It has been a confusing several days for federal workers: First came a federal hiring freeze, the announcement of an end to remote work and an executive order reclassifying thousands of civil servant positions. Then came Tuesday’s government-wide email giving nearly all federal employees until Feb. 6 to decide whether to opt into a “deferred resignation program.”

But how well do most Americans understand this group that has been in the news so much — who they are, where they work and what they do? Here are six things to know about this vast pool of workers:

How big is the federal workforce?

About 2.4 million workers are employed by the federal government, excluding uniformed military personnel and U.S. Postal Service employees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By contrast, Walmart, the largest private-sector employer in the U.S., has 1.6 million workers.

Where do most federal employees work?

If you guessed Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, you’d be wrong — and not by a little. Although a sizable concentration of the federal workforce does work in the District of Columbia and the surrounding states (about 459,000 as of March 2024, according to the Office of Personnel Management), 80% of federal civilian employees can be found at military bases and in government offices outside the region: about 181,000 in California, 168,500 in Texas, 115,000 in Florida and 88,000 in Georgia.

That means the effects of cuts in the federal workforce won’t be felt in just the D.C. area but will be “scattered across the country,” according to Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

Fifty-four percent of federal workers are 100% on-site. That’s according to May 2024 data from the Office of Management and Budget cited by the Federal News Network that was originally posted on a since-removed White House page. The other 46% are eligible for telework, most of which are on hybrid schedules. Only 10% of them are working entirely remotely.

Also, one-third of nonuniformed federal workers are military veterans, according to Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, which describes itself as a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to a better government and stronger democracy.

“Most people don’t understand that lots of people in the military go into civil service because they want to continue to serve,” he says.

Just a few agencies and departments employ most of the workers. And their numbers haven’t been growing much

“The vast majority of the [federal] civilian nonuniform employees are either in Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security or the Department of Defense,” Moynihan says.

Despite what may be conventional wisdom, the relative size of the federal workforce hasn’t skyrocketed in recent years, according to a Pew Research Center report released this month.

“While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years,” the report says.

That’s “despite the fact that our government is doing lots more stuff,” Stier adds.

Salaries of federal workers take up just a fraction of the government’s budget

Moynihan says the government spends “about $350 billion on federal employees every year, out of a $6.5 trillion budget.”

That represents “a tiny sliver of total government spending — just around 5% to 6%,” according to Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

There are concerns that cuts could affect vital services that impact average Americans

It depends on how many federal employees leave and which agencies and positions see the most departures.

But regardless, “programs that provide retirement, health and income support — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — need to be administered,” Bivens says.

“Claims have to be filed and examined, and problems need [to be] addressed,” he says. “Payments to farmers need [to be] processed and administered,” and “key public goods like pandemic monitoring and response” need to take place.

More esoteric government responsibilities, such as economic data collection and analysis, are also vital, he adds.

Stier offers up a few examples of what could go wrong. The administration says it wants a 10% cut, he says, but “what happens if that is 50% of the food safety inspectors or 50% of the air traffic controllers or 50% at the FBI?”

“You’re talking about a fairly arbitrary reduction. … It’s entirely unpredictable about who actually walks away and who decides to stay,” he says.

Cuts could have other downsides

Buyouts and incentives aimed at shrinking the number of federal employees aren’t new. They were tried in the mid-1990s, during Bill Clinton’s presidency. But the results were mixed at best, according to a 1997 report by what’s now called the Government Accountability Office.

“[A]gencies often granted buyouts across the board rather than prioritizing them to achieve specific organizational objectives,” the GAO concluded.

“This contributed to a variety of adverse operational impacts. For example, 15 agencies said that they had experienced a loss of corporate memory and expertise, and 11 agencies said that there were work backlogs because key personnel had separated,” the report said.

As a result, Moynihan says, those agencies lost vital skills and ended up hiring more outside consultants — some of the very same federal workers who had quit — at a higher cost to taxpayers, “because people who had the most capabilities and most value on the private sector job market were the first to leave.” 

“Rational employees who think, ‘You know, I can make more in the private sector than I’m making in government, and it’s not worth the hassle of continuing to stay in this new environment,’” he says.