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Maps: Where Do Federal Employees Work in America?
Federal agencies began unveiling their plans this week to further reduce their staffs in mass firings, as demanded by the Trump administration and billionaire Elon Musk. Tens of thousands of federal employees have already accepted buyouts or been fired or laid off.
These maps are based on newly available data from payroll records and offer a glimpse of the federal government’s 2.3 million or so civilian workers in March 2024, before the recent cuts. They show employees based in every state and in thousands of cities and small towns across the country, far beyond Washington, D.C.
Veterans Affairs
The Department of Veterans Affairs — the largest agency in the federal civilian work force outside of the Department of Defense — employed more than 480,000 people as of March of last year. Its employees include physicians and nurses at the agency’s network of medical centers, as well as staff members who help veterans access a wide range of benefits. The Trump administration has pledged to eliminate up to 80,000 jobs.
Internal Revenue Service
Tax examiners and customer service representatives employed by the Internal Revenue Service report to regional offices across the country, including major centers in Memphis; Austin, Texas; and Ogden, Utah. The Trump administration has slashed its federal work force — once totaling nearly 100,000 — by 13 percent, and it could lose up to a third of its staff because of further buyouts and resignations.
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution’s staff comprises museum curators, archivists, animal keepers and security guards who work at its museums and research centers.
Health and Human Services
The Department of Health and Human Services employed more than 90,000 people in March of last year before the Trump administration dismissed about 24 percent of its work force. The department consists of thousands of scientists, public health officials, researchers, and food and drug inspectors working on a vast array of health-related concerns.
Agriculture
At the Natural Resources Conservation Service, soil conservation experts are distributed widely across the country to support the agriculture industry. The Forest Service, which manages about 193 million acres of public lands, employs wildland firefighters, archeologists and wildlife biologists stationed primarily in rural areas of the country.
Social Security Administration
The Trump administration’s cuts have already caused staffing shortages at field offices across the country, where remaining employees are facing longer lines and anxious recipients. The agency had more than 59,000 staff members as of March of last year.
Commerce
The Commerce Department encompasses a group of distinct bureaus that conduct research, forecast weather and gather data in locations across the country.
The U.S. Census Bureau is headquartered in Suitland, Md., and also maintains a significant presence in Jeffersonville, Ind., where it has its main processing center for mail and surveys. The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s staff of engineers, physicists and chemists is primarily based in Gaithersburg, Md., and Boulder, Colo.
Interior
The Interior Department maintains a far-flung work force that staffs national parks, works with Native American tribes, manages the agency’s vast lands and conducts research.
The department manages over 400 million acres of federal lands, primarily under the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management. These bureaus employ scientists, researchers, technical staff members and park rangers across their portfolio of lands.
NASA
NASA’s highly specialized work force is composed of engineers, astrophysicists and planetary scientists distributed across several major centers across the country, such as the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The agency had more than 18,000 employees as of March of last year.
Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security is one of the largest agencies by total employment with more than 222,000 employees as of March of last year. It does not reveal the specific locations of staff members in many of its more high-profile subagencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol. That said, several of the department’s other subagencies offer a window into how the nation’s security and safety apparatus is distributed across the country.
Energy
The Department of Energy’s work force is distributed across a network of field offices and laboratories across the country, such as Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. The department’s staff of chemical engineers, nuclear experts and computer scientists is divided into groups like the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Energy Information Administration.
Transportation
The Transportation Department encompasses a group of agencies that sets regulations for the aviation industry, railroads, highways and public transit. The Federal Aviation Administration, by far the largest agency within Transportation, with more than 45,000 employees as of March of last year, has employees at almost every airport in the United States, as well as technical operations in Oklahoma City and Atlantic City, N.J.
Securities and Exchange Commission
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s offices are concentrated in urban areas with a significant financial services sector, like New York, San Francisco and Chicago. The agency employs lawyers, accountants and compliance experts whose mandate is to regulate the securities industry.
About the data
Data shown in the maps is from the Office of Personnel Management and reflects employees whose locations were available in federal government payroll records as of March 2024. The data does not show federal government contractors. The records also do not include employees of the Postal Service, intelligence agencies, or several other excluded agencies.
Locations shown for workers are based on federal duty stations, which are used across the federal government to standardize location data. About 1.2 million records in the O.P.M. data included valid duty stations codes; the remaining portion, about 880,000 records, had redacted locations. Agencies like the Department of Defense, Department of Justice and Homeland Security did not share precise locations for most staff members.
Records with valid codes were matched to locations based on data from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. About 40,000 were not able to be matched, so they were joined to duty stations data from O.P.M. and then geocoded to the city or county level.
The maps show agencies and subagencies for which we were able to locate over 75 percent of its U.S.-based staff, based on the March 2024 O.P.M. data. The maps do not show employees who are based outside of the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
Numbers in the text of the article that reflect the total size of agencies and subagencies are from FedScope data as of March 2024.
new video loaded: F.A.A. Ignored Safety Concerns Prior to Collision Over Potomac, N.T.S.B. Says
transcript
transcript
F.A.A. Ignored Safety Concerns Prior to Collision Over Potomac, N.T.S.B. Says
The National Transportation Safety Board said that a “multitude of errors” led to the collision between a military helicopter and a commercial jet, killing 67 people last January.
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“I imagine there will be some difficult moments today for all of us as we try to provide answers to how a multitude of errors led to this tragedy.” “We have an entire tower who took it upon themselves to try to raise concerns over and over and over and over again, only to get squashed by management and everybody above them within F.A.A. Were they set up for failure?” “They were not adequately prepared to do the jobs they were assigned to do.”
By Meg Felling
January 27, 2026
President Trump speaks as U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth looks on during a meeting of his Cabinet at the White House in December 2025.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Relatives of two Trinidadian men killed in an airstrike last October are suing the U.S. government for wrongful death and for carrying out extrajudicial killings.
The case, filed in Massachusetts, is the first lawsuit over the strikes to land in a U.S. federal court since the Trump administration launched a campaign to target vessels off the coast of Venezuela. The American government has carried out three dozen such strikes since September, killing more than 100 people.
Among them are Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, who relatives say died in what President Trump described as “a lethal kinetic strike” on Oct. 14, 2025. The president posted a short video that day on social media that shows a missile targeting a ship, which erupts in flame.
“This is killing for sport, it’s killing for theater and it’s utterly lawless,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “We need a court of law to rein in this administration and provide some accountability to the families.”
The White House and Pentagon justify the strikes as part of a broader push to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. The Pentagon declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying it doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation.
But the new lawsuit described Joseph and Samaroo as fishermen doing farm work in Venezuela, with no ties to the drug trade. Court papers said they were headed home to family members when the strike occurred and now are presumed dead.
Neither man “presented a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury to the United States or anyone at all, and means other than lethal force could have reasonably been employed to neutralize any lesser threat,” according to the lawsuit.
Lenore Burnley, the mother of Chad Joseph, and Sallycar Korasingh, the sister of Rishi Samaroo, are the plaintiffs in the case.
Their court papers allege violations of the Death on the High Seas Act, a 1920 law that makes the U.S. government liable if its agents engage in negligence that results in wrongful death more than 3 miles off American shores. A second claim alleges violations of the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign citizens to sue over human rights violations such as deaths that occurred outside an armed conflict, with no judicial process.
The American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Jonathan Hafetz at Seton Hall University School of Law are representing the plaintiffs.
“In seeking justice for the senseless killing of their loved ones, our clients are bravely demanding accountability for their devastating losses and standing up against the administration’s assault on the rule of law,” said Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel at the ACLU.
U.S. lawmakers have raised questions about the legal basis for the strikes for months but the administration has persisted.
—NPR’s Quil Lawrence contributed to this report.
new video loaded: New Video Analysis Reveals Flawed and Fatal Decisions in Shooting of Pretti
By Devon Lum, Haley Willis, Alexander Cardia, Dmitriy Khavin and Ainara Tiefenthäler
January 26, 2026
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Video: New Video Analysis Reveals Flawed and Fatal Decisions in Shooting of Pretti
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