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Trump wants to cut the federal workforce. Who they are and what that means
President Trump arrives to speak at the House Republican members conference dinner at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami on Jan. 27.
Mark Schiefelbein/AP
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Mark Schiefelbein/AP
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.”Â
“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.
new video loaded: What Trump Told Us About the ICE Shooting
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Alexandra Ostasiewicz, Nikolay Nikolov and Coleman Lowndes
January 8, 2026
Good morning. You’re reading the Up First newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to the Up First podcast for all the news you need to start your day.
Today’s top stories
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman, yesterday. Multiple observers captured the shooting on video, and community members demanded accountability. Minnesota law enforcement officials and the FBI are investigating the fatal shooting, which the Trump administration says was an act of self-defense. Meanwhile, the mayor has accused the officer of reckless use of power and demanded that ICE get out of Minneapolis.
People demonstrate during a vigil at the site where a woman was shot and killed by an immigration officer earlier in the day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Jan. 7, 2026. An immigration officer in Minneapolis shot dead a woman on Wednesday, triggering outrage from local leaders even as President Trump claimed the officer acted in self-defense. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey deemed the government’s allegation that the woman was attacking federal agents “bullshit,” and called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers conducting a second day of mass raids to leave Minneapolis.
Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images
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Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images
- 🎧 Caitlin Callenson recorded the shooting and says officers gave Good multiple conflicting instructions while she was in her vehicle. Callenson says Good was already unresponsive when officers pulled her from the car. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claims the officer was struck by the vehicle and acted in self-defense. In the video NPR reviewed, the officer doesn’t seem to be hit and was seen walking after he fired the shots, NPR’s Meg Anderson tells Up First. Anderson says it has been mostly peaceful in Minneapolis, but there is a lot of anger and tension because protesters want ICE out of the city.
U.S. forces yesterday seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the north Atlantic between Iceland and Britain after a two-week chase. The tanker was originally headed to Venezuela, but it changed course to avoid the U.S. ships. This action comes as the Trump administration begins releasing new information about its plans for Venezuela’s oil industry.
- 🎧 It has been a dramatic week for U.S. operations in Venezuela, NPR’s Greg Myre says, prompting critics to ask if a real plan for the road ahead exists. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded that the U.S. does have a strategy to stabilize Venezuela, and much of it seems to involve oil. Rubio said the U.S. would take control of up to 50 million barrels of oil from the country. Myre says the Trump administration appears to have a multipronged strategy that involves taking over the country’s oil, selling it on the world market and pressuring U.S. oil companies to enter Venezuela.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released new dietary guidelines for Americans yesterday that focus on promoting whole foods, proteins and healthy fats. The guidance, which he says aims to “revolutionize our food culture,” comes with a new food pyramid, which replaces the current MyPlate symbol.
- 🎧 “I’m very disappointed in the new pyramid,” Christopher Gardner, a nutrition expert who was on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, tells NPR’s Allison Aubrey. Gardner says the new food structure, which features red meat and saturated fats at the top, contradicts decades of evidence and research. Poor eating habits and the standard American diet are widely considered to cause chronic disease. Aubrey says the new guidelines alone won’t change people’s eating habits, but they will be highly influential. This guidance will shape the offerings in school meals and on military bases, and determine what’s allowed in federal nutrition programs.
Special series
Trump has tried to bury the truth of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. NPR built a visual archive of the attack on the Capitol, showing exactly what happened through the lenses of the people who were there. “Chapter 4: The investigation” shows how federal investigators found the rioters and built the largest criminal case in U.S. history.
Political leaders, including Trump, called for rioters to face justice for their actions on Jan. 6. This request came because so few people were arrested during the attack. The extremists who led the riot remained free, and some threatened further violence. The government launched the largest federal investigation in American history, resulting in the arrest of over 1,500 individuals from all 50 states. The most serious cases were made by prosecutors against leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. For their roles in planning the attack against the U.S., some extremists were found guilty of seditious conspiracy. Take a look at the Jan. 6 prosecutions by the numbers, including the highest sentence received.
To learn more, explore NPR’s database of federal criminal cases from Jan. 6. You can also see more of NPR’s reporting on the topic.
Deep dive
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Trump takes 325 milligrams of daily aspirin, which is four times the recommended 81 milligrams of low-dose aspirin used for cardiovascular disease prevention. The president revealed this detail in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published last week. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that anyone over 60 not start a daily dose of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease if they don’t already have an underlying problem. The group said it’s reasonable to stop preventive aspirin in people already taking it around age 75 years. Trump is 79. This is what you should know about aspirin and cardiac health:
- 💊 Doctors often prescribe the low dose of aspirin because there’s no benefit to taking a higher dose, according to a large study published in 2021.
- 💊 Some people, including adults who have undergone heart bypass surgery and those who have had a heart attack, should take the advised dose of the drug for their entire life.
- 💊 While safer than other blood thinners, the drug — even at low doses — raises the risk of bleeding in the stomach and brain. But these adverse events are unlikely to cause death.
3 things to know before you go
When an ant pupa has a deadly, incurable infection, it sends out a signal that tells worker ants to unpack it from its cocoon and disinfect it, a process that results in its death.
Christopher D. Pull/ISTA
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Christopher D. Pull/ISTA
- Young, terminally ill ants will send out an altruistic “kill me” signal to worker ants, according to a study in the journal Nature Communications. With this strategy, the sick ants sacrifice themselves for the good of their colony.
- In this week’s Far-Flung Postcards series, you can spot a real, lone California sequoia tree in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris. Napoleon III transformed the park from a former landfill into one of the French capital’s greenest escapes.
- The ACLU and several authors have sued Utah over its “sensitive materials” book law, which has now banned 22 books in K-12 schools. Among the books on the ban list are The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. (via KUER)
This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.
new video loaded: Minnesota Governor Condemns ICE Shooting
transcript
transcript
Minnesota Governor Condemns ICE Shooting
Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota slammed the fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration agent. President Trump said that the agents had acted in self-defense.
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This morning, we learned that an ICE officer shot and killed someone in Minneapolis. We have been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety, that someone was going to get hurt. Just yesterday, I said exactly that. What we’re seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines and conflict. It’s governing by reality TV. And today, that recklessness cost someone their life.
By Jiawei Wang
January 8, 2026
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Video: Minnesota Governor Condemns ICE Shooting
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