Rachel Treisman Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan walks toward an entrance to a federal courthouse in San Francisco in December 2022. She is representing thousands of former Twitter employees suing the company over severance and other issues. Jeff Chiu/AP hide caption toggle caption Trump wants to cut the federal workforce. Who they are and what that means At the same time, she acknowledges that many federal employees fear being targeted, citing the "veiled or not-so-veiled threats" that DOGE will put entire contingents of the federal workforce on the chopping block anyway. "Employees are being warned, essentially, that if they don't take this resignation, they may just be terminated tomorrow and then get nothing — which was also a concern for a lot of the Twitter employees who were faced with this Fork in the Road," she adds. At Twitter, a number of employees opted in to the Fork in the Road, only to get fired shortly afterwards (some on the night before Thanksgiving), she says. Sponsor Message Today, many rank-and-file federal employees are worried about getting fired because of their political affiliation, whether real or perceived. This week, for example, the FBI gave the Justice Department a list of employees who worked on the Jan. 6 investigation. FBI agents have filed two lawsuits in federal court seeking to block their personal information from becoming public. Like with Twitter, the fork may lead to court Liss-Riordan says she is already talking to federal workers about political discrimination claims, which she believes can be brought in court under the First Amendment. "So we're looking into that and making plans to help employees who find themselves in this situation," she adds. She says her experience suing Twitter has taught her that Musk — the world's richest man — is willing to put a lot of money into court fights, between the two major law firms representing the company and the costs of the thousands of individual arbitrations that Twitter has to cover. Trying to defend all these claims individually, she says, is not very cost-efficient — an irony for the man running DOGE.