Federal government to drop 300,000 workers this year

By Brett Rowland
The Center Square

The federal government is on pace to eliminate about 300,000 workers this year.

Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor said 80% of those employees would leave voluntarily and 20% would be fired. Kupor provided the figures to Reuters on Thursday. That's a 12.5% reduction in the federal workforce since January.

The U.S. government employs about 2.4 million federal workers, excluding the military (about 1.3 million active-duty military personnel) and U.S. Postal Service (about 600,000 employees), according to 2024 Pew Research report. That report noted that the federal government employed 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce. That percentage includes postal employees, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

President Donald Trump promised Americans a more efficient government when he took office for his second term. At first, his Department of Government Efficiency, with Elon Musk at the helm, led the charge. Musk has since left DOGE and had a public feud with the president.

When Trump created DOGE, he said it would be the government cost-cutting equivalent of the "Manhattan Project." Both Trump and Musk promised Americans would get a more efficient government after DOGE addressed government waste, reduced regulations and reduced the federal workforce.

Musk initially said DOGE would aim to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, but he later cut that in half. At a Cabinet meeting in April, Musk said DOGE was on pace to cut $150 billion from the federal budget.

Unions have challenged some of the administration's reductions, which remain pending.