The number of employees on the federal government’s payroll has dropped by 277,000 since President Donald Trump took office for his second term, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
The agency said in its monthly jobs report that federal employment was 2.738 million in November, adjusted for seasonal variations, down from 3.015 million in January.
President Donald Trump and the White House have touted the drop in federal workers as an accomplishment.
The big decline in federal payrolls came in October, with the end of the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program. In early 2025, via an email titled “fork in the road,” the administration offered to allow workers to resign and then pay them through the end of September. When that program ended at the end of the month, 179,000 workers dropped off the payrolls, according to the BLS’s count.
Altogether, more than 320,000 workers have been separated from the federal government since Trump took office, while more than 100,000 have joined, according to the Office of Personnel Management. The Department of War has seen the most employees leave.
Trump came into office pledging to shrink the federal workforce, especially by getting rid of civilian employees who he saw as thwarting his agenda in his first term. He campaigned on eliminating a number of agencies and downsizing the government.
He followed through on those pledges to some extent, in part with the help of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. On their watch, the Department of Education, USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and other agencies or bureaus have been largely dismantled.
Yet he faces obstacles in further reducing the federal workforce.
One is that he is also planning to hire more federal workers, including for the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed in July included new funding for immigration enforcement and national security. Trump has also called for a further 50% increase in defense spending.
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The other challenge is that much of the growth in government in recent years and decades has come not in the form of additional federal workers, but in contractors. The civilian federal workforce is the same size it was 60 years ago, meaning that it was about 4% of the total U.S. labor force in the 1960s and less than 2% today. At the same time, though, the federal contracting sector has grown enormously. No updated precise figures are available from reliable sources, but one estimate put the figure at 5 million in 2020.