eighty-one million dollars in overdraft fees to consumers. Scott guessed that the settlement had prompted fresh complaints about other institutions.

But he wasn’t able to track the complaints as he normally would. Typically, when a complaint comes in, it is both reviewed by the C.F.P.B. and routed to the relevant financial company, which is then obligated to respond, and often does so through e-mail with an attached PDF. The many contracts Vought had cancelled, however, included one “with a software company who would scan all our documents for viruses,” Scott explained. “So, now we’re not able to open attachments.” What this meant, he continued, was that “Nobody’s monitoring, right now, to make sure the responses are timely or that they’re complete.” He shrugged.

We got in the car and drove southeast, past the main gate of Fort Meade, past a Northrop Grumman campus, past a strip mall advertising cheap tax preparation. “Some people get loans against their tax refunds—I worry about that,” he told me. I asked him what the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Defense might do to help members of the military, if the C.F.P.B. no longer could. “I mean, not a lot,” Scott said. “For some things, the servicemembers could go to their JAG”—the military’s law department—“and the JAG might write a letter, but that’s about all they’re going to do.”

Enough of the agency was still intact that Scott believed it could be brought back to life. The day after my visit, a federal judge in Maryland ruled that thousands of fired federal workers, including those at the C.F.P.B., would have to be temporarily reinstated; the Trump Administration appealed the order. Some probationary workers subsequently received a “notice of rehiring” that put them on paid administrative leave. Though Scott had recently interviewed for jobs in a city prosecutor’s office and at a credit union in need of a compliance officer, he still hoped to return to the bureau. “If this blows over, I can come back,” he said. He hated to think what would happen if the agency went away completely. “You’re going to see a boom and bust in crypto. You might see a recession,” he told me. “We’re gonna see foreclosures. People forget that. People don’t remember what that’s like.” ♦

The New Yorker is committed to coverage of the federal workforce. Are you a current or former federal employee with information to share? Please use your personal device to contact us via e-mail (tammy_kim@newyorker.com) or Signal (ID: etammykim.54).

[theivorybilledwoodpecker]

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ruled that the ban violates the equal protection clause because it discriminates based on transgender status and sex. Reyes said the ban “is soaked in animus.” “Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact,” she wrote. Reyes added, “Indeed, the cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed — some risking their lives — to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the Military Ban seeks to deny them.”