President Donald Trump and his designated cost-cutter Elon Musk are promising to dramatically trim the size of the federal government, something no president has done dating back to World War II with one notable exception, as presidents of both parties usually added numbers to the workforce.
Since World War II, only one president significantly shrunk the federal workforce during stable ... [+]
The government fired up to 200,000 of workers in their probationary period with less than a year of employment beginning Thursday, adding to the roughly 75,000 civil servants who took voluntary buyouts initiated by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Should the 3.02-million-person federal government workforce (not including the 1.3 million active members of armed services) shrink by 275,000 or more during Trump’s second term, his presidency would be in rarified air in trimming the number of federal employees.
Of the 14 presidents dating back to World War II, including Trump in his first term, just six (Presidents Harry Truman, Bill Clinton, Dwight Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford) oversaw a reduction in the number of civil servants, with only three (Truman, Clinton and Eisenhower) cutting at least 100,000 jobs, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report.
Truman directed a leading cutdown of 566,000 as the U.S. economy normalized following the war, followed by Clinton (339,000) and Eisenhower (170,000), similarly to Truman, unwound World War II and New Deal programs.
Clinton introduced a massive buyout program designed to “reduce the layers of bureaucracy and micro-management that were tying Government in knots,” which sounds awfully familiar to Musk’s and Trump’s rationales, eventually helping the U.S. achieve record budget surplus.
The presidents who oversaw the most federal government job increases were Lyndon B. Johnson, whose government added 440,000 workers as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, followed by Ronald Reagan (197,000)—viewed by many as the standard-bearer for small government—and Joe Biden (138,000).
Though both Musk and Trump indicated the government bloat stems from programs initiated by the “radical” left, data suggests there’s little pattern between a president’s party affiliation and the expansion or contraction of the workforce during his tenure. Since Truman, Republican presidents have overseen a net change of 8,000 federal jobs, compared to -68,000 for Democrats. And dating back to Jimmy Carter’s term ending in 1981, the federal workforce shrank by 64,000 under Democrats and grew by 237,000 under Republicans.
73,000. That’s how many civil servant jobs were added during Trump’s first term. That put Trump in the middle of the pack as the sixth-most prolific president in terms of expanding the federal footprint.
The federal workforce is almost exactly as it was when Truman took office 80 years ago, going from 3.09 million in April 1945 to 3.02 million last month. The U.S. population more than doubled over that period, growing from 132 million as of the 1940 Census to 331 million in the 2020 Census, and the total number of non-farm employees expanded from about 41 million in 1945 to 159 million last month. So, the percentage of the total U.S. workforce employed by the federal government shrank from 7.5% at the beginning of 1945 to 1.9% at the start of 2025.
Musk and Trump have also targeted significant cuts to federal government grants and contracts. Trump signed an executive order last month pausing grant funding, which was blocked by a judge, and Musk’s DOGE has touted the cancellation of more than $1 billion worth of contracts it’s identified as frivolous. The limited funding threatens an emerging class of the partial federal government workforce, whose work is funded by federal contracts and grants, but aren’t included in the standard federal employee count. From 1984 to 2023, the proportion of grant and contract workers in the expanded federal workforce rose from 50.1% to 66.5%, according to Brookings Institution fellow Paul Light.