Look what happened. Is this crazy? We stand on the verge of the four greatest years of the history. Make America great heckling. How can you be against it?

Welcome to Sidebar from The Washington Post. I'm your host, Libby Casey, and I'm with senior political

correspondent Rhonda Coleman and columnist and editorial writer James Homan. So today, Thursday, February 6th, is Decision Day for millions of federal workers who received Elon Musk's email offering or promising or threatening a fork in the road. It offers the

chance to stop working but still get paid through September. But there are a lot of questions

about the legality, the legitimacy of what might be a buyout offer and whether it's really like

real. So on today's show, what the efforts of President Donald

Trump and Elon Musk mean for federal workers, that's 2.3 million people spread out all over the

country, also the future of government contractors, of which there are millions, and changes to

the functions of government that could affect you, whether you're a federal worker, whether you

even live in America or you're someone listening abroad. So let's talk about the fork in the road email, James, and had an Elon Musk vibe to it.

When he took over Twitter, he sent this email where you basically had to opt in and say, if I want to

stay at Twitter, I'm going to be hardcore and work around the clock and buy into the culture change. And in this case, Elon Musk is trying to essentially wage a hostile takeover of the U.S. government, getting into every agency, looking at the payment systems, the personnel files, going into places like the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, where a lot of the climate data is to the FAA.

And so there's kind of this move fast and break thing, sort of tech disruptive vibe that he's

trying to bring to all of this.

And the risk is that he's going to cut into the bone of government.

And then it's one thing to kind of slash staff at Twitter.

You can always hire people back.

It's another to end up shedding all these essential workers who have decades of, you know,

combined millennia of experience that your institutional memory that you're basically

throwing away at a time when there are so many crises in the world.

Rhonda, I think people have this idea of a federal worker being like someone pushing papers around sort of a generic office building, maybe marble, maybe brutalist architecture style in Washington, D.C.

But we're talking about everyone from doctors and nurses at the Department of Veterans Affairs

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