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

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 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , show a seasonally adjusted decline in civilian federal employment, excluding the U.S. 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 U.S. Census workers).

The U.S. 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 U.S. 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-program 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 reorganization 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 .

Overall Interior Department employment fell by 10,214, or 14.6%, from July 2024 to July 2026 — which is a better comparison than January to July because several of its agencies hire lots of summer employees. The employment increases at the two immigration-enforcement agencies were not just the result of shuffling people around and are on a scale not seen anywhere else in the federal government. The next biggest non-reorganization gainer was the Secret Service , with an increase of just 413 jobs, or 5.1%.

The overarching picture is of a shift of government resources to immigration enforcement and away from everything else. Even agencies not targeted for cuts by the administration suffered big job losses as employees signed up for the buyouts offered by DOGE and other early retirement programs. Did the president really mean to abruptly reduce staffing at the Transportation Security Administration and Federal Aviation Administration (which employs air-traffic controllers)? Probably not, but that was the result of his policies.

During Trump’s first term, federal employment rose. The fact that his second has come to be defined by job cuts owes much to the efforts of biotech-entrepreneur-turned-politician Vivek Ramaswamy , who during his campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination pledged to reduce federal employment by 75%, then continued to push for huge job cuts after President-elect Trump appointed him and Musk as co-heads of DOGE (a job Ramaswamy left before Trump took office).

This staff reduction was supposed to go hand-in-hand with big reductions in government regulation, but it was never clear how the two were linked — most federal government employees don’t spend their days writing or enforcing regulations, they provide services like medical care or disaster aid or firefighting or help with getting Social Security .

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has argued that focusing on "the spending that is the easiest to cut practically" can build public support for the government-benefit reductions needed to get the federal deficit under control. But apart from some Medicaid and food-stamp cutbacks in the 2025 budget act, there hasn’t been much action on that front, and overall that legislation was deemed by the Congressional Budget Office to have increased the deficit by $3.4 trillion through 2034.

The push to reduce federal employment instead seems to have taken on a life of its own, proceeding at many agencies without any apparent vision for what it’s supposed to accomplish. Pushing out career employees and replacing them with Trump loyalists is clearly one goal, but at the place where that’s been most explicit, the Justice Department , it’s been quite a struggle to find qualified lawyers willing to work there.

And while older workers have left in large numbers to take advantage of buyout and early retirement offers, the number of young federal employees has fallen even faster, with workers in their late 40s the only group experiencing gains. (These age-group numbers do include the defense agencies with their incomplete June and July data, so I’ve measured the change as of May.)

There haven’t been big differences in job-loss rates by educational attainment — the share of federal workers with college degrees is, at 53.5% as of May, about the same as what it was before Trump took office. There may be big differences by race but, this being the Trump administration, the OPM no longer provides data on that. It no longer breaks federal employment down by sex either, but the BLS still does in its payroll employment statistics. These show a marked change since Trump returned to office in the percentage of federal employees who are women, although at 47.2% in August the share was still higher than at any time before 2024.

All in all this feels less like a thought-out effort to reshape the federal government than a somewhat inchoate attempt to assert executive power, punish perceived political enemies and just be seen as doing something. If federal agencies keep struggling to perform popular or essential tasks, the effort may increasingly be seen as doing something counterproductive.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of "The Myth of the Rational Market."