President Donald Trump has spent the first two months of his administration dramatically overhauling the federal workforce, with more yet to come.
Before receiving mass layoff plans due Thursday from federal agencies, Trump has instituted new rules and personnel changes that would give the president more control over agency employees − including both his own appointees and career civil servants.
Guided by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department Of Government Efficiency aides, the Trump administration has already laid off tens of thousands of federal employees across the country including the National Park Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, Internal Revenue Service, and the National Institutes of Health.
In an interview with conservative Youtuber Shawn Ryan during the campaign, Trump blamed career federal employees for “destroying this country,” and cast them as “crooked,” and “dishonest” as part of his justification to downsize the federal government.
Though the president has called the workforce “bloated” with “people that are unnecessary” the size of the federal workforce hasn’t substantially changed since the late 1960s, when employment hovered around 2 million, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The government has consistently employed between 1.8 and 2.4 million people over the last 60 years. The U.S. population grew from 203 million in 1970 to 331 million in 2020.
Federal agencies have been ordered to present their plans for mass layoffs of permanent civil servants by Thursday, and layoffs have already begun at Veterans Affairs and the Education Department.
As the federal layoff’s accelerate over the next few weeks, here are some ways Trump and DOGE have already changed the federal workforce:
About 75,000 federal employees accepted President Donald Trump’s buyout offer, which was made soon after he took office.
The figure represents about 3.3% of the federal government’s 2.3 million workers, less than the 5% to 10% of the workforce that the White House projected would accept the buyouts.
Trump’s offer promised eight months of pay and benefits to federal employees through September in exchange for their immediate resignation. Democrats and unions warned federal workers not to trust the deal, noting that the federal government is not funded beyond March 14.
Tens of thousands of probationary workers across the government were laid off starting in early February.
A probationary employee normally fits into one of three categories: a new hire, an existing employee who switched federal departments, or someone who was promoted. Probation lasts between one and two years, depending on the agency, and probationary workers have fewer avenues to contest their firing.
Many of the fired probationary workers received the same letter saying they were being fired for poor or unsatisfactory performance despite receiving glowing performance reviews or awards. The internal federal agencies designed to protect federal workers from improper firings pointed to that letter, and the fact that no specific performance deficiencies were listed, as an indicator that the firings might not be justified.
When asked to respond to Democrats’ and unions’ claims that firing probationary workers was illegal, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said, “President Trump is rooting out the vast waste, fraud, and abuse across the Executive Branch. He will deliver on the American people’s mandate to effectively steward taxpayer dollars, which includes removing probationary employees who are not mission-critical.”
Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern California District last Thursday ruled the Office of Personnel Management lacked authority and acted out of bounds by ordering agencies – including the Education Department, the Small Business Administration and the Energy Department – to fire employees.
“OPM does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire or fire any employees, but its own,” Alsup said.
The case is ongoing, and earlier this week the head of OPM refused to testify.
The White House and the Office of Management and Budget have not provided a total number for the number of fired probationary workers despite repeated requests from USA TODAY.
The Trump administration has created a new system for performance reviews for high-level managers with a classification known as Senior Executive Service. At Trump’s directive, the Office of Personnel Management created a system that makes it harder to get a perfect performance review, and requires these executives to be fired or reassigned if they score poorly. Trump himself is allowed to issue exceptions to these rules to help executives get performance bonuses or avoid getting fired.
Trump also brought back an employment classification formerly called Schedule F that gives him the power to hire and fire certain employees who advocate for policy changes and otherwise would have had civil service protections. The Office of Personnel Management said in a memo that the employees don’t have to “personally or politically” agree with the administration’s policies, but “are required to faithfully implement administration policies to the best of their ability. Failure to do so will be grounds for dismissal.”
The change could impact the civil service protections of thousands of federal workers.
In a Jan. 31 memo to agency heads, Trump said his administration would not honor the contracts that unions negotiated with President Joe Biden’s administration in the last 30 days of his tenure, arguing that they were designed to bind his ability to govern. The memo specifically pointed to a union contract for Department of Education employees signed three days before Biden’s term ended that protected their ability to telework through 2029.
The Department of Homeland Security announced March 7 that it would end collective bargaining — what unions do — for 47,000 employees of the agency that handles airport security. The president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley slammed the move as “merely a pretext for attacking the rights of regular working Americans across the country because they happen to belong to a union.”
In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security said the union created bureaucratic hurdles.
“The Trump Administration is committed returning to merit-based hiring and firing policies,” it said.
The day he took office Trump signed an executive order directing department heads to require federal employees to “return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis” immediately, with exemptions allowed, officially ending COVID-19 era flexibilities that allowed about half of civilian federal employees to work from home at least some of the time.
Before the order 54% of federal employees performed their work duties fully on-site, according to a August 2024 Office of Management and Budget study that examined the majority of federal employees.
Trump has said he believes federal employees working from home aren’t spending the whole day working and that some have second jobs.
Many federal offices had been shut down or consolidated over the last few years in response to fewer employees coming in, and workers across the country have told USA TODAY about being ordered to return to offices that don’t have enough desks or sufficient Internet access. Others have said they considered the layoffs rather than resume lengthy commutes.
Musk and DOGE are also working on selling government buildings and ending existing leases for other office spaces.
On his first day in office Trump also ordered a freeze on hiring new federal employees until April 19. The order exempted military personnel and positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.
The freeze has meant an end to seasonal hiring, including thousands of wildfire fighters and National Park Service summer workers. It also meant that people in the process of being hired saw their offers rescinded.
Some agencies are expected to extend the hiring freeze as a way to reduce staff.
In early February, Trump fired three key people in charge of the agencies that help protect federal workers from unlawful practices. All were nominated by Biden and confirmed by the Senate, and all had job protections that prevented presidents from firing them except in certain situations. But Trump fired them anyway, and his administration has gone to court to argue that firing them is his right as the head of the executive branch, and that laws saying otherwise are unconstitutional.
One of the firings was Hampton Dellinger, who ran the Office of Special Counsel and successfully got the Merit Systems Protection Board, which acts as a court in cases involving federal employees, to temporarily pause the firings of thousands of workers. A court upheld his firing this month. Another was Cathy Harris, a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board. A court has temporarily reinstated her. The third was Susan Grundmann, the head of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which handles disputes between unions and the government. She has asked a court to be reinstated.
