The Boondoggle in the Basement

Do you know what the word boondoggle means?

It comes from the Boy Scouts. A boondoggle is a braided leather cord — a small useless craft project meant to keep your hands busy. In the 1930s, critics of the New Deal grabbed the word and used it as a slur for federal make-work programs: taxpayer money going to people doing nothing important, looking busy because someone had to look busy.

Ninety years later, in the basement of the CDC's Division of Reproductive Health, we have what is arguably the purest boondoggle in the modern history of American public administration. Except this time, it isn't being run by liberals defending public investment from conservative critics. It's being run by conservatives. And the administration that built it would prefer you never noticed it exists.

Let me describe it for you.

Imagine you are one of the roughly forty people still employed at the Division of Reproductive Health — not one of the 110 who got the Reduction in Force notice on April 1, 2025. You are one of the ones who survived. Officially, your job still exists. Officially, you still have a portfolio. Your badge still works. Your paycheck still hits your account every two weeks.

But the team you ran point with — the epidemiologists who cleaned the data, the program officers who managed the state grants, the senior staff who knew where the bodies were buried (sometimes literally) — they are on administrative leave or have moved on. The work you were trained to do, that you came to government to do, has been quietly liquidated around you.

You still get emails. You still attend meetings. Sometimes the meetings are about the work that no longer exists. Sometimes the meetings are about how to describe the work that no longer exists in language that won't trigger the new restrictions on what federal employees are allowed to say. You cannot use the word "women" in certain documents now. You cannot use the word "Black." "Disability" is on the list. "Tribal" is on the list. "Trauma" is on the list. There are nearly two hundred words on the list.

You can technically log into the data systems. You can technically file the paperwork. In November 2025, somebody at the agency filed an OMB extension request for PRAMS — the surveillance system whose entire operational team had been on leave for seven months. The paperwork went through. In March 2026, somebody filed a revision cutting 1,495 hours of data-collection burden. That paperwork also went through. Nobody on your floor seems to know who is going to do the work the paperwork now authorizes.

This is not the kind of boondoggle the New Deal critics meant. They imagined waste in the form of activity — federal money going to people doing pointless work. This is the inverse. This is federal money going to people who have been deliberately prevented from doing the work they were hired to do, while the bureaucratic shell that documents the work continues to file the paperwork claiming it is being done.

It is The Office, if Michael Scott had been disappeared by executive order and Toby was the only one left in the branch — expected to keep doing HR for a company that no longer manufactures paper but is still legally registered to manufacture paper, and there are still trucks pulling up to the loading dock, and the trucks are empty.

This is the architecture of what we are calling The Quiet Dismantling. PRAMS is one piece of it. To understand how it works — and what comes next — you have to look at the whole building.