This message comes from David Tennant does a podcast with, back for season three. David Tennant

returns to sit down with superstar guests like Russell T. Davies, Jamila Jamil, and Stanley Tucci.

New season streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Here's a hypothetical question. If he wanted to, could Elon Musk establish a new

bathroom breaks policy for more than two million federal employees? Well, he hasn't, but since the Trump

administration took office and gave Musk's Department of Government efficiency a mandate to shrink

the government, Musk has wielded an astonishing level of authority over the

federal workforce. After gaining access to the Treasury Department's massive payment system,

Musk and his team have dismissed thousands of employees, terminated countless contracts,

and targeted two government agencies created by Congress for elimination.

Last weekend, federal workers received an email, instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week.

Musk added in a social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation.

That got pushback from several Trump-appointed agency

leaders who told their employees not to respond. Much of what Musk has done is under court

challenge, but President Trump has said he'd like to see him become even more aggressive.

To help us understand these efforts to drastically reshape the American government, we've invited

Elizabeth Lina's to join us. She's the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and

Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and director of the People Lab, which does research

on how to recruit, retrain, and support the government workforce and integrate evidence-based

policymaking and government. Earlier in her career, she was a policy advisor to Prime Minister

George Papandreou of Greece pursuing government reform at a time of financial crisis.

Well, Elizabeth Lino's welcome to fresh air.

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