The Trump administration has driven the federal workforce to its lowest level since 1966, delivering the government slimdown Washington has not seen in six decades.
As of August, just 2.67 million people worked for the federal government, down from just over 3 million when President Donald Trump took office, Fox News reported. That is the lowest headcount since 1966, according to newly released Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and the lowest point in roughly 60 years.
The cuts fulfill a core 2024 campaign promise. Trump vowed to slim what he called a bloated government, and most of the reductions landed in his first year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics count excludes about 1.35 million members of the armed services and roughly 100,000 people in the intelligence agencies.
The New York Post put the figure near 2.7 million after more than 300,000 workers left since January 2025, an 11% shrink and the largest single-year civil servant exodus in nearly 80 years. Over 150,000 accepted buyouts in September 2025 alone.
The Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Personnel Management eventually spearheaded the project. The Deferred Resignation Program let many employees stop working while still collecting a paycheck until they officially left government service. OPM projects that program alone will save more than $20 billion a year.
Those savings did not arrive free. The Government Accountability Office found agencies spent about $6.7 billion paying workers who took the deferred exit. The Partnership for Public Service estimated another $12.1 million went to rehiring people previously fired in the reductions.
National Review framed the milestone plainly: fewer people now work for the federal government than at any point since 1966, and as a share of total U.S. employment the civilian workforce sits under 2%, the lowest mark since before World War II. In about 14 months the government shed roughly 352,000 civilian workers, a decline near 12%. National Review credited the administration for a leaner bureaucracy built mainly through buyouts and lawful reductions in force rather than chaotic firings, with cuts concentrated in administrative roles across Defense and departments such as Education, Agriculture, and Housing and Urban Development.
Education, Agriculture, and HUD took particularly hard hits. The Department of Homeland Security headcount stayed largely unchanged. That agency carries much of the president’s immigration agenda, including enforcement priorities that have also drawn court fights over ICE detention rules for illegal immigrants.
A Treasury watchdog reported that revenue collected from IRS examinations fell 35%, from about $10 billion in fiscal 2024 to $6.5 billion in fiscal 2025. Examination and collection staffing dropped by nearly 10,000 employees during the same stretch of steep workforce cuts. The Trump administration has proposed further IRS reductions for 2027.
That path reverses the prior build-out. Former President Joe Biden secured nearly $80 billion in 2022 for the IRS over 10 years to upgrade systems, improve taxpayer service, and hire more staff, including enforcement personnel. The new numbers show what happens when headcount falls instead of rises.
Taxpayers still foot the short-term bill for exits. The administration spent 3% more on federal salaries during its first year than the Biden administration did in its initial year, a reflection, in part, of deferred-pay arrangements that keep people on the books while they leave.
Beyond buyouts and resignations, Trump signed an executive order reclassifying about 8,000 career federal workers in policy-related jobs from protected civil service status into at-will positions. The change covers high-ranking GS-15 employees and roles such as directors, deputy directors, chiefs of staff, senior advisors, policy analysts, and staff involved in regulations, public affairs, legislative affairs, and federal grants.
Just the News carried the White House fact sheet language. “Personnel rules make removing federal employees for any reason exceedingly difficult,” the White House said. “Consequently, employees with significant policy-making responsibilities can stay in their jobs for years even if they perform poorly, engage in misconduct, or are unwilling to advance presidential policy across administrations.”
The order aims to fix a system that made it extremely hard to remove workers who fail to perform or refuse to carry out the elected president’s agenda. That accountability push sits alongside other administration fights over personnel and authority, including cases where an Obama-appointed judge blocked removal of a court-picked U.S. attorney.
Trump said the government shutdown that took effect Oct. 1, 2025, will likely include mass layoffs and program cuts. Related reporting has also flagged planned State Department layoffs and a push for the Senate to lock in DOGE reductions in statute so a future Congress cannot simply reverse them.
Not every reduction plan has sailed through cleanly. Courts have already weighed in on pieces of the broader overhaul, just as they have on immigration tools such as third-country deportation authority. The White House did not respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment on the workforce figures.
If Republicans win the midterms, the president has promised $5,000 checks to all adult American citizens. Follow-through on that pledge would cost between $1.2 trillion and $1.35 trillion. Separately, OPM has reported uncovering $500 million in fraud and waste in federal health benefits programs, another data point in the same efficiency drive.
The headcount story is no longer theoretical. BLS numbers, buyout totals, agency-by-agency patterns, and the at-will order all point the same direction: a smaller civilian workforce than Washington has fielded in two generations. Spending and entitlement reform remain larger fights, but the payroll itself has finally moved.
Voters asked for a leaner government. For the first time since the 1960s, the employment rolls show they got one.