At Issue: The Dismantling of the Federal Government: Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post Reporter Hannah Natanson in Conversation with The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser

Hill Center launched its new public affairs discussion series At Issue in April, 2025.
The series examines the many critical issues we are faced with today.

Hannah Natanson spearheaded a major series of investigative reports for The Washington Post documenting the Trump administration’s effort, at the outset of his second term, to dismantle much of the federal government — firing hundreds of thousands of civil servants and redirecting remaining staff toward implementing the president’s agenda. In a first-person essay describing the assignment, Natanson wrote of becoming the Post’s “federal government whisperer,” after amassing more than 1,100 sources across federal agencies.

Her reporting covered a series of consequential stories, including the firing of inspectors general, federal officials warning that Elon Musk’s rapid restructuring effort violated the law, and the suppression of federal reports on the impacts of U.S. foreign aid freezes.

Subsequently, FBI agents searched Natanson’s home and seized several of her electronic devices. The search had no clear precedent as a Justice Department action against a reporter in a national security leak case, and it drew condemnation from press freedom advocates nationally.

Months later, Natanson’s reporting anchored the package of Post articles awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, which the Pulitzer Board recognized for “piercing the veil of secrecy” around the administration’s overhaul of the federal government.

Hannah Natanson is a narrative enterprise reporter for The Washington Post. Before that, she covered the Trump administration’s transformation of government, playing a key role on a team recognized with the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Her coverage also won the 2026 Livingston Award for national reporting and the Toner Prize for national political reporting. She previously reported on education for six years, winning a Peabody Award in 2024 for a podcast series on school gun violence. She also was part of a team of Post journalists awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; and part of another team of Post journalists who were finalists for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso. Natanson graduated from Harvard, where she served as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson.

Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker based in Washington, D.C., writes a weekly column on life in Washington and is a host of the Political Scene podcast. Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington publications, including Politico, where she founded the award-winning Politico Magazine, and Foreign Policy, which won three National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure as editor-in-chief. Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was the editor of Outlook and national news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics, spent four years as the Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She started her journalism career in the nineteen-eighties, as an intern at the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, which she later edited.