Federal employment stood at about 2.67 million workers in August. Around the time Donald Trump returned to office it was just over 3 million. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, that puts the federal headcount near where it was in 1966, once temporary Census hiring spikes are set aside.
The cuts have taken out hundreds of thousands of jobs since the second term began. Reuters reported last year that about 154,000 workers accepted buyouts as part of the restructuring. Trump made a smaller bureaucracy a central campaign promise and first put Elon Musk to work on it through the Department of Government Efficiency.
Where the cuts landed
The reductions were not even. Education, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service all took hits. Homeland Security largely escaped, because the administration was building up immigration enforcement and adding people in national security work.
Savings and costs
Supporters of the drive point to money. The Office of Personnel Management projects that the Deferred Resignation Program alone will save taxpayers more than $20 billion a year, and the administration says it found $500 million in fraud and waste in federal health benefits programs.
There are costs on the other side of the ledger. The Government Accountability Office flagged roughly $6.7 billion paid to employees who left through the resignation program, plus about $12.1 million spent on targeted rehiring. Examination revenue at the IRS fell 35% during the transition. Defenders of the cuts argue that revenue was tied to the nearly $80 billion Congress put into the agency under President Biden, much of it for hiring enforcement staff, and that scaling it back is no loss. Critics see an agency stripped of the people who collect what taxpayers owe.
Sources
- Federal Workforce Falls to Lowest Level Since 1966 Under Trump
- Trump Reduces Federal Workforce to Lowest Level Since 1966, Cutting Over 330,000 Government Jobs in First Year
