There will be some 300,000 fewer federal workers on the government payroll by the end of December than there were in January, according to the Trump administration’s top human resources official.
That amounts to the loss of about one in eight federal civilian workers, and would be the largest single-year reduction since World War II. But in an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, Scott Kupor, painted the coming few months as a period of relative stability after a time of tremendous upheaval.
He said the resignation incentives first introduced by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, accounted for the bulk of the 300,000 departures. He said most would be officially separated by the end of September, and others by the end of the year. Most have already stopped working, even though they remain on the payroll.
In addition, though some already announced cuts are still pending, he said he did not expect significant new layoffs — formally called reductions in force — before Sept. 30, the end of the government’s fiscal year.
“That’s roughly like 2.4 million to start and ending roughly about 2.1 million,” Mr. Kupor said of the size of the civilian work force when Mr. Trump returned to office and what it will be at the end of the year.
The figure is the clearest picture yet from the federal government of the extent of President Trump’s downsizing. Mr. Trump has said the effort is about eliminating waste, saving money and making the government run more efficiently. But it also represents a reduction of a bureaucracy that he believes has tried to thwart him. Many federal employees say the depth of the cuts has threatened to cripple vital services, drained the government of expertise and wreaked havoc on workers and their families.
The departures are a combination of employees who voluntarily took an early retirement or resigned and continued to get paid through September, as well as fired probationary employees and others who have been laid off in agency reorganizations, including at the Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Agencies have reported a total of 10,000 fired probationary employees, Mr. Kupor said, and about 6,000 of them are already formally separated from the government. Others’ employment statuses are in limbo, in many cases because of lawsuits.
Critics have called the cuts indiscriminate and thoughtless, particularly the administration’s decision to pay people not to work for months. During the first Trump administration, officials sought permission from Congress to reorganize the government, which would have included firing employees. Agencies submitted detailed plans and justifications for the cuts and reorganizations. But those requests never went anywhere.
This time, the administration moved forward without congressional input or a studied assessment of where to cut. And the vacancies have been felt across the government.
In dozens of interviews, federal workers have shared the stress of working in such an uncertain environment where managers have been left in the dark about personnel changes. For some, voluntarily resigning and collecting a paycheck for several more months was a better option than the stress of staying in the government, waiting to be fired and weathering insults about their work ethic.
By the spring, so many employees had left on their own that agencies did not need to move forward with the mass layoffs they had planned.
“I think the agencies expected they would have fewer people in the, call it ‘voluntary bucket,’ and they would therefore have to do more in the ‘involuntary bucket,’” Mr. Kupor said. He did not provide an agency-by-agency breakdown of the departures.
In some instances, agency officials have realized that the cuts went too far. The Internal Revenue Service let too many people leave, which “created a potential gap in mission critical expertise,” according to an internal email on Wednesday shared with The Times. The message, from the agency’s acting human capital officer, David P. Traynor, said some employees who left voluntarily would be contacted about returning to work. Mr. Traynor said the agency would also reassign people to cover gaps and hire from the outside.
Federal workers at agencies where layoffs have been announced but not yet enacted have been waiting. One National Park Service ranger, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, called it “psychological torture,” working long hours because of staffing shortages and wondering how much longer they would have a job.
“There’s still some moving parts there,” Mr. Kupor said of the potential for more layoffs. “My gut is — I don’t think there’s going to be meaningful changes, kind of through Sept. 30, relative to at least what’s been forecast to date.”
But whether the cuts have made the government slim enough for Mr. Trump remains to be seen. Mr. Kupor said he did not know if the White House would ask agencies for more reductions as planning begins for fiscal year 2027.
“That’s a little bit of a T.B.D.,” he said. “That’s the one I think that we don’t really have as much guidance on right now.”