Trump Has Forced Out Nearly 10% Of The Federal Workforce

WASHINGTON – More than 199,000 federal workers have left their jobs or have been forced out by the Trump administration since January 2025, according to an alarming new analysis by Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit focused on better government.

That’s nearly 10% of the entire federal civilian workforce, which was composed of about 2.3 million employees at the start of the year.

“We’re seeing the arson of our government,” Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, told HuffPost. “The numbers are stunning. We can count 200,000, and the administration said 300,000, by the end of the year. That’s 1 in 8.”

The nonpartisan group has been tracking federal workforce cuts since President Donald Trump began his second term. On Tuesday, it released updated numbers to reflect new data it has collected from agencies and the Office of Management and Budget. Specifically, it has factored in new deferred resignation data for the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Interior Department, reduction-in-force data for the Defense Department, and retirement data for the Department of Agriculture.

Of the more than 199,000 people who have left their federal jobs this year, more than 135,000 did so through the Trump administration’s so-called deferred resignation program. This program, also known as the “Fork in the Road” deal, offered employees paid administrative leave and benefits for a set period if they agreed to promptly resign.

HuffPost has spoken to several federal workers this year who felt torn about this option, as they didn’t want to quit their jobs but knew if they didn’t take this offer, they risked being fired in the near future and getting no benefits.

The Department of Defense has lost more people this year than any other Cabinet-level department, with more than 55,000 federal civilian employees having left. The Treasury Department saw the second-largest workforce reduction, losing more than 30,000 people, followed by the Department of Agriculture, which has lost more than 21,000 employees.

Nearly one-quarter of all civilian federal employees are veterans, meaning they are being disproportionately hit by Trump’s workforce cuts. And contrary to the idea that Trump is purging Washington bureaucrats, the vast majority of federal employees in general ― more than 80% of them ― work outside of the D.C. area, across all states and around the world.

“Huge numbers of very talented public servants are being forced out the door. That’s going to hurt,” said Stier. “The services that Americans have come to expect are not going to be there.”

Trump has forced out nearly 10% of the federal workforce in seven months.

via Associated Press

The Trump administration has been aggressively, and sometimes unlawfully, firing and forcing people out of their federal jobs at the direction of Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. He claims his goal is reining in unnecessary spending, but the reality is he’s been devastating federal agencies and trying to make working conditions as miserable as possible for all federal employees so they’ll leave and the government will become a shell of its former self.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a private speech in 2023 unearthed by ProPublica.

“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so,” he said. “We want to put them in trauma.”

An OMB spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about traumatizing federal employees or the number of them who have left their jobs.

As for how the government is expected to function with nearly one-tenth of its workers gone, a senior administration official said only, “Much better.”

The Trump administration has been so reckless in its efforts to purge federal workers that agencies have raced to hire back thousands of people they had just fired, because it turns out we need seasoned civil servants to make the federal government function well.

“They’re not removing the poorest performers or people unnecessary for federal activity. They’re just lopping people off. It’s a numbers game,” said Stier. “The cost to the American public is going to be immense. It’s already an issue.”

“These guys are doing this with maximum harm in mind,” added Stier. “OMB is trying to traumatize the workforce. No organization gets better if you traumatize the people you need to get the work done.”