Welcome back to Sirens, a new series brought to you by the ladies of bombshell, where we

dissect the institutions of American power. Join us as we sound the alarm on technology, governance,

and national security issues, and maybe lure some men to

their deaths. Our last episode included special guest, Kristen Dorgalo, a former senior advisor at the

Office of Management and Budget, and an amazing expert on the federal workforce ecosystem to talk

about reductions in force that we're seeing the federal workforce.

We had a lot more to explore for our listeners on the context and consequences of RIFs,

which are both unprecedented in approach and also an impact.

Let's dive in again on what we may see in terms of the impact over the coming months and more hopefully how we might use this as a springboard

for future reform. So just so overarching context for folks as we go into the second part of the

conversation, reductions in force have been a tool that presidents and administrations have

used in a number of different ways over the decades.

This runs from anything in the post-World War II context, President Truman,

used an approach similar to this in order to cut the size of the federal workforce to a much smaller version that was not actually, to get rid of the folks that were not

actually needed in a post-war context.

And that was upwards in the millions of people. So in the same way that we had military demobilization,

we also had federal workforce demobilization to a degree. We've also seen a number of other

approaches that different presidents have used. That includes anything from President Eisenhower, reduced, did a reduction of

around 200,000 positions as well as downsizing the military that came out of recommendations from the

Hoover Commission. President Ford proposed the elimination about 40,000 positions following the

1973 recession. Ronald Reagan, famous for

not exactly being a huge fan of the federal government and federal workforce, he attempted to

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