One of the most unheralded policy successes of President Donald Trump’s second term has been the purging of many unnecessary federal jobs.
The federal government has reduced its workforce by 300,000 jobs since Jan. 20, 2025, bringing it down to a still-bulky 2.7 million employees. Not since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society vastly expanded the scope of the national government has the federal workforce been at this level.
It’s not merely that the feds have shed superfluous jobs — there are still over 4 million contract workers, after all. It’s that the White House has been targeting all the right institutions.
The bloated War Department, with over 61,000 departures, and the equally bloated State Department, with 37% of its staff gone, experienced the biggest reductions.
But most of the buyouts were aimed at agencies and departments that should have been shuttered a long time ago. Take the U.S. Agency for International Development, which, for years, was used to funnel billions to hard-left ideological projects around the world. Virtually its entire staff is gone.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the unaccountable bureaucratic brainchild of progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), has lost roughly 88% of its workers, though it’s still far too big.
The Agriculture Department, which, despite its name, is principally a welfare agency that has little to do with farming, experienced tens of thousands of departures. So has another welfare-state institution, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, whose most notable achievement has been helping inflate housing prices.
Not every agency is being clipped fast enough, though. Early in his term, Trump signed an executive order directing the dismantling of the Education Department. Yet this intrusive agency, which spends its time propping up unions and undermining local initiatives, has lost only 40% of its staff.
Every time Republicans threaten to cut federal jobs, though they rarely follow through, Democrats predict that society will be plunged into chaos and high unemployment.
The unemployment rate in September 2024 was 4.1%. In September 2025, it was 4.4%. It’s at 4.1% today. Barely anyone, one suspects, has noticed that the federal workforce has shrunk by around 11%. They probably wouldn’t notice if it shrank by another 11%.
What Democrats really fear is losing power. Federal agencies, government employees, and public-sector unions are all bases of political influence for the Left.
“This is an attempt at intimidation,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) complained when the Office of Management and Budget released a memo instructing agencies to plan for large-scale layoffs. “Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare.”
Why would Democrats be “scared” of a leaner federal workforce?
We don’t know how government employees vote, but we can make an educated guess. Around 84% of campaign donations from federal workers went to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024. Federal civilian jobs rose by over 130,000 under the Biden administration. Around 11% of the approximately 16 million jobs added during Biden’s term were federal, state, and local government jobs. Roughly 15% of the total workforce, around 24 million people, still work for the government at all levels.
There is more that can be done, not only in trimming the federal workforce but also in decentralizing and dispersing it. The Trump administration promised to relocate more federal jobs out of the Washington area. The political class entrenched around the capital in Virginia and Maryland keeps voting to empower itself. It should be dispersed as much as possible.
In 2001, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously proclaimed that his goal was to shrink the federal government until it was small enough to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” We’ve learned over the years that it doesn’t work that way. Neither party has any plan to curb spending, and voters don’t seem to be clamoring for one.
Shrinking the federal bureaucracy and workforce isn’t going to restrain massive deficit spending and our economy-threatening, turbocharged debt. Still, paring down the size, scope, and intrusiveness of a swollen federal government, even if it’s just temporary until Democrats come back into power, is a win for taxpayers.