Trump’s push to cut federal jobs lacks a goal and a vision

Justin Fox, Tribune News Service

Wondering why so many things seem to have been going wrong this year, from contaminated lettuce to measles outbreaks to air-traffic-control-related flight cancellations? The reduction in federal government capacity caused by the Trump administration’s job cutbacks may be a factor. The administration has made shrinking the federal workforce a top priority, and it has done so at a remarkable pace.

But many of the job cuts don’t appear to have a coherent goal, and the overall result so far is a federal government that spends about as much money as it did before but by all appearances does a worse job of it.

The timeliest data available, from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, show a seasonally adjusted decline in civilian federal employment, excluding the US Postal Service, of 332,900, or 13.6%, since President Donald Trump moved back into the White House in January 2025. That’s a huge drop, surpassed over the nine decades for which these numbers are available only by the sharp federal employment drawdown after World War II and the slower decline after the end of the Cold War (as long as you don’t count the ins and outs of temporary US Census workers).

The US population and workforce have grown over this period, of course, leaving federal employment’s share of overall nonfarm payroll employment at a record low of 1.303% in July. Measured by employment at least, the age of big government is long past. Measured by spending it is not, but employee pay and benefits amounted to 10% of federal spending in the 2025 fiscal year, according to a Peter G. Peterson Foundation analysis of federal data, with civilian executive-branch employees — the focus of the Trump administration’s job reductions — accounting for just 5.5%. If the goal were to reduce spending, the richest targets are elsewhere, and in fact federal spending has risen since Trump returned to office, although noninterest spending has at least been roughly flat.

So what exactly has the Trump administration been up to with all these job reductions? The federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) keeps tabs on monthly federal employment down to the subagency level, and the statistics paint a revealing if not exactly crystal-clear picture of the administration’s priorities. Agencies long in the crosshairs of conservative activists have shed lots of jobs, and the two immigration-enforcement agencies have unsurprisingly added many of them. But what is perhaps most striking is how widespread the job losses have been, with many agencies that I don’t think anybody in the administration really had in their sights struggling to get by with much-reduced workforces.

The nondefense agencies — plus the Army Corps of Engineers, which focuses mainly on defending us from water — had the biggest job losses since Trump took office. I left out defense agencies because their June and July numbers are incomplete and also because many defense job shifts were due to reorganizations and renamings that would take several columns to unravel. (The civilian defense employee total was down 89,668, or 11.6%, as of May.) That the US Agency for International Development lost 95% of its employees is not news — it was the main early focus of temporary government employee Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — but remains shocking. A smallish federal agency that had long enjoyed bipartisan support and funded some quite-effective global public health programs was effectively shut down with no input from Congress. Why?

Musk spread unhinged conspiracy theories about the agency’s supposed sinister activities, which the president partially echoed, and the White House released a short list of questionable if mostly quite small expenditures. But my sense is that, because it didn’t have a significant domestic constituency, USAID was mainly just an easy target for an assertion of power meant to cow Congress and other agencies. With credible estimates now putting the loss of life from the health-programme cutbacks in the millions, its destruction leaves a bloody stain on this administration and on Musk that will never go away. By contrast, the huge employment reductions at the Internal Revenue Service were largely a rollback of increases in enforcement and customer-service staffing during the Biden administration. This rollback is almost certainly reducing tax revenue and increasing the deficit, but it was endorsed by Congress and popular with many Republican voters.

Other agencies seen as suspect by some conservatives, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (home of most federal climate research) and Bureau of Land Management (famously the target of armed protests by right-wing Oregon ranchers), have also experienced sharp staffing reductions. The same goes for the Department of Education, which the administration has vowed to close but wasn’t very big to begin with and is also divided in the OPM data into a number of subagencies (total department job losses so far add up to 1,832, or 44.6%).

The list of big winners is a lot shorter. The biggest employment gain here is the result of a reorganisation that consolidated financial management, human resources, communications and other functions previously performed separately by Interior Department agencies such as the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Reclamation in the office of Secretary Doug Burgum.