Hey, Tammy.

Hi, Tyler.

It's good to see you.

Yeah, it's good to see you too.

So yeah, we're here today to talk about the shutdown, which I think it's already been a very,

very hard time for federal workers.

And I guess I'm wondering, you know, in your view, how much worse it's gotten. Like, if you're a federal employee in the midst of this shutdown and you've been furloughed or maybe you've been laid off completely or you're working without pay, is this worse and more chaotic than what things were like earlier in the Trump administration when

the first version of Doge was kind of wreaking havoc on the federal workforce, or is this,

would you say that this is almost like par for the course at this point?

It's very 2025 is the vibe. And I have to say some of the federal workers I'm in touch with

are signal texting me emojis of shrug emoji, you know, which is sort of indicative of the sense of, yeah, how much worse can it be? You know, how much more can they do to me? And, you know, so I think in a way there's a little bit of a recapitulation of the start of the year of this uncertainty of like what's going to happen. And are there going to be more reductions in force, mass firings, all this stuff, the things that people were waiting for in February and March. And then in other quarters, it's a little bit of like, all right, this is another week in the course of this year. It's not so different from the way that OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, has been treating me this whole time. I know that you're talking to all sorts of people across the government, but I'm wondering if you could almost separate into categories, like the kind of worker who was left at this point. Like, you know, like are these people who basically are, are they just the ones who are like kind of the most committed to public service?

And they're sort of like, I know that this is a, you know, a tough administration to be a part of,

but my life is public service. And so I'm not going to try to get a job using my skills at McKinsey.

Are these people who have such specialized skills that they kind of can't go anywhere else?

Are they young? Are they old? Like what is like the profile of the kind of worker who you speak to most often? Yeah. Right now, if I were to be very sort of general about it, I might say there are like three buckets. One is, yes, extremely committed. The people who, you know, on the one hand are saying, I'm a federal worker for life, I want to do

civil service, this is what I meant to be, and might also, on the other hand, have a little bit of mischief in them, like, I'm not going to go, they're going to have to drag me out of here. I'm not going to let President Trump and Russell vote, you know, drag me out of my job. A second category might be people who really need the money and aren't

sure where else to go, especially if you're in an area where there are a lot of federal workers.

The job market is incredibly tight in a piece we worked on a few months ago. We talked to a worker

who I think had applied for 75 jobs. She had done a very specialized task

inside an agency on the contracting front and now was applying for like Costco, Trader Joe's,

this sort of thing. So yeah, I think that's a second bucket. And the third book I would say is,

yes, older workers who are, you know, getting close to retirement. They want to make that 20 or 25-year

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