Are you tired of winning yet? I'm not.
The federal government has become a bloated Colossus, inflated far beyond the worst nightmares of the Founding Fathers. In my grandparents' times, the only interaction most people had with the federal government was when they went to the post office. Now the federal government has its tentacles in almost everything we do.
Thanks to the DOGE and the Trump administration, we're making a start on removing some of those tentacles. A new report informs us that the federal workforce will be pared by 300,000 by the end of this year, with most of those being voluntary departures. This is what we call "a good start."
The federal government is on pace to eliminate about 300,000 workers this year.
Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor said 80% of those employees would leave voluntarily and 20% would be fired. Kupor provided the figures to Reuters on Thursday. That's a 12.5% reduction in the federal workforce since January.
The U.S. government employs about 2.4 million federal workers, excluding the military (about 1.3 million active-duty military personnel) and U.S. Postal Service (about 600,000 employees), according to 2024 Pew Research report. That report noted that the federal government employed 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce. That percentage includes postal employees, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The military and the postal service are actually constitutional functions of the federal government. These are mentioned in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to:
To establish Post Offices and post Roads
And:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.
Much of the rest of what Washington does today has no such constitutional sanction. So, the Department of Government Efficiency - the DOGE - should be and is looking at everything.
When Trump created DOGE, he said it would be the government cost-cutting equivalent of the "Manhattan Project." Both Trump and Musk promised Americans would get a more efficient government after DOGE addressed government waste, reduced regulations and reduced the federal workforce.
Good efforts. Now let's ramp them up by several orders of magnitude.
Read More: Trump Talks About Social Security and the Changes DOGE and the OBBL Have Made
There are 37 trillion good reasons to keep this effort up. This isn't a job for a scalpel. It's a job for an axe or, better yet, as Argentina's President Javier Milei has shown us, a chainsaw. So let's get after it. There are entire cabinet-level agencies that should be eliminated. The Trump administration is trying to shut down the Department of Education, which has no constitutional authorization to exist, and has been opposed every step of the way by liberal politicians and the teachers' unions who fund their campaigns. We see from that very clearly that this won't be easy, and it won't be fast.
But it needs doing, and this is 300,000 steps in the right direction. Afuera!
Editor’s Note: The Trump administration and DOGE are bringing much-needed accountability to our out-of-control bureaucracy as they take a chainsaw to rampant waste, fraud, and abuse.
Help us continue to report on DOGE's accomplishments and expose Big Government corruption. Join RedState VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.