Editor’s Note: Read Julia Curlee’s full essay here.

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When Julia Curlee was a kid growing up in Hawaii, she dreamed of becoming an intelligence officer. In 2007, when she took her oath standing on the marble CIA seal, she achieved that goal. But she had another childhood dream too: She’d always had “an unshakable belief that I should have been born a woman.”

In 2013, Julia Curlee became the first CIA officer to transition openly and keep serving the agency. She felt more effective at her job living as the person she always believed she was—and years ago wrote about her experience under a pseudonym in The Atlantic. Her performance proved her effectiveness: She became the daily intelligence briefer for Vice President Pence during the first Trump administration and a director on the National Security Council in both the Biden administration and the second Trump term.

Less than 70 days after the president returned to office in 2025, Julia was fired from the White House without explanation. She returned to the CIA and, over time, began to feel a lack of support at the agency in an administration that was openly hostile to transgender people. Julia left her dream job with the federal government earlier this year. This week, she is telling her full story for the first time—in an Atlantic essay she wrote and in a conversation with Radio Atlantic.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Julia Curlee: After everything I had been through with my service to the former vice president, my briefing for this president in the first term, and my war zones, my 20 years, all of it, “Be discreet” meant We need you. We need your service. But we don’t want anyone to know you are here.

Adam Harris: As a high-level CIA officer, Julia Curlee had the ear of one of the most powerful politicians in America: the vice president of the United States. He relied on her to let him know what was going on in the world each day. She held prominent intelligence positions during the last three administrations: Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2. She is also a transgender woman.

For a long time, Julia had two dreams: to be a CIA officer and to be her authentic self. She realized the first in 2007, when she took the oath on the agency seal; the second in 2013, when she transitioned.

She made a promise when she did: never to hide who she was. Yet in 2017, she wrote two stories for The Atlantic under a pseudonym. She wrote about her experience; she wrote about what it meant for the intelligence community to accept people like her. The agency used it to help recruit on college campuses. Julia was using the discretion that came naturally for a CIA officer.

Now, after being pushed out of the White House and leaving an agency where she no longer felt supported, Julia is telling the rest of the story as herself.

I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic, and today: a conversation with Julia Curlee.

Let’s get to questions.

Julia, welcome to the show.

Julia Curlee: Thank you, Adam. Thanks for having me.

Harris: Absolutely. So Julia, you served the United States for more than 20 years in intelligence positions. What was it that drew you to public service?

Curlee: Well, I grew up a barefoot kid in Hawaii, and I always wanted to see what was over the horizon and see the world and all that. And then, at some young, impressionable age, I was ambushed by The Hunt for Red October and the analyst as hero, getting to save the day. And, I don’t know, it sort of came out of nowhere and it sort of bubbled up in my life. And my parents definitely instilled in me a desire to serve our country, and intelligence just caught something in me and I wanted to be a part of it.

Harris: When you joined, was it everything you imagined?

Curlee: Oh, many more late nights and long PowerPoint-presentation sessions.

Harris: So not quite like the movie?

Curlee: Not so much, yeah. I didn’t call in many drone strikes on my way to the PowerPoint presentation that you would sometimes see in the movies. Did not repel off a helicopter into a submarine too many times.

But it was an amazing and wonderful career. I got to travel to 35 countries. I briefed several presidents. It was just all I wanted to do, and I desperately wish I was doing that now. It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do and it was the only plan I ever had.

Harris: And today you’re writing in the pages of The Atlantic, telling your story for the first time under your own name. Why now?

Curlee: Well the institutions that I served through my adult life are under assault. The ability of officers to speak truth to power, to inform policy making so that they make the best decisions on behalf of the United States—that is being eviscerated. And the officers who deliver that, who spend their lives learning about foreign countries, learning how to systematically understand multiple sources of intelligence, convey uncertainty—all of that is being destroyed by an administration that wants to both cherry-pick the intelligence to only receive what they want to hear, and to punish the officers who have the courage to speak that truth to them, to do their jobs and to live up to the values that we inculcate in all of our officers. And so the only way to do that was to leave and to begin to tell my story.

I also felt like I needed to tell the other part of my story, which has nothing to do with my substantive experience in the world, and that’s being a trans person. And I know that the sustained assault on people like me is a part of a broader campaign to try to define who gets to be in public spaces, who gets to have positions of honor.

Harris: I want to talk about that service and about your transition while you were in the service. You transitioned in 2013, and did you have concerns when you were transitioning? What was that first day going into the office like?

Curlee: Well, it was the most terrifying day of my life. And that was in the wake of several war-zone assignments and being rocketed, and I didn’t know whether it would be the last day.

You know, as I already said, I’d always dreamed since I was a kid of being an intelligence officer. The other dream that I’d always had that was unexplainable was just an unshakable belief that I should have been more born a woman.

I didn’t know where it came from. It just was always lurking in the background. And over time in my life, it became this just unshakable darkness that clouded out everything else. And finally, I came to the conclusion I had to transition. The only problem, of course, is that there were no trans people. The last time someone at CIA had tried to transition had been decades before, and it had been terrible. The person had been driven out of the organization, in a hostile workplace, and management had not been supportive. And so I contacted the LGBT group to say, Hey, I’m here. I’m here to meet other people and get some help. And they said, Congratulations, but you’re the only one.

And that is what led me in 2017 to write in pseudonym in The Atlantic under the name Jenny Hall. And it was an opportunity to get the word out that people like me are a part of our national security, that we’re patriots, that we want to serve, that we don’t want any special rights. We just want what everyone else has.

And so I was very happy to get to do that. And in the years following that, CIA actually used those articles on college campuses to recruit people. And I was very proud of that, but I was also very, very happy to disappear back into my day job, in the work.

And so, you know, in short, my transition in those years was a big “nothing significant to report,” in the lexicon of my profession, and that was the best possible outcome.

Harris: So when you talk about the work, this is 2017; the first Trump administration has just begun. What were your concerns? Did you have concerns ahead of that first Trump administration about their policies, or the platform, regarding transgender people?

Curlee: You know, going into that term, it really hadn’t been in the political realm very much. I mean, it honestly wasn’t a big issue. It only really became, in my consciousness anyway, a big political issue when the president, the first time, banned trans people in the military, which was a shock, because for a lot of us it was a rock-solid belief that progress is linear, that things you gained might slow down, but, you know, the long arc, and that things would get better. And this was a case of it regressing in a significant way.

And I knew several trans intelligence officers who were in uniform who were doing the same job that I was doing at CIA, and they were being told that by being honest, by which the previous administration had told them they could be, that they would be thrown out and that their careers would be destroyed just for being themselves. And so I also wrote about that to try to make the case in a good-faith way to our leaders that this was the wrong decision and that it would hurt our national security.

Harris: So you gave the president’s daily brief during that first Trump administration. Can you tell us what it means to do that job and what all it entails?

Curlee: Yeah, so as a baby analyst, you imagine yourself being that briefer in the room with the commander in chief or briefing on Air Force One. It was the thing that most of us aspired to at the end of a long career. And initially I was assigned to the deputy national security adviser in the White House. And boy, it was like cramming for a final exam every morning from midnight to 5 a.m. or so. And then at some point there, you’re whisked downtown and you come to the White House when it’s pitch black and you check in with the Situation Room, and you’ve got these pieces that you’ve been studying. And so I would get to the White House and I would find my—I’d be the first person that would see my policy customer when they came in the door in the West Wing, the deputy national security adviser, at first, and I would be in there for 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 minutes, and it would be 20 questions, and it would be firing things at me and asking me to follow up with taskings. And it was just exhilarating for a person that was a news junkie who wants to be plugged into the information universe, just wanting to be available to help these policy makers make good decisions. And I did that for two years in total for the Trump administration for the first term.

Harris: And so, while you’re in the Trump administration, you begin giving the president’s daily briefing, and you begin giving that briefing to Vice President Mike Pence. What was the experience of first meeting him like?

Curlee: Yeah, so I’d been in the PDB for a few months, and it was wonderful. And as much as I loved roaming the West Wing of the White House before dawn and no one caring apparently that a trans woman was serving the highest levels of the Trump administration, my boss walked into my office one day and said, you know, Julia, what would you think about briefing the vice president? And I looked up at her and I said, This vice president?

And she said, Yeah, I think you’d be the right pick for this. And I took her word for it. And so, the first time I was standing in the driveway at the Naval Observatory when there he was, unmistakably, with his silver-white hair, and he turns to his outgoing briefer and said, You’re gonna abandon me with her? And it was his dad-joke humor, and there I was, and it was just me and Mike Pence.

And I discovered that he was an excellent intelligence customer. He took the book, he took the briefing almost every day, religiously. He took rapid notes and would be firing questions at me. And he really impressed me with how seriously he was taking the job of being this consumer of intelligence, this massive, multibillion-dollar apparatus we’ve built out to help our leaders make better decisions. And he was using it as I would have hoped he would. And in a broader administration where that was not always the case, I really felt like I could really do good, and support him as he participated in these policy conversations. And it was a real pleasure. It was truly the thing that I had been training and and wanting to do since I’d been a kid. It was like the experience that I dreamed of.

Harris: Yeah, so he was really relying on you for your expertise?

Curlee: Yeah, I mean, I would be one of the first people he would see in the morning. It has been described to me that a PDB briefer is—part of your job is, like, helping to filter the world so that a policy maker whose most precious commodity is time can know what are the really big issues to focus on. And I would play that part in his day, in focusing him on the key events happening in one part of the world versus another, teeing up information so that I would know what policy-making meetings he was going into or heading on a foreign trip, and I would be trying to anticipate his needs, and then when he asked a question, ensure that it was rapidly answered as quickly as possible. And so getting to travel with him around the world, getting to be a part of the team that follows the vice president, was truly an amazing privilege.

And for all of the fears and my own trepidations—I wasn’t ignorant of his public persona. It truly was a  great experience, and I got to see our government operating as it should.

Harris: There’s probably some dissonance there, right, between that public persona and the private persona? How do you square the difference between the public policy and and the person who you engaged with on a regular basis?

Curlee: I don’t know, and I don’t want to suggest that I know his personal views. What I know is what I experienced. I experienced being treated with great respect, being treated as a serious professional, being trusted. When my tour was over, he asked me to extend. So that was a conversation to have with my wife.

But I had been raised in a CIA that had trained into us that we serve regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, that we are nonpartisan civil servants who will support them with the best information possible. And he was the vice president and needed the best information possible. And so what I would do is I would put that to the side.

It was the fulfillment of what I had always wanted to do, and there were moments like when my tour was finally coming to an end and he invited my family to the White House, and he took my mother’s hand—and this is my mother who had had a really hard time with my transition years before—and Mike Pence took my mother’s hand and says, You must be very proud of your daughter.

And I’m sitting there watching this and I’m thinking, We’ve arrived. There’s no more battles left to be won. I mean, it’s not, that wasn’t true, but it just felt like the two dreams that I’d had since I was a kid, which I had always felt were just completely incompatible.

Harris: You write about the moment that the vice president certified the election and how there was a certain sort of kinship between the two of you around that service, right? That you mentioned the, sort of, bargain, right? The exact quote was, “That was the bargain: service before politics, country before self.”

Can you tell me about that moment? What that moment signified for you?

Curlee: So, this was a few days after January 6 and I had been done briefing him for several months at that point. And he brought us all together, and we were in his West Wing office just down the hall from the Oval, and we went around talking about what serving in this role had meant to us. And I told him that moment, when he had prioritized the country, when he had certified the victory of his opponent in the election, that I was never more proud to have served as his briefer.

And he, you know, he took my hand; we shook hands, and he said that meant a lot to him.

And that is what the bargain meant to me, was the fact that despite our almost certain profound differences of views on many subjects, we could put that aside and treat each other with dignity and do what was right, regardless of our politics and the political cost. And it was a very special moment for me and everybody who was there.

Harris: So, after four years of the Biden administration, the Trump administration comes back for a second time, and people begin to decide whether they should stay or go. So what advice were you getting about what you should do?

Curlee: It was fairly uniform that we should all leave. So during the campaign I had been serving at the White House; I served for about 20 months in the Biden administration as a director for intelligence programs in the NSC. And all throughout that period, it was wall-to-wall TV. I remember standing in the sit room, looking up at one of the many screens and watching these scary images of people like me and hundreds of millions of dollars being poured to create this caricature that somehow trans people were a threat to America and tar the Democratic candidate with association with these scary people. And I’m watching this and in horror that I’m witnessing on the TV the same kind of dehumanization that I’d written PDBs about in my career.

And so, but, despite all of that, despite the warnings from our leadership that they were very afraid for us, that we would be targeted, that it would destroy our careers, that the online mob would be summoned against us—despite all of that, I was the trans woman that briefed Mike Pence. I believed fiercely in the idea of nonpartisan civil service to whoever is the president. And I was not going to walk away from this task that I had been given to help with the peaceful transfer of power of an administration.

And so, the only person in the whole White House, I have to say, who asked us to stay was the president. And I believed it, that was the right decision. And I still believe it still. But almost everyone that decided to do that has paid a price in some form or another.

And so when the politicals departed, about a week out from the turn of administration, I was asked to serve as the acting senior director for intelligence programs. And so I was there when the new team arrived on Inauguration Day. I was there in the West Wing as people were still finding their offices, as people were moving in the furniture and moving in the new furniture, when the vice president arrived and saw his office for the first time. I was there to help the new administration get off the ground. And I did. And for day after day, we did that until the third day, when the administration, while I was briefing the deputy national security adviser, summoned 160 NSE detailees from departments and agencies to a group call and told them they had 15 minutes to get off the compound.

I walked out of my briefing with a handful of taskings that I knew I needed to get to the intelligence community as quickly as possible. And my assistant intercepts me on West Exec, the road between the White House and the EEOB, where my office was, and says, Everyone’s fired except for you. And I was in shock at the recklessness and the callousness of it. And so over the next several days, it was a mess.

And so for the next 69 days, I and the few people from my team that I could bring back served until one day on a Saturday, I’m down in Roanoke, Virginia, with my family, and I get a phone call that says that my tour is over. The chief of staff called. I can’t give you a reason why. You’re gone. You’ll be sent back to CIA. But if you don’t mind, we’d still like you to come in on Monday.

Harris: So you were removed from your position and asked to come back in.

Curlee: Yeah, in the same phone call, you know, fired on Saturday but needed on Monday. But I was warned in that call to be discreet. And I still didn’t understand what was happening until I got off the phone and my iPhone was was bombarded with friend after friend after friend forwarding me a tweet that said, that announced to the world, that there was a trans Biden holdover who hates President Trump in the intelligence directorate, and please give me this person’s name so that I can out them to the world.

And I was terrified of what that would mean for me and my family. But Monday came and I came to work anyway. And I served for another three days to help finish off an important budget item that I had been working on, to turn over a portfolio that I had managed at that point for almost two years, and it was that third night, my last day there, that a list of enemies within the administration was given to the president. And it was yet another purge of people with decades of experience, including my boss at the time.

And, you know, as I was leaving the White House for that last time, with my little box of mementos from two years of serving at the White House, you know, this dream come true, it really hit me what “Be discreet” meant in that point, after everything I had been through with my service to the former vice president, my briefing for this president in the first term, and my war zones, my 20 years, all of it, “Be discreet” meant We need you. We need your service. But we don’t want anyone to know you are here.

And that has stuck with me ever since, and why I have to tell my story, because they’ve taken from me my calling. I can no longer serve. I couldn’t use the bathroom. When I was at the White House, I had to cross the street to coffee shops across Pennsylvania Avenue in order to just get through the day. And the same restrictions followed me back to CIA. And the constant fear of being fired for being who I am just—I couldn’t continue.

But the one thing I can’t allow for me is for the fact that what has happened has already happened. It can’t be undone. And so telling my story is a part of putting that on the record, that someone like me can serve in the White House, can brief a president, can serve honorably, and loves their country.

And so I had to tell this story.

Harris: You mentioned the list of enemies landing on Trump’s desk, and the tweet hunting for the transgender intelligence person in the White House. That tweet and the list came from Laura Loomer, who is a far-right provocateur.

If she never posted that tweet, if that list had never gone out, do you think that you might still be in the White House?

Curlee: I think I probably would have reached my limit at some point in terms of my family, and it would have been time for someone else to come. But I fully intended to keep serving, and at the time it was funny. In that same conversation that I was in with the deputy national security adviser, briefing him on some very sensitive, important programs, he asked me when my tour was over, and I said, Well, sir, it’s been—it’ll be two years and just in a couple months, and, you know, I gotta get home and I’ve got a family. And he said, Hmm, June. I don’t think that’s gonna work for us. And so, I was already starting to think how I was gonna have this conversation again. But I wanted to keep serving, and keep serving at CIA. That was my only plan, and I’m just sad that it became impossible.

Harris: I want to home in on your expertise. You’ve said that what Americans should be concerned about is this wider assault on expertise in this administration, and especially in the intelligence community. So are we already seeing the consequences of that assault on expertise and elimination of expertise?

Curlee: I’m regretting to say we are, and it’s all around us in the evidence of disastrous policies. But to back up a second, you know, the same assault on trans officers, on other minorities, was accompanied by a parallel attack on the ability of our officers to speak truth to power.

So, one of the things that happened early in the new administration was I was asked to send a tasking to the intelligence community on the status of this group Tren de Aragua, which was a Venezuelan street gang. And the tasking was whether the Maduro government had ordered this group to invade the United States, which is the predicate for invoking the Alien Enemies Act almost verbatim, and I tasked it out to the National Intelligence Council, where the chairman of the NIC, which is the most senior analytic body in the intelligence community, dutifully wrote an excellent assessment that reflected the consensus position of the intelligence community. And he and his deputy, when they delivered the product, which did not accord with what the administration wanted to hear, were told that they should rethink their assessment. And when they refused, they were ordered out of the building. And publicly firing one of the most esteemed officers in the intelligence community and their deputy for living up to the values that we inculcate in every young officer was a devastating blow to the whole organization.

And it has had ripple effects all through. And it is just further attacks on officers for assessments that they wrote a decade ago, because they don’t conform with what the president wants to hear, has taught this generation now of officers that your clearance can be revoked with a phone call if you say the wrong thing. And so a muzzle has been put on an organization that is vital to our national interest.

And when you wed that with the destruction of the National Security Council as a policy-coordinating body, which I got to witness firsthand through the purges that unfolded through the first few months of the administration, you’ve lost the very venue in which those concerns and experts and expertise can be delivered to help the president make good decisions. And so it’s not surprising when disastrous outcomes ensue.

So, just for the example, when the country was marching to war in Iran, America launched a full suite of airstrikes showing that the U.S. military is the finest fighting force in the world. And at the same time, the State Department somehow hadn’t planned for the evacuation of half a million Americans and diplomats and officers and their dependents in a war we started.

In any competent administration, regardless of the wisdom of the effort, there would have been a plan. And there would have been a plan to deal with the fact that the Iranians were going to close the Strait of Hormuz. There would have been briefings that would have made clear to the president that decapitating the leadership and killing the supreme leader would not immediately lead to the Iranians surrendering. All of these things are what the intelligence community and the National Security Council should exist to do, to head off these things, to ensure that things that are foreseeable and have been foreseen in multiple public war games for decades about the Iranians would have been delivered and provided context for the administration to make a sound decision or at least plan. And none of it happened.

And as a result, we’re in this debacle where there’s no clear road out, where all the choices are terrible. And we’re looking at ending the conflict in a worse position than when we begun. And there’s, I think there’s a word for that, and it’s called losing a war. And this is a direct result of a climate of fear that the administration has instilled on a workforce that it somehow sees as the enemy within rather than the civil servants who have given their professional lives to helping the country. And we’re all paying for it.

Harris: You wrote that your grandfather told you “Work hard; don’t complain; and the country will take care of you.” Do you still think the country is taking care of you?

Curlee: No, no. It’s hard to feel the sense of betrayal, a bit. And it’s not just me; it’s all of the people who devoted themselves to this ideal of nonpartisan public service, who have been callously thrown away. I’ve got many friends who are transgender in the military, who have faced ruinous financial and life circumstances and had something so important to their identities taken away from them for no reason at all, other than just animus for who some people are.

And that’s why I titled the piece “The Wrong Kind of American,” because it really is that. It is a decision to treat some Americans as not worthy of a full life, of positions of honor, and to treat them as if they’re some sort of threat to society. And it feels as if we’ve just turned our back on the most fundamental ideal that we try to teach everyone, which is that we can rise as far as our talents take us in this country. And that’s a terrible thing.

You know, nine years ago I closed my piece in The Atlantic saying trans kids should know that CIA is always recruiting, because I wanted them to know that there was this amazing life that they could have, that there were some people like them who got to do that, and now I could not in good conscience advise any LGBT American to apply to work at CIA. And that is awful. That is un-American, and I regret saying it, but it’s just true. And I hope that in the coming years that will change and we’ll do what’s right, and we’ll look back at this period in our history with shame and we’ll learn from it.

Harris: Julia, thank you so much for sharing your story and for joining me on the show today.

Curlee: Thank you. It was a privilege.

Harris: That’s all for today’s show.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday.

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Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

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Jeff Flake is something of a maverick in today’s Republican Party. He was an early and consistent critic of President Trump. In December 2015, when then-candidate Trump floated a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering” the United States—a preview of what became his now-infamous executive order barring travel to the U.S. by people from several Muslim-majority countries—Flake, then a United States senator from Arizona, immediately spoke up. The idea repulsed him. He made a visit to a mosque in Scottsdale days later to declare that what people were seeing from Trump on the campaign trail was not representative of America.

“This was a difficult week in Washington—it wasn’t so much the legislative calendar as it was the rhetoric that came forth mostly from the presidential campaign,” Flake, who is a practicing Mormon, said. It was his first visit to a mosque. “That is not in keeping with the values and ideals that have made this country the shining city on the hill that it is.”

Trump went on to win that election. And Flake could no longer stomach the direction his party was headed. He would have been up for reelection in 2018 but decided against running again. As he told my colleague McKay Coppins at the time, he was not interested in the kind of campaign he’d had to have run to win—or even simply to secure Trump’s endorsement. In a memorable speech, Flake decried the deterioration of politics and called for America to look toward its better angels.

It’s been almost a decade since that speech and Trump’s hold over the Republican Party shows few signs of weakening any time soon. Meanwhile, Flake recently endorsed Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator from Georgia, in Ossoff’s reelection bid over the Trump-endorsed Representative Mike Collins. What does it mean to be a Republican when the party has moved away from the things it has historically claimed to stand for? On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Flake joins me to discuss his endorsement, the Senate, and the party he hopes to reclaim.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: What does it mean to continue identifying with the party if it’s moved beyond the recognition of what it’s been in the past? Which is sort of to say, are you hanging on to a party that isn’t your party anymore?

Jeff Flake: That would be, you know, easy to say right now, but parties sometimes return as well. You see parties flirt with populism and then return, and I’m hopeful that that’s what you see now.

Harris: I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic, and this week, a conversation with former Republican U.S. Senator and Ambassador Jeff Flake. We talk about the state of the Republican Party, the Senate, and what it means to be principled in politics.

Flake is known for crossing party lines. Most recently, he endorsed Georgia’s Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff in his reelection campaign against Mike Collins. Collins, of course, is the Trump-endorsed Republican congressman from Georgia.

In announcing his endorsement, Flake told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that his decision boiled down to character, saying: “Character is more important. I’ve been around long enough to know you’ll disagree on issues with people across the aisle, or sometimes in your party. But the more important thing is character.”

In 2017, Flake delivered a fiery speech where he announced that he would not run for another term in office.

Flake: “There are times where we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time.”

Harris: He believed the shift in the Republican party was temporary; he believed the fever would break.

But it’s been almost a decade since that speech. Does he still think that’s possible?

Ambassador Flake joins me now to discuss. Let’s get to questions.

Ambassador, thank you for joining me.

Flake: Hey, thanks for having me on.

Harris: What to you are the characteristics of a moral candidate, of a candidate with character?

Flake: Well, I want somebody who respects the institution of the Senate. And, you know, the Senate and senators have always very jealously guarded their prerogative to push back against any president from their own party or not. That’s just kind of been a hallmark of the Senate. You have six-year terms; you’re more independent; you have more rules than the House does in terms of advise and consent.

Then, too, I would fit in character as well. I have a hard time with people who simply won’t admit the obvious—one when your president loses an election and you’re afraid to tell him. That, I think, doesn’t speak well for character.

So yeah, in this case we have that problem as well. Senator Ossoff’s opponent, you know, simply won’t admit, and claims that President Trump won in Georgia and won the 2020 election. That doesn’t speak well for character. Also with character, it’s realizing in the Senate, too, with the special rules, the supermajority rules of filibuster, that you’re a legislator; you work across the aisle. And I’ve seen Senator Ossoff do that on a number of occasions sponsoring legislation. And then, constituent service as well. When I was ambassador in Turkey, I got calls from Jon Ossoff. I got to know him then because he was advocating on behalf of some of his constituents. So anyway, I’ve been impressed with him.

Harris: I have to reference the speech from the Senate floor in 2017, because it was such a succinct articulation of democratic values and principles. You argued in that speech that “anger and resentment is not a governing strategy,” and you took particular issue with your party’s acquiescence in that regard. How has that dynamic changed at all in the years since, for better or worse?

Flake: Unfortunately, it hasn’t gotten better in terms of my party and, you know, our willingness to stand up and actually govern. As I mentioned before, anger and grievance are not a governing philosophy, but we’ve just kind of fallen in and decided that whatever the president wants, whatever the party wants, that’s where we are. And that unfortunately has not changed much.

You see some people standing up when they’re not running for reelection anymore or have been defeated in a primary, but we need to stand up more. That’s why I like divided government.  You know, a fiscal conservative, I Iook back over the past few decades and the only time we’ve really had good fiscal discipline is when we’ve had divided government. Republicans in particular act more responsible and act more as fiscal conservatives when sometimes we’re in the minority.

Harris: Do you think there will be consequences for the fact that things haven’t gotten better? Do you think that there will be a migration away from the GOP?

Flake: I do, I do. You know, Donald Trump has led a charmed existence politically and he seems to be given a pass that others aren’t given. And if you look around, his imitators have not done well. In Georgia, they haven’t, and in Arizona, where I come from. Arizona is a very red state. We have more than 300,000, you know, more Republicans registered than Democrats.

But we have a Democrat in the governor’s office, two Democratic senators, Democrat secretary of state, and Democrat attorney general—all the elected statewide offices—because we’ve had people try to imitate the president and haven’t done well.

I do think that we’re gonna see a migration, and I’ve written about this, away from the president and his policies. And one, the president has been able to basically control any primary, Republican primary, across the country. That’s waning. And if a president leaves office or is in the last two years of his term, if his policies are really popular, that still lends him power that he wouldn’t otherwise have as a lame duck. But the president’s policies have not done well, in particular, you know, tariff policies, protectionist policies, have led to high inflation, and then also couple that with a war that’s been not popular at all and so, yeah, I think you’re seeing a migration now that, you know—filing deadlines have passed, most primaries have passed, and we’re into the midterm general. And then beyond the midterms, you’ll really see that happening.

Harris: I should ask, do you still identify as a Republican?

Flake: I do, I do. I’m still a registered Republican, and I’m hoping that the party returns to its previous kind of tenets of limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, strong American leadership abroad. And I do think that we’re gonna see a return to that. And I think you saw in the Senate, for example, the other day a vote on Russian sanctions. That is a bit of a proxy vote, support for Ukraine but also a support for American leadership, and support for NATO, and support for kind of the old bicameral consensus on foreign policy. So I think you see in elected officials a desire to go back to that, but it’s been very difficult when the president has had such a hold on the party base.

Harris: What does it mean to continue identifying with the party if it’s moved beyond the recognition of what it’s been in the past? Which is sort of to say, are you hanging on to a party that isn’t your party anymore?

Flake: Well that would be easy to say right now, but like I say, parties sometimes return as well. You see parties flirt with populism and then return.

We’re in unfamiliar territory right now, and I think we’re going to be migrating back to more familiar ground. And I do think that that’s where the country really is. I think we’re a center-right country. But the problem right now is, you know, you only have a subset of a subset of a subset that votes in Republican primaries. You have a similar issue on the Democratic side, not as pronounced perhaps, but that just puts all the political incentives to drive to the extremes. But I don’t think that’s where the country is.

That’s why one thing that really excites me about people like Jon Ossoff is I think that they can move the Democratic Party more to its, more to the center, and that would force Republicans to then contest that ground as well. As long as we have Democrats, you know, all the energy on the far progressive side, it allows Republicans to be extreme as well and still be seen as less extreme, I guess.

Harris: Well, actually, I wanted to stick with that for a second, because you’ve said there’s this sort of massive lane in the middle, that most people identify as politically in the middle, but Democratic voters in recent primaries have shown that that’s not exactly where they are either, right? There’s been this feeling that things are broken in part because of some of the middle-ground solutions, right? They’re part of what has led us to this moment where you see candidates like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan winning the Democratic primary. So, I guess, what does success from the left wing of the Democratic Party tell us about what Americans actually might want right now?

Flake: Yeah, well I think it just proves the point I made before, that when you’re looking at primaries, although there was increased turnout, certainly in Michigan, it’s still a subset of a subset that are determining who the nominee is. And I do think the Democrats in Michigan would have been far better off by, you know, going a different direction. I think they would have had that general election easily. Now it’ll be more difficult, certainly. But I do think, yeah, the same problem is on both sides. I think without a polarizing figure like Donald Trump, who certainly controls primaries on the right and causes Democrats to act in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise. I see people like Gavin Newsom using foul and crude language just because the president does and he wants to match it. And you see that phenomenon all over, and it’s not not been good for politics. I hope we can move away from it. But that’s gonna require leadership. That’s why, in particular I appreciate Jon Ossoff, who’s more of a serious candidate and doesn’t kind of follow that.

Harris: Thinking about that speech from 2017, and where we’ve come since then, right, it’s been roughly a decade. All three branches of government right now have really abysmal approval ratings. People’s trust in institutions is flagging, and you said that the spell will eventually break, right? Once there’s no longer a Trump, we can return to ourselves once more. It seems that you’re still of that belief that the fever is going to break. What are you seeing that gives you that hope that the fever’s going to break?

Flake: Well, it’s been one heck of a fever. It’s been a long time in coming. Well, one, let me just say, I was back in Washington for Lindsey Graham’s funeral last week, and I came away from that believing that, like I’ve said, that this fever will break.

One, I saw Democrats and Republicans. Lindsey was an interesting figure, but if nothing else, he certainly had friends on the Democratic side. I was with him on a lot of those issues on immigration reform in particular and a lot of the foreign-policy issues. And you saw people from all political stripes come out and celebrate a man’s life that way. That made me feel good. At the same time, you had Senators [John] Cornyn and [Thom] Tillis standing up—albeit they’re not staying in Washington after January—but hey, it’s still something to actually stand up to the president and see the Senate acting more like the Senate again.

And I see John Thune keeping some of his members at bay who want to make institutional changes, like getting rid of the filibuster, which would fundamentally change the Senate into a more partisan body than it already is. But I came away from this week even more firmly believing that, you know, this fever will break. And when you look around the country as well, I still think you see that phenomenon that the president’s imitators don’t do as well as he does. So I’m hopeful that that fever will break.

Harris: But you’ve written, right, that we’ve seen folks in the past, lawmakers, the country generally, come together after death or after a tragedy? Two of which you experienced at the congressional baseball practice as well as standing with Representative [Gabby] Giffords at the State of the Union.

But that quickly fades away, and people sort of divide again. Do you think that even if we do heal that there will be that division again?

Flake: Yeah, well, I think you’ve had a lot of people elected, particularly in the last several cycles, who haven’t really been in Washington when there’s been so-called regular order, or, you know, what we’re used to. So it’s gonna be difficult. You’ll always have those voices, and we have a media environment that’s not going back to the way it was before, where there are just a few trusted sources of information. It’s more distributed that way. So it’s more difficult to go back to the way it was. But that’s why it’s going to require real leadership. And leadership is important. We’ve seen that, because the man in the White House now, he’s certainly been effective in where he’s wanted to go and getting people on his side more out of fear of losing primaries. But, by the same token, you’re going to have leaders that actually inspire people, better angels of our nature, and that’s what I’m hoping to see in this next presidential election is people on both the Republican and the Democratic side who will appeal to people’s better angels. And if they do, I think we can get to a better place. It’s gonna be more difficult moving ahead, like I said, just because of the media environment, but it’s not impossible.

Harris: Well, ambassador, we’ll have to leave it there. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Flake: Thanks for having me on.

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The Ebola outbreak raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo is now the largest in the nation’s history, according to the World Health Organization. The strain of Ebola driving this outbreak is called Bundibugyo and has no vaccine or treatments. It’s devastating: More than 3,600 cases have been identified, which have led to more than 1,500 deaths—a 44 percent fatality rate. The tragedy has been compounded by the ongoing conflict in the nation. Millions have been forced from their homes and even more are facing crisis levels of hunger.

Could this all have been prevented? Hasn’t the world figured out how to handle Ebola? This week, I spoke with my colleague Hana Kiros, who has been covering the outbreak and how the Trump administration has gutted foreign aid that it says saves lives, about why this outbreak is different and what it tells us about the state of global health today.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and this week we need to think about Ebola and the crumbling global-health infrastructure.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is in the throes of one of the largest Ebola outbreaks in the history of the African continent. Nearly half of those who have contracted the virus have died.

Since the outbreak began, in May, the international community has been playing a game of catch-up. But perhaps it should have seen this coming.

On the day President Trump returned to office in 2025, the administration issued a 90-day freeze on foreign aid. In February of that year, they eliminated 90 percent of the USAID foreign-aid contracts before they finished dismantling USAID a few months later.

The shuttering sent shockwaves through the international-aid community: The resources the U.S. was withdrawing weren’t just good PR; they were critical to the public health of poorer nations. And now, as Ebola ravages the Congo, advocates say that this is exactly the sort of outbreak that money and coordination was intended to contain.

How will this outbreak end? And could this level of catastrophe have been avoided?

With me to discuss is my colleague Hana Kiros, who has been covering the decimation of the U.S.’s global-health aid and the current Ebola outbreak.

Let’s get to questions.

Hana, thanks so much for joining me today.

Hana Kiros: Thanks for having me.

Harris: When we spoke at the office maybe about a month ago, there’d been roughly 500 deaths from Ebola on the African continent to that point. Now there are roughly 1,500. Why has this breakout been so difficult to contain?

Kiros: I think there are a couple of factors, but the biggest one is probably just that it was caught so late in its spread. There was a lot of disease transmission that occurred before an international response was mounted. Ebola was sort of this runaway train that was spreading through the DRC. And then, it’s in an active war zone, which complicates things. There’s not really any testing in refugee camps. And it’s also a gold-mining town where the epicenter of the outbreak’s where people just sort of come in and out.

So, it’s a place where people—Ebola was spreading and spreading to a lot of different places before we started trying to contain it, and now it’s just the response hasn’t moved as fast as Ebola has through the country.

Harris: Yeah, and so you’re talking about the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo; where else in the region is it? I know there were cases in Uganda. Has it spread beyond the DRC, or is it still primarily located in the DRC?

Kiros: So, it’s primarily located in the DRC and specifically in the eastern DRC. There’s a health zone that’s near South Sudan that has had its first cases of Ebola. Uganda has had a few cases, but the outbreak there has been declared over. They have a really robust health-care system. South Sudan much less so. So, there’s fear of that happening, but right now it’s still within the DRC.

Harris: The West African Ebola outbreak in the 2010s, where something like 30,000 people were infected, over 11,000 people were killed—what is different about this strain of Ebola?

Kiros: The one that’s tearing through the DRC right now is a different virus entirely. So, it’s the Bundibugyo Ebola virus. And because of that, this virus has evaded detection and that’s a really big part of why it was caught so late. Because the machines that were being used to test for Ebola were giving back negative results because they were looking for one Ebola, not all five of them.

So that’s one way that this outbreak is different. We don’t have the regular arsenal of vaccines, treatments, diagnostic capacity, that we know works.

And then in terms of the actual scale, so now the outbreak is over 3,000 cases and it’s very nearly the second-largest Ebola outbreak in recorded history.

And the big difference is that this is the fastest-moving Ebola outbreak that we’ve seen. So, there’s an explosion of cases that’s happened within a very short period of time. Again, we’re not really sure what the period of time is. We don’t know who patient zero is in this outbreak. So, I think that’s the main differentiator.

Harris: When you mentioned patient zero, it’s almost a reminder that these are individuals, right, that make up these larger numbers? Can you sort of humanize this for us? What has that experience been like, traditionally or historically, during these outbreaks?

Kiros: You know, I was speaking to a woman at Doctors Without Borders who’s coordinating their response to the outbreak in the DRC and she was saying that the current case-fatality rate is like 40 percent. She talked about a mother that showed up to an Ebola-treatment facility with symptoms and with two kids, and because of delays in testing it can be 48 hours, 72 hours before you get a positive or negative result. So, there’s a question of like, where do the kids go while you’re waiting? If you’re at home with a fever, you might be hesitant to go to this place where half, almost half, of people don’t come back from. So I think that, there’s this perception that the Ebola treatment wards are like places where you go to die, and health-care workers have said that that’s really something they want to fight against, because if people—you have a much better chance of surviving if you’re treated earlier in the disease progression. So, there’s a lot of fear. I think 90 percent of people are dying before they ever reach a hospital, according to the World Health Organization.

And also just like cultural practices. In the DRC, funerals are a multiday affair where you celebrate the life of the person, you touch the body, and that’s a major way that Ebola spreads. So, this very basic cultural practice—like, imagine your mother died and you think about, there’s this way that you honor her before you put her in the ground and you can’t do that anymore because of a virus. It reminds me of COVID in a lot of ways, in the way that there’s disruption, there’s a lot of suspicion; some people think it’s a hoax. But yeah, it’s just caused a lot of disruption in the DRC.

Harris: Yeah, to that point of people thinking that that it’s a hoax—there is the hoax that leads people to a hesitancy to go to a doctor or to go and be seen, but there’s also this sort of mistrust that leads to almost anger, right? This idea that Maybe they’re withholding something from us that could help people. How are folks in the Congo dealing with that in their response to the international community’s sort of attempts to help contain the spread? Is there a sort of violent response to those efforts?

Kiros: So, there has been, in some cases. I think most people in the Congo don’t think that Ebola is a hoax. There was a survey recently that I think 30 percent of people thought that it wasn’t a real disease, which is significant, but it’s not the majority of people. But Ebola-treatment centers have been burned. There are teams that are called “safe and dignified burial teams,” and they go out in basically hazmat suits and then they will, if someone’s tested positive, they’ll go to their home and try and disinfect everything so that bodily fluids that can transmit Ebola don’t infect other people. And then they sort of wrap people up in a special tarp, and they try to bury them in a way that ensures the disease doesn’t spread. Those people have been attacked because they’re highly visible.

And I think from the perspective of someone in the DRC, you’re much more likely to die from the conflict that’s happening there, or from malaria or from malnutrition, issues related to displacement, than you are from Ebola. But when an Ebola outbreak spreads, there is this parachuting in of international aid, which is apt to make sure that the spread doesn’t continue, but if you look at even the worst-case scenario, there are—in the minds of some people, there are bigger fish to fry. And so, I think that there is a lot of gratitude, people that are cooperating. There’s a lot of really great radio programs that have positive public-health messaging, but there’s also a lot of distrust and just wariness of how much people’s daily lives have changed.

Harris: Bio threats happen all the time. It’s something that governments are sort of always thinking about, and scientists have estimated or believed that there’s about a 50–50 chance of another COVID-level pandemic materializing in the next 25 years. And that probability jumps significantly when you’re talking about these sort of smaller-scale outbreaks and epidemics, right? They’re things that are going to happen.

There was a playbook that developed out of some of these previous outbreaks to deal with things like this. Is that playbook still a thing? Does the international community still know how to manage these sorts of outbreaks?

Kiros: I hope so. The Trump admin published its America First Global Health Strategy and it promotes this à la carte model of funding global-health responses. So, it takes the control of global health away from the CDC and puts it in the hands of the State Department.

Marco Rubio: We care about Ebola. We don’t want anyone dying or being affected by Ebola. But our No. 1 priority will always be making sure it doesn’t come to the United States. That’s our No. 1 obligation.

Kiros: And there was a really great Substack post that I read, I think it was headlined, like, “Would You Want Henry Kissinger Running the COVID Response?,” where, like, if you don’t have public-health experts, epidemiologists, people that are specialized in running global-health responses and whose primary purpose is not statecraft but in preventing disease spread, like, how that impacts our global-health security, how it affects all of us that are alive. Like, I don’t know.

And also, the à la carte model asks countries to decide basically like, Do you want bed nets? It leads me to worry about how comprehensive future responses will be, and how prepared we’ll be.

Harris: Yeah, it’s almost like when you move it to the State Department, it becomes more of a  play for diplomacy as opposed to a care, a sort of compassionate aid, right?

Kiros: Yeah, I think there’s always been this dual justification for providing foreign aid and health aid specifically. We should nip it in the bud before it comes to our borders, but also we don’t want innocent people and babies to die of things that are very preventable.

Harris: The World Food Program was talking about, they just put out a report recently that talks about the compound factors that make the sort of public-health crisis in the DRC worse. And they’re requesting over $100 million over the next six months for Ebola response in the region, $76 million for the Congo alone.

You’ve reported on the sort of deep cuts for international aid out of the United States. And I wonder if the U.S. will ever get back to funding international-health aid in the same way that it did before this Trump administration.

Are there any indications that they will get that $100 million and then have some for the future to prevent Outbreak 17, Outbreak 18, Outbreak 19?

Kiros: So, the World Food Program is really broke currently. They’ve had to pull back from a lot of really critical places where they were providing food aid, cut rations. But I will say I think that Trump really cares about Ebola. In 2014, he was a prolific Ebola poster. I think he made 100 tweets about Ebola within a span of a few months. It’s at the intersection of hypochondriac Trump and border-control Trump. He really was adamant that no one that had the virus should enter the country, even if they’re Americans that caught the virus while abroad. And you see that he’s implemented that this time around. So, if an American doctor goes to the DRC, gets Ebola, instead of sending them back to the U.S., we’re sending them to Europe. So I mean Trump is engaged on Ebola.

Donald Trump: Go ahead, Ebola. Ebola.

Reporter: Should Americans be concerned about Ebola?

Trump: I’m concerned about everything. But certainly am. I think that, you know, it’s been confined right now to Africa. But it’s something that’s had a breakout.

Kiros: Ebola is sort of like, even when Elon Musk was discussing the USAID cuts, he was like, We cut Ebola, whoops! Everyone knows we should keep doing that. So I actually, I do think that when there’s an Ebola outbreak, out of a desire to protect national security, there is typically a surge in response. And we’ve seen that even this time, that the research and development money that’s gone into developing a vaccine for this species of Ebola, developing treatments—the U.S. has provided that.

I think what I’m skeptical about ever coming back is really there were some things that were just dropped from the global-health-aid agenda that the U.S. no longer funds. So, neglected tropical diseases—they’re this sort of package of diseases like river blindness or different types of parasitic diseases that are disabling but typically aren’t deadly, but they can make someone blind permanently or make it so that they’re unable to work, unable to go to school. And the U.S. had really successful programs that were eliminating these diseases in many countries. And most of the drugs were donated from pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. was just helping with distribution, and we’ve stopped doing that, and those companies have stopped donating the drugs because a lot of the infrastructure is gone. And that’s one of those things where I think there are a lot of examples like that, where progress was being made on a major global-health problem, and we, the U.S., just lost interest and then that’s without really an explanation things were dropped from the agenda.  

I don’t know if we ever get back. I think it’s harder to argue for the reinstitution of something than the continuation of it. And then I also think that aid has been politicized in a way that makes it difficult. The U.S. provides virtually no aid to Somalia anymore, even though they’re on the brink of famine. Certain countries have been blacklisted for lack of political interest. So, I think that we’re seeing a narrowing of ambition. And then also, some countries have just been dropped from the aid agenda by the Trump admin. So those are the major changes I see and the things that I think might not come back.

Harris: If those things don’t come back, what risk does that pose to the global-health picture?

Kiros: Zooming in on Ebola specifically, there’s just a lot less health care in the DRC because humanitarian funding not just from the U.S. but from most other wealthy countries is down pretty significantly, because the U.S. has always been a leader in global health. So I think a lot of people took our lead and brought it down.

The International Rescue Committee, for example, in this region of the DRC, they closed I think more than half of their health-care facilities. And there’s a relationship between these NGOs and the World Health Organization, the U.S. government, sort of tipping off the right authorities when they see something that is suspect and could be a pathogen that’s a real threat to biosecurity. So, I think that there are just sort of all of these holes in our picture of disease spread, and diseases will come. So I think that’s something to worry about. But I also think that the main impact will be just, if there’s a famine in Somalia and the U.S. doesn’t respond, a lot of people in Somalia are gonna die—more than would have otherwise.

The U.S. has been successful in the past of saving millions of people from famine in Somalia.

Harris: If you were to open your reporter’s notebook, think about the questions that you still have about the outbreak, about the spread, about the global, international response to it, what are those questions that you still have about the outbreak that you would like answered or that you want to pursue?

Kiros: When I’ve talked with people that are in the DRC, in Bunya, which is the current epicenter of the outbreak, I have asked where are the Americans? Do you see Americans? Is the U.S. playing a clear leadership role? And a lot of the people I’ve talked to have been like, It’s not really the U.S. leading anymore. And part of that, I think, is because after the Obama administration really took the lead on the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and the World Health Organization—it floundered and was not as useful as the U.S. was. So, there was effort put into training up the World Health Organization and building capacity so that they were more capable of leading an international-outbreak response.

And so I think that part of the story is that the World Health Organization is capable of taking the lead. But also, the leadership gap, if there is one, is interesting to me. And then I also think that this is a massive, massive human effort. So there are doctors, there are nurses, there are health-care workers that are donning hazmat suits basically, and are in 80 percent humidity in the summer heat. Doctors, they have to, they can only work for an hour because otherwise they’ll pass out due to the heat, and they’re not being paid. So there’s strikes that are happening amid the outbreak, which are, I mean, really disrupting care for people in really critical condition. But there are also these health-care workers that are working in extremely dangerous situations. People call Ebola a disease of compassion because the people that are the caretakers often are the ones that get infected and die from it.  

Harris: Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned that human element—global health is really, at the end of the day, really a human endeavor, right? A moral endeavor. It’s about preventing unnecessary human suffering, right? I think that human element of folks putting themselves in harm’s way to help other people is such a fundamental part of being human.

Hana, thank you so much for your time today and in sharing all of this with us. And we’ll be following your reporting as the effort to contain the outbreak continues.

Kiros: Thanks so much.