There are 271,000 fewer federal employees than there were at the start of 2025 — about a 9% drop, per the latest tally from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The bulk of the departures happened in October — when 162,000 people, mostly those who took Musk’s “fork in the road,” were officially off the books, per the Labor Department.
The fork became known as “deferred resignation,” meaning these folks quit [ick —lambert. Since when did “folks” get normalized in written communication?] and in exchange continued getting paychecks through Sept. 30.
The administration has since moved to rehire some employees, realizing they were needed to handle things like the nuclear weapons arsenal, avian flu[, —lambert] and taxes.
A tally from Brookings identified 26,511 occasions where the Trump administration “abruptly fired people and then hired them back” — some due to court orders.
Most who left the federal workforce weren’t technically fired, they were pushed out: either taking the fork or choosing other more traditional voluntary retirement programs or other incentivized departures.
Only about 25,000 of the more than 300,000 people the Trump administration expected would be gone by the end of 2025 were actually terminated, Scott Kupor, the current head of the federal government’s HR agency, the Office of Personnel Management, said recently on the Statecraft podcast.
Those who were fired included probationary employees with fewer job protections, and those impacted by so-called RIFs, reductions-in-force, where agencies formally decide to permanently reduce headcount.
Add new comment