Nearly 1 in 5 federal workers have left their roles since Trump took office
Government workforce has shrunk to smallest number of employees since 2013, with Black workers disproportionately impacted by job cuts, according to a new analysis
The U.S. government has lost nearly one in five of its employees since President Donald Trump returned to power in January 2025, with Black workers more likely than other groups to have been impacted, according to a new analysis.
Trump took office with Elon Musk at his side and swiftly tasked the world’s richest man with cutting wasteful expenditure from the federal bureaucracy through DOGE.
A Washington Post study of Federal Workforce Data collected by the Office of Personnel Management now reveals that 426,000 full-time employees have left their posts over the last 18 months, accounting for roughly one-fifth of the 2.2 million people Trump inherited from Joe Biden’s administration.
By contrast, the proportion of workers leaving the government during Biden’s single term between 2021 and 2025 was closer to one in seven and it was around one in eight in Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021.
The Post notes that only 32,000 of the total were directly fired while 85 percent resigned voluntarily or retired. There was a sharp spike in departures in September 2025 when the administration’s incentive programs encouraging early exits came into play, at which point almost 121,000 people left federal service.
When subsequent new hires and reinstatements are taken into account (the latter sometimes forced on a judge’s orders), the 426,000 figure falls to 255,000, taking the total size of the workforce to 1.94 million – a decline of 12 percent – which is roughly where it was at the end of Barack Obama’s first term in January 2013.
Asked about the findings by The Independent, OPM Director Scott Kupor denied that Trump had carried out mass firings and said: “The vast majority of individuals who left government since the beginning of the administration did so voluntarily – through early retirement or the deferred resignation program, which provided eight months of severance to participating employees.”
Of the disproportionate impact of job cuts on Black employees, the Post notes that, as of September 2024, the demographic accounted for 428,000 employees or 19 percent of the federal workforce, giving the group an outsized representation given that it makes up just 12 percent of the total U.S. population.
It adds that while the Trump administration has broken with recent precedent by ceasing to publish demographic information on government employees, it was able to use data collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to identify a 30 percent decline in Black employment between November and December 2024 and the same period a year later.
DOGE placed a particular emphasis on removing “DEI” employees – meaning people supposedly hired in the interests of promoting diversity, rather than on merit – and a planning guide cited singled out 225 offices for closure and described how their staff might by removed via firings, administrative leave or reassignment.
The Post identified 200 workers to whom the document’s instructions applied and found that 52 percent no longer work in government and that more than half of those targeted were Black, whereas a third were White and Asian and Hispanic people accounted for 13 percent and 8 percent respectively.
It also looked at a website called “DEI Watchlist” created by the American Accountability Foundation that named 93 specific federal employees to be removed from their posts, finding that 50 still worked for the government, 15 had since found jobs elsewhere and the remaining 28 were unemployed. Twenty-three of the last category were Black.
A White House official told The Independent: “The government complies with all Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rules regarding employment discrimination, including those governing disparate impact alone and discriminatory purpose.”
DOGE only operated from January 20 until July 4 last year but claimed to have saved taxpayers $215 billion, or $1,335.40 per person. Those figures have since been hotly disputed and are well short of the $2 trillion in “waste, fraud and abuse” Musk promised to eradicate.