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

Today we examined 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 this 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 of you 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.

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 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 the ball rolling for telework in the federal

government. Certainly, you know, that continued through a couple

...