Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping effort to purge and reshape the federal government is underway.

Federal employees have arrived at a “fork in the road,” the new administration proclaimed in a Tuesday night announcement. Their offer is that employees can choose to voluntarily resign effective September 30, but receive full pay and be exempt from return-to-office requirements before then. Or, employees can choose to stay — but they’ll be subject to higher expectations and no guarantee of job security.

The announcement comes after a week in which Trump’s team has instilled “fear and confusion” into the federal workforce. They’ve fired some employees (including in legally dubious ways), put others on administrative leave, and demanded government employees fess up to any effort to hide DEI programs by changing their names.

All of that now seems intended to “encourage” many federal employees to quit — saving Trump and Musk the trouble of pushing out employees with legal protections against firing. However, the administration also begun the process of trying to rip away those protections for many positions. This would let them hire more political appointees who the president would unambiguously be able to fire at will.

And keep in mind that this has all unfolded in just nine days; there is likely much more to come. It’s rapidly becoming clear that this will be the most ambitious and extensive effort to radically remake the federal government in our lifetimes.

In part, this is Trump’s effort to get revenge on what he calls the “deep state,” prevent future investigations of himself, and sweep aside checks on his power. It’s also, in part, the fulfillment of long-held conservative ambitions about sweeping aside federal bureaucrats and reducing spending.

But Musk and others in what’s become known as the “tech right” have their own grand ambitions — to “disrupt” a federal workforce they view as bloated, incompetent, and ideologically unsympathetic to them — and build something better in its place.

Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist close to Musk and involved in the Trump transition’s planning, recently argued that the current federal government was basically built by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and ’40s, but had since become an “out-of-control bureaucracy” without its “founder” around to lead it.

So, Andreessen argued: “You need another FDR-like figure —........

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