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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.
President Trump promised political payback last year when Indiana state senators from his own party voted down his plan to redraw the state’s congressional map to help Republicans.
On Tuesday, he got much of what he wanted, as at least five of the seven anti-redistricting Republicans facing Trump-backed challengers lost their primaries, according to The Associated Press. The results reflected Mr. Trump’s continuing sway over Republican voters and his ability to enforce political consequences for Republican officeholders who defy him.
In the other races, at least one incumbent won his primary and another race remained too close to call.
State legislative primaries are often low-drama affairs, but Mr. Trump’s involvement brought unusual levels of attention and outside spending. The president issued social media endorsements to the seven challengers and hosted some of them at the White House, while outside groups aligned with Mr. Trump poured money into the races.
As the challengers emphasized their ties to Mr. Trump, many of the incumbents focused on their own conservative credentials, as well as endorsements from groups supporting farmers, gun rights or abortion restrictions.
Rather than a contest between moderates and conservatives, the primaries became a test of how much deference Republicans owe Mr. Trump and how much control the president holds over rank-and-file voters.
“It’s not that anyone is less or more pro-life,” said Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, a Republican redistricting supporter who backed most of the Trump-endorsed challengers. “It’s really that, do you understand the battle we are in, and do you understand the role Indiana plays in that battle on a national stage?”
State Senator Spencer Deery, one of the anti-redistricting incumbents, described the election as a test of how much sway Washington policymakers and their allies have over state policymaking.
“What’s at stake,” he said, “is the question of whether state legislators are going to be free to listen to their constituents and to govern their state without the outside meddling of enormous financial sums of dark money.”
On Tuesday, voters had diverging views of the political landscape and of the president’s endorsement.
In Granger, Ind., along the Michigan border, Tony Xouris said redistricting was his top issue and that he turned out to vote for the Trump-backed challenger to Senator Linda Rogers, who voted against the redrawn map.
“She lost my vote,” said Mr. Xouris, a semiretired insurance agent. “She’s a RINO. She’s a bad Republican.”
But outside the polls in Schererville, Ind., near Chicago, Matt Bartz said he was voting for Senator Dan Dernulc even though Mr. Trump had endorsed a challenger.
“I’m a Trump supporter,” said Mr. Bartz, a retired steelworker. “I was under the understanding that he wanted states to regulate themselves, take care of themselves, but now he’s coming back with this revenge type of thing and I’m not happy with that.”
The races also split political leaders in Indiana, where Republicans have amassed power over the last 20 years, but where there are longstanding fissures between the party establishment and an ascendant movement that hews closely to Mr. Trump.
Gov. Mike Braun and Mr. Beckwith, along with some members of the congressional delegation, came out in support of many of the challengers.
On the other side, former Gov. Mitch Daniels, who helped usher in Indiana’s era of Republican dominance, became a leading voice against redistricting. His successor as governor, former Vice President Mike Pence, endorsed one of the incumbents seeking re-election.
The rupture began last year when Mr. Trump was pushing redistricting nationwide in a bid to gain seats in Congress in the midterm elections. Several Republican-led states quickly fell in line, and some Democratic-led ones moved to counter with their own maps. But a critical mass of Indiana lawmakers remained opposed to the plan to draw a map that would position Republicans to flip the state’s two U.S. House seats held by Democrats.
When lawmakers returned to Indianapolis in December, the Republican-led House approved a new map. But the Republican-controlled Senate said no, with a slim majority of Republicans joining Democrats to vote the bill down even as Mr. Trump threatened political consequences.
“Any Republican that votes against this important redistricting, potentially having an impact on America itself, should be PRIMARIED,” Mr. Trump wrote in a November social media post that referred to two senators as Republicans in name only.
He soon followed through on that promise, endorsing challengers to seven of the eight anti-redistricting Republicans who ran for re-election this year. Other Republicans who voted against the bill have two years remaining in their terms or did not run for re-election.
Kim Bellware, Robert Chiarito and Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.
Stephen Zenner/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Wealthy biotech entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has won the Ohio Republican primary for governor, according to a race call by The Associated Press.
He took an aggressive but traditional route to securing the nomination. On President Trump’s inauguration day, Ramaswamy announced he was leaving the president’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency. That evening, Trump threw his support behind Ramaswamy with what he called his “complete and total endorsement.”
Tuesday, Ramaswamy won with a comfortable margin over Casey Putsch, a northwest Ohio car designer and racing team owner new to politics who attacked Ramaswamy for his South Asian heritage.
Democrat Dr. Amy Acton will face Ramaswamy in the general election. In red Ohio, where a Democrat hasn’t been elected governor in 20 years, the race looks competitive. The Cook Political Report, which tracks elections, shifted the race from one Republicans were likely to win, to one that just leans in Ramaswamy’s favor. But the Republican has vast financial resources of his own and has raised an enormous amount of money.
Acton is the former state health director, appointed to the position in 2019 by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. She played a major role in Ohio’s response to the COVID pandemic, signing orders from DeWine that restricted in-person gatherings, shut non-essential businesses, and closed K-12 schools. Republicans have called her “Dr. Lockdown” and have used her pandemic response to campaign against her. DeWine has defended Acton’s work as health director, even though he’s endorsed Ramaswamy, and has said pandemic-related decisions “were made by the governor”.
Her campaign has focused on the high cost of living, an issue that has left voters disgruntled with Republicans. She’s called for child tax credits, reducing prescription drug costs, lowering utility costs and helping Ohioans stay on Medicaid, among other things.
When Ramaswamy launched his campaign in February last year, he said he wanted to see property taxes eliminated. He’s backed off that proposal, and now talks about instituting “the largest rollback of property taxes in the history of Ohio.” He’s also raised fears with a proposal to consolidate or close public universities in the state.
new video loaded: U.S. and Iran Make Competing Claims Over Strait of Hormuz
transcript
transcript
U.S. and Iran Make Competing Claims Over Strait of Hormuz
The U.S. and Iran both claimed to have control over the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday after the U.S. launched a naval effort to escort vessels through the vital shipping route. Some 1,600 ships are trapped in or near the waterway, which remains effectively closed.
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These international waters belong to all nations, not to Iran to tax, toll or control. We’re not looking for a fight. But Iran also cannot be allowed to block innocent countries and their goods from an international waterway. Two U.S. commercial ships, along with American destroyers, have already safely transited the strait, showing the lane is clear. We know the Iranians are embarrassed by this fact. They said they control the strait. They do not.
By Christina Kelso
May 5, 2026
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