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Hi, everybody. Cheryl Akison here. Welcome to another edition of full measure after hours.

Today, we examine the Trump administration pledge to fire federal workers who refused to come back into the office.

When President Trump took office for a second term, there was somewhere in the neighborhood of about 2.3 million civilian federal employees.

That's about the size of the population of New Mexico. Never before have they, as a group, been so shaken up than under the Second Trump administration. Under the direction

of the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, they've been told the party's over. But some insist

there never was a party to begin with and that the downsizing is

going to have disastrous results. In today's podcast, we will hear a view from Randy Irwin,

president of the National Federation of Federal Employees. This is a union representing about

110,000 federal workers nationwide.

He is obviously against the idea of downsizing the federal workforce.

And I will say up front, some of the facts and numbers that he gives in the interview are disputed by the other side.

But here is his take on President Trump's back-to-work orders and mass firings.

Thank you. Here is his take on President Trump's back-to-work orders and mass firings. Was COVID the thing that sparked it and then people just never came back to work in as great in numbers?

I think that's not the start of the story. The start of the story is when people started having access to laptops and internet at home.

And so, and then after 9-11, telework became a very high priority of the Bush administration, a Republican,

so that in case of some national emergency, we could still continue government operations and that kind of got

...