President-elect Donald Trump, returning to office on a pledge to root out the “deep state” of unelected bureaucrats that thwarted his first-term agenda, has better prospects of exerting greater control over the civil service than he does cutting its size.
On the campaign trail, he frequently criticized the federal bureaucracy as beyond the control of the president.
Accordingly, at the top of his agenda is a plan to extend the president’s control over career bureaucrats and impose new standards on civil servants.
Relatedly, he has called for reducing the government’s footprint and downsizing agencies — up to eliminating the Department of Education. Trump has said he would create a government efficiency program to limit spending and bloat, to be headed by the world’s richest man, the entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk has suggested that, with his counsel, Trump could cut around $2 trillion in spending. That would be about 30% of fiscal 2024 total spending.
Musk has had success in the private sector in reducing headcounts. He has said that he has cut about 80% of the staff of X after buying the platform.
Yet reducing the number of federal employees is a different proposition altogether.
One basic fact that will confront the Trump team is that the size of the federal workforce has stagnated for decades. As of this year, there are about 2.3 million executive branch civil employees, according to the Office of Management and Budget. Add in the Post Office, and the number is about 2.9 million. There were also 2.9 million federal employees in 1967, nearly 60 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump, in his first term, called for privatizing the postal service.
Setting that aside, though, it’s worth noting that the federal workforce has shrunk dramatically, in relative terms. It was about 4% of the total U.S. labor force in the 1960s and less than 2% today.
“The overall pattern of federal employees is that it’s been stagnant for a couple generations at this point,” said Donald Kettl, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.
Of the total federal civilian workforce, more than half work for the Department of Defense or the Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump has campaigned on building up the military and taking better care of veterans rather than calling for cuts to those departments.
Of the remainder, not all are indispensable, of course. But finding efficiencies will be difficult.
In terms of specific cuts, dismantling the Department of Education altogether would yield a headcount reduction of roughly 4,200 — hardly a drop in the bucket.
Another cut favored by Republicans is the reversal of the boost to IRS funding granted by Democrats in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. That bill authorized $80 billion in additional funding for the tax collection agency, although some of that was later clawed back by Republicans.
In recent years, the agency has been adding employees. Its workforce had shrunk from 84,133 in 2014 to 73,519 in 2018, in part because Republicans fought hard against IRS funding in the wake of the Lois Lerner targeting scandal.
Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, however, was more amenable to giving the agency more money, and it began adding workers again in the later Trump years. With the new Inflation Reduction Act funding, its workforce has grown above 90,000, and the agency now plans to have 102,500 employees by 2029.
With Republicans now set to hold the purse strings in 2025, it is possible that those staffing increases could be slowed or reversed.
But those cuts number in the thousands or tens of thousands. And Trump and Republicans are also aiming to add employees elsewhere.
Trump has called for hiring 10,000 Border Patrol agents to address the crisis at the southern border, and bringing an end to the staffing problems that bedeviled the agency during the Biden years. He’s also planning a major ramp-up in the use of tariffs to prosecute a trade war, which could necessitate greater staffing at the Department of Commerce and elsewhere.
The bottom line is that it will prove difficult to offload government employees.
Trump learned that lesson in his first term, when he presided over growth in the federal workforce.
The ranks of the bureaucrats swelled even though the Trump administration, in its early days, imposed a freeze on federal hiring.
The problem with such blunt tools for restraining federal employment is that it is too hard to avoid making exceptions. Whether it is for Border Patrol agents or other high-priority hires, such as for air traffic controllers, high-ranking officials will inevitably find it difficult to go without the ability to hire.
“The reality is that it removes judgment from the management of our government and it is a symbolic rather than a meaningful change,” said Max Stier, the CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, noting that the Trump administration added employees despite attempting a freeze.
But there’s an even greater obstacle to cutting the size of government, one that has cropped up over the course of decades. That is that restraint in federal hiring has, in the past, translated into the growth of federal contractors, a sort of shadow government workforce.
This shadow government is less directly accountable to the public, to the extent that there is no up-to-date, accurate, official measure of its size. One outside researcher estimated the number of contractors was 5 million in 2020. It is not known how large it is as of today. But total spending on contractors has grown from $665 billion in fiscal 2020 to $759 billion in fiscal 2023, according to the Government Accountability Office, suggesting that it has only grown.
A simplistic explanation, then, is that efforts over the decades to shrink the federal workforce have succeeded not in bringing down headcounts but rather only in diverting work to outside contractors who are less accountable to the president and the public.
Perhaps more realistic than altering the size of the workforce would be Trump’s plans to change its composition.
The centerpiece of his reform agenda is the reimposition of a rule change referred to as “Schedule F.” In 2020, Trump issued an executive order calling for the creation of a new category of federal employment for which policymaking workers would be exempt from certain hiring rules — and from which they could more easily be fired. The Office of Personnel Management implemented the rule briefly before President Joe Biden took office and reversed it.
Trump has pledged to reinstate the rule, and allies have suggested that it could apply to as many as 50,000 workers. The effect would be to replace many of those workers, presumed to be liberal or otherwise opposed to Trump’s agenda, with people who would further his goals.
He has also called for moving parts of the bureaucracy out of Washington, D.C., suggesting that up to 100,000 positions could be moved.
Chris Edwards, a fiscal policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute who edits the site DownsizingGovernment.org, said the best way to improve the government’s performance would be to eliminate programs to make bureaucracies more manageable. But he also advocated the adoption of Schedule F.
“Making it easier to fire federal employees would be a step forward, as the firing rate in the government is only about one-sixth the rate in the private sector,” he said.
Reimposing Schedule F could be procedurally difficult or time-consuming for the new Trump administration, thanks to Biden’s efforts to block it via regulation.
If Trump were to implement the rule, though, it could backfire in some ways.
Stier said civil servants should be chosen on the basis of their expertise, not their political loyalties. He noted that the United States already has far more political appointees than comparable democracies, in which the number of political appointments usually numbers in the tens rather than the thousands.
The career workforce should be held accountable to the president and to high-performance standards, he said, but a partial reversal of the bureaucratic reforms of the late 19th century, which required that positions be awarded on the basis of merit, would risk a return to the “spoils system” of government. In that era, positions with major influence over decisions about contracts, rules, and personnel were granted to allies of the president as a form of reward, resulting in corruption. “We should not make that mistake again,” Stier said.
Paradoxically, an increase in the number of politically appointed positions could create pressure to grow the federal workforce, he noted. To the extent that such roles are seen as rewards for political support, the president could find it helpful to create positions to distribute to allies.
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Rather than proceed with a wholesale reworking of the bureaucracy, Kettl suggested, Trump might carry out a more targeted effort to replace key officials in agencies who obstructed his agenda last time, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and, in particular, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Replacing several hundred bureaucrats in key positions could significantly ease resistance to Trump’s efforts to reorient policies on the border, foreign policy, and crime.
Making an example of recalcitrant bureaucrats could send a message to others, he said. “There would be an effort in some agencies, in particular, to put heads on spikes and to try to make the point to other feds that it’s a dangerous thing to cross what the administration has in mind in terms of policy.”
Joseph Lawler is the policy editor of the Washington Examiner.