Or how getting laid off turned into a music career side hustle.
USAID Layoffs
On March 14th, 2025, USAID was dismantled, I was laid off and so began my quarter-life (mid-life?) crisis.
In the first two months of the new administration, Trump made the move to dismantle all of USAID, overriding millions upon millions of Congressionally allocated funds and laying off tens of thousands of people. The career I had spent years studying at Georgetown and completing internships for, disappeared overnight.
Most Americans don’t know what USAID does or they find it to be a waste of time. For an agency that makes up 1% of the country’s entire budget and takes only about $38 worth of taxpayer money every year, USAID’s global impact cannot be overstated. As the largest humanitarian donor in the world, USAID saves lives, from delivering life-saving HIV medications under PEPFAR to feeding Sudanese IDPs (internally-displaced peoples/ internal refugees) at soup kitchens in Khartoum. An estimated 700,000-1 million people have died due to USAID cuts, the majority of whom are children, much of the time in countries we have imperialized and exploited. Preventable diseases have risen exponentially, with UNAIDS losing 80% of its funding and an increase of malaria cases by 1 million (700,000 of those impacting children), resulting in an estimated 88 deaths every hour. A study by The Lancet Medical Journal estimates that global aid cuts could lead to a total of 9.4 million deaths– with 2.5 million of deaths being children under 5 years old and high estimates reaching as far as 22.6 million– by 2030. Places where aid has stopped flowing have seen an uptick in violent crimes.
Additionally, with the world’s largest humanitarian donor disappearing, new organizations such as the “Gaza Humanitarian Fund” in coordination with the Boston Consulting Group have popped in. The GHF operated with little oversight from humanitarian NGOs or agencies, with IDF/ IOF troops shooting Palestinians at point-blank range as they ran to grab aid, food and medical supplies. In the second half of 2025, over 2,600 Palestinians were killed and hunted for sport in a real-life Hunger Games while simply seeking basic humanitarian aid. With USAID gone, some of the most globally minded and diverse professionals rooted in the humanitarian ethos were silenced and humanitarian watchdogs effectively defunded.
Since the agency was created by and funds were distributed by acts of Congress, it legally requires acts of Congress to undo it. This was bypassed by the Trump Administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE, unsurprisingly as USAID was investigating government contracts of Musk’s Starlink in Russia. This should concern every American as it represents the continued unchecked expansion of the Executive Branch’s powers, which have been expanding ever since Presidents began declaring war and executing drone strikes without Congressional approval– most recently the strikes killing innocent schoolgirls in Iran with our proxy state (or, military base disguised as a country) in SWANA*: Israel. The dismantling of USAID sets the stage for dismantling Trump’s new targets, from the Department of Education to the Department of Justice. The former is to keep the populace uneducated and the latter is especially of particular concern when it comes to hiding the full truth about the Epstein files.
It is important to note that USAID itself has been used as an arm of U.S neo-colonialism. For example, in my own family’s home country of Pakistan, USAID worked with the CIA to extract DNA from Pakistanis for the sake of finding Osama Bin Laden under the guise of a Polio vaccination drive. As a result, Pakistan is now 1 of only 3 countries globally which has active Polio outbreaks. These realities are horrible and must be addressed at the root cause: colonialism itself, whose power comes from (racial) capitalism. As an agency, USAID was slowly moving towards aid localization, decolonization and wealth redistribution through meetings such as the Grand Bargain Summit, which I helped major international NGOs such as CARE International prepare for through research, policy analysis and advocacy. I believe that USAID can be a tool for meeting the global sustainable development goals and wealth redistribution through global collaboration, local hiring and flexible grants funding, if given the chance and political will to do so. During my unemployment, I still kept advancing this goal of decolonial sustainable development, including serving as a guest speaker for Women of Color Advancing Peace & Security. One thing is clear, the solution is not to withdraw all funding commitments with no alternative infrastructure or funding streams overnight.
When I hopped off the dreaded Teams call where my manager informed me I was furloughed, I felt relief. Relief that I did not work too hard at my job. I did not make work my life. Instead, I invested the stability that my job gave me into my health, community and music, playing house shows, festivals and practicing guitar whenever I could. My ego was not tied to my career, but to a spirit of creativity and freedom which my career gave me the flexibility to pursue. As soon as I was laid off, I kept on making zines for mutual aid groups, performing shows and tapping into my passions with nothing left to lose. If it weren’t for getting laid off, I wouldn’t have had the same opportunity to host a vinyl swap pop-up fair that recieved a feature in The Washington Post or learned about instruments from all over the world at the House of Musical Traditions to transform my passion for music into a real side hustle. Gratitude has been my grounding.
I was prepared for this as I grew up watching my Dad face layoffs during recessions, from 2008 to 2023, knowing that when layoffs happen, companies don’t give a single shit about laying off loyal employees to save themselves or make a quick buck. These recessions are a feature, not a glitch, of capitalism. Infinite growth is a myth perpetuated by the capitalist class. We are told that graph up = good and graph down = bad, but just like in nature, nothing can bloom year-round. Everything has its season, from corn in the summer to cherry blossoms in the spring. To maintain infinite growth and escape the natural downturn of profits, shareholders continue to enrich themselves by cutting the largest cost for most employers: labor. This is what results in mass layoffs. In 2026 alone so far, hundreds of thousands of people across top sectors have been laid off, while corporate profits continue to skyrocket. These mass layoffs are an effort to reset the job market following massive increases in hiring, remote work and salary increases during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a city like D.C, where the federal government is the largest employer, USAID set the blueprint for later federal agencies’ funding cuts and the layoffs of an additional hundreds of thousands of federal workers. 600,000 Black women in particular were laid off and are still the most impacted by federal layoffs. The D.C metropolitan area is home to some of the wealthiest Black majority counties in the U.S such as PG and Charles County. With the ability to erase DEI protections and layoff Black women en masse, these federal layoffs have been a direct attack on the Black middle and upper class.
(I still maintain that the real DEI is the myth of meritocracy for rich legacy kids. I went to Georgetown surrounded by them– ask me how I know.)
I believe what we are in now is not a recession, but a Silent Depression that will shift towards a K-Shaped Economy. In other words, upward growth for those in the AI boom and downward growth for everyone else- especially those who have lost their jobs due to AI. After all, you don’t have to pay AI to work. U.S history, since the early 20th century, has laid the following blueprint:
To escape depressions and recessions, the U.S goes to war. War is a business, and the U.S leads in it from being the top arms exporter in the world and spending more on defense than the next 7 countries combined. Plus, when a country is divided, nothing unites faster than a shared enemy. The image of the Muslim, Arab or Palestinian boogeyman has slowly been deconstructed, especially due to the rise of second-generation Muslim Americans like myself, but across party lines political administrations still try to manufacture consent for endless wars, now against Iran and to profit from the genocide in Gaza. Once directly through arms sales, and secondly through colonizing and ‘developing’ the land along the Mediterranean coast, which the international ‘development’ sector will then profit from.
We have normalized mass-death and suffering. Not only that, but we have normalized our own complicity in mass murder around the globe. This escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic when over 1 million essential workers died due to COVID-19 as frontline workers, majority of whom were Black and Brown. This restructured the economy as we know it. 1 million essential workers who died in the line of duty means 1 million roles that need to be filled: cashiers, doctors, nurses and teachers. While Gen Z faces a low hiring market and AI pulls the entry-level ladder behind it, younger and marginalized workers are being asked to fill the labor gaps left behind by essential workers who died during COVID.
But even in the collapse of the Amerikkkan empire, I still needed to figure out how to pay rent.
(F)Unemployment
With my main quest interrupted, I began doing what I do best: side-questing. My newly unemployed lifestyle consisted of waking up with the sun to go on weekday museum runs, recording guitar clips on TikTok and lengthy cafe sessions spent applying to jobs, with a brief lovely stint as an English & Language Arts Teacher at HD Woodson High School until the summer rolled around. (My thoughts on the public education system are a blog post for another time.)
Over the summer, music does what it always has for me: save my life. I moved into a spare room at the Incubator house, where I had previously performed shows at, while struggling to find somewhere to live on two minimum wage jobs. In between teaching gigs, I picked up two jobs: one hosting music events at a cafe to another selling and restringing musical instruments from all around the world. I spent my days pestering my coworkers with questions on all the rare and unique folk instruments, from djembes to guzhengs. All the while, I restrung mandolins, tuned sundoors (English: Hammered Dulcimers), played the sitar and practiced guitar on shift.
On average I worked about 50-60 hours a week, 6 days a week just to keep up with basic living expenses. Over the past few months, I continuously found issues with my paystubs. One thing I don’t, and will never play about, is my money. This is a reminder to always double check your paystub and be a loud bitch who leaves a paper trail in the face of injustice so that you’re never easy to manipulate or target. Numbers don’t lie: CHECK YOUR PAYSTUB!
Never once when I faced housing instability was I unemployed or uneducated. In fact, it was the most employed and overworked I have been in my life. My entire savings account of $8,000 at 23 years old was drained in the few months I was unemployed. The cost of living crisis is beyond insane and the system is built to maintain a level of poverty to enforce compliance and capitalist hierarchy. Work has always felt like a hostage situation to me: comply or die. Work, or starve on the streets. Even with a Georgetown degree, years of government work experience, internal referrals and a diversified skill set, this experience was a stark reminder of how all of us are just one crisis away from homelessness, at the mercy of the system that could care less whether we live or die. The threat of homelessness is not an accident, it is purposeful to scare us into compliance for abusive jobs and a system that values profit and power above all else. Luckily, I have a family who is supportive of my queerness that I could turn towards– a luxury not afforded to most queer kids, let alone queer Muslim kids from immigrant households.
Despite this reality, it feels like whenever I try to settle comfortably back into the 9-5 life or gain a foothold of stability anywhere, life makes it so that I must always turn back to music. No matter how much I run from it, in my seasons of isolation and despair, I have shared my sorrows with my guitar and in conversations with Allah (God) when words and conversation with others feels too heavy to bear. Though I temporarily lost my job and almost lost where I was living, my knowledge never left me. Instead, Allah blessed me with more than I could have asked for, bringing me back to the power of knowledge, music and a community to fall back on.
The Path Forward: Music
My goal in pursuing music is simple. I want to be free.
Free from the fear of homelessness, free from toxic workplaces and free to fully step into my whole self without fear of retribution. Free time with slow mornings spent in nature and the ability to create at my own pace, as God literally intended. Then, as Toni Morrison also put it, “Your job if you are free is to free someone else.”
Artists are one of the only groups that interact with people across class and identity. We are powerful in shaping narratives and framing current events to build solidarity. Authoritarian states know the power of art, funding the propaganda machine in Hollywood to justify endless wars and censoring celebrities who speak out on Palestine. I myself have faced censorship from institutions like the Smithsonian, which led to the creation of this blog since I decided to self-publish my work here instead (which you can read here.) Sufis find unity with God (personified as Divine Love) through dance and music. Sufism is central to Punjabi Muslim culture, my beliefs and my own art. Liberation itself is creative work requiring us to desconstruct oppressive epistemologies in favor of a new world.
Music for me is a path of self-expression, self-transformation and financial freedom. We were created to create. In creating art, I create myself, rather than ‘find myself’. I enter into a conversation with various parts of myself and the Universe’s collective consciousness, or what I call flow, also central to yoga.
One of the songs I performed at the backyard show while squatting at the Incubator house is Jogi by Panjabi MC. Jogi is the Punjabi word from which Yogi* derives. Yoga, at its core, is an Indigenous spiritual practice focused on bridging the sacred and worldly through connecting our body with our breath. It has provided me peace, grounding and a roadmap for change even when the world is crumbling around me.
As a Punjabi descended from the Indus River Valley Civilization where yoga originated, now mostly centered in modern-day Pakistan, I would never want to gatekeep yoga because of the profound benefits it has given me. I do not believe in ownership through gatekeeping, but rather ownership as stewardship. Similar to Indigenous stewardship of the land, stewarding the practice of yoga entails proper cultural appreciation and recognizing its social justice roots beyond a commodifiable practice or aesthetic exercise dressed up in Alo mats and Lululemon leggings, especially when the wellness to white supremacy pipeline is very much alive and real. The core tenants of yoga, Ahimsa (non-harm), Satya (truthfulness) and Seva (selfless service) ground it in social justice and wellness as community care. This, is what it means to be a Jogi.
So, we cannot practice yoga while acting xenophobic towards immigrants, preaching Hindutva, being Islamophobic or looking down on Indians/ Pakistanis. You cannot be a Jogi while ignoring social justice crises worldwide, from Black Lives Matter to Free Palestine to ICE to the genocides in Gaza, Sudan and Congo. Yoga reminds us of the prana life force flowing through us all, where cutting off one branch harms the whole tree of humanity. The breath and body connect the sacred and worldly, erasing the ego and into the same life force that connects us all.
Back in Pakistan, my grandparents were teachers, tribal chiefs and businessmen who earned the title ‘Malik.’ Malikah represents that legacy, yet at the same time, signals a break away from the patriarchal tradition which has stained it, such as my grandmothers both being child brides married at 13 and 14 in the shadow of Partition following third world poverty and British colonialism in South Asia. It represents me turning what the system deems a disadvantage (my Muslim surname, which results in more ‘random’ selection searches at airports or nearly 50% fewer callbacks due to hiring discrimination) into a strength as sovereignty and independence. Al-Malik, is one of the 99 names of Allah itself translating to ‘The Sovereign.” As cheesy as it sounds, no one owns the Earth or the unseen (only felt) Spirit world but God, to whom I surrender (the meaning of Muslim.)
The name Malik itself derives from the root letters M-L-K and is the name of Muslim minister & Black power activist Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz. My parents immigrated to the U.S not via high education or employment requirements on H1-B or F-1 visas like the majority of South Asian immigrants, but from the Diversity Lottery Visa program which traces its roots back to the Civil Rights Era which abolished immigration quotas for non-White countries. Like, they literally won the lottery and built their life from the ground up, humble beginnings. American dream type shit. Part of why the South Asian community leans conservative is because upper-caste, upper-class immigrants are disproportionately represented in the diaspora, resulting in the Model Minority Myth. As a result, I inform my politics and struggles of Islamophobic racism through the Black radical tradition and legacy of activists that have tirelessly fought against this oppressive racial capitalist system that targets Black & Indigenous people first & foremost since this country’s founding, but won’t think twice about sacrificing anyone who stands in its way. Their legacy inspires me and sets the blueprint for resistance towards liberation worldwide.
I believe that with the rise of AI we have seen the fall of the college-career-retirement pipeline and accelerating climate change. Especially as more women and people of color gain college degrees, the value of a college degree is devalued and the goal post moves again. Instead, the 21st century economy will bring a renewed focus on skills and the creative economy, plus hopefully a push towards socialism and divestment from old, oppressive systems. Craft and skill will provide employment, though knowledge and wisdom remains priceless. This wisdom must be passed down from our elders, just as my Mom and Dad have passed down their wisdom to me, as we return to Indigenous ways to save us from climate collapse. Power is not held in imaginary money or borders, but in the strength of our connections and knowledge.
Right now I work as a full-time high school social studies teacher. Between lesson-planning, grading and making 6-7 jokes with students all day, I have little time left for music or writing at the end of the day. Once summer comes around though, I’m excited to share some new things I’ve been working on. Stay tuned 😉
Signing off,
Malikah