There is no magic lever for cutting the federal workforce.
The thin policy, magical thinking, and big consequences of the Trump-Musk attempts to get rid of people they actually need.
The issue
The Trump Administration is trying to cut a lot of federal staff. Even if it was a good idea, they’re not doing enough to prevent an economic disaster.
Wait, what?
A decade and a half ago, I was a reporter in West Tennessee, covering what was then the most-expensive congressional primary in the country, where the rough draft of what would become MAGA started slouching toward a golden escalator waiting to be born. As the money and ads piled up, the more the candidates fed off each other in dark ways.1 That included an escalating series of promises to slide more and more of the federal government into a thresher.
The person who went the furthest on that point? One of the decidedly non-funded candidates, a military veteran and chef at a family restaurant named Randy Smith.2 He told me during an interview that he wanted to eliminate 50 percent of the federal government.
I asked him a version of a question that I didn’t realize until much later is one of the most important questions in good policymaking:
And then what?
I don’t think he expected me to ask that. But the unemployment rate at the time was 9.5 percent, and hurling a bunch of federal workers out into the streets would make that quite a bit worse. I wondered how he would account for that.
“Well, you would release the money,” he said.
The federal government has all the money locked up with bureaucracy and government workers, Smith said. All it has to do is be let out the door and into the streets. Once the money’s released, it would all sort itself out.
Like there was a lever—pull it and whoosh, money avalanche, nothing hurts and everything is beautiful.
As you can imagine, this conversation has been running through my mind as the Trump Administration tries to force out much of the current federal workforce, possibly up to 75 percent.
Last week, the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR department, sent an email to every civilian federal employee offering “deferred resignation,” where they would be paid not to show up to work through September 30 if they replied with their plan to resign by this Thursday, February 6.3
The reason why? The government was going to have higher performance standards and expectations for loyalty ahead of a likely “streamlining” of the federal workforce in the months to come. In other words: if you want to get off the boat now, we’ll be happy to put you on a life raft rather than throw you overboard. A memo circulating this afternoon pretty much says so.
This plan, of course, is of questionable legality, to be kind,4 and assumes the nonexistence of Congress, the courts, and collective bargaining agreements. This sort of thing seems to be going around.
I have feelings about it as a longtime fed. I’ll share many of those eventually, but I’m also thinking about what this means for the American workforce because
This is a profoundly consequential set of decisions for the American workforce as a whole. I don’t think there are enough private-sector jobs at the skill level of the feds who will be cut, and the structures are not in place to help feds get private-sector roles that might be available to them.
Also, what are we trying to accomplish again?
Explain yourself.
I had a simple question going into researching this piece: what exactly is eliminating most of the federal workforce supposed to do, anyway?
To find the answer, I dug back into the movement I was embedded in during that race 15 years ago. Generally, the answer is some version of “I want to cut the federal workforce because it will make me happy.”5
Money Lever v.1.7 is ready to install.
The basic idea is that if there are fewer federal workers, then there will be money for all the magical things that the private sector can’t do. It’s not terribly clear what the private sector can’t do now, but somehow a million-plus people being out of work will unlock everything.
Of late, possibly because someone in messaging realized the people in charge sounded like jerks, there have been statements of concern for the federal workers themselves.
The feds are victims too, you see.
As explained to Axios by former DOGE co-chief Vivek Ramaswamy:
Ramaswamy believes that cutting the workforce will improve the "productivity" of the U.S. economy, "because I don't believe that the highest and best use of any of those talented people is what they're doing in the federal government today."
There’s plenty to unpack there, but for the sake of brevity: the public sector likely is the highest and best use for a lot of feds.
The federal government does things for which there usually is no profit motive—nuclear power regulation, for example. The Show for folks in those fields is getting to work for the federal government, and that’s not going to be replicated in the private sector in a way that fits them and their career goals.
If it’s replicated at all.
Federal workers aren’t doing their jobs because they’re not in an office and they’re going to quit as soon as they get told they have to be.
A number of feds I know have laughed off the idea they will quit because they can’t telework all the time. Partially because they have been back in the office at a regular clip for a couple years now, partially because if being the office was the reason they were going to quit, they likely would’ve done it the first time they had A Cockroach Incident.
The first Trump Administration wasn’t successful because a disloyal career workforce got in his way.
An upside of the Delta and Omicron COVID variants is that the continued office closures gave a lot of feds time apart to individually process what happened in the first administration. When people finally caught up with each other in person and shared stories, they were complete stories, and the themes and characters were remarkably consistent even at vastly different agencies.
One of the more common occurrences? We all had times when we showed appointees quick, clear, and effective ways to get what they wanted, but they refused to take them because it wasn’t the Trump way. They were expected to change things, and that meant they had to change things by not doing the things you actually needed to change things.
We would pick up on it in certain ways.6 You’d be in a meeting, for example, where someone in leadership would acknowledge that a plan didn’t make sense, but suddenly they would stand up and holler we needed to push the limits for this president.
Or you’d be in a call with the White House where the politicals would agree with the careers’ recommendation, and there would be a remark from the phone speaker that translated to “You boys sure do sound chummy.”
Then, when they took the least-advisable path, the whole thing would get struck down—maybe by a judge they thought was one of theirs—they would blame the careers, and the whole cycle would start over again.
Those things seem to have gotten more pitched all around in the new administration. The White House’s belief is that cutting talent isn’t really cutting talent if they can get one of theirs into a career job.
But there’s no guarantee one of theirs will be hired into a job that they actually know how to do, or that they will figure out how to do it, or that the way they choose to do it will survive in court or won’t lead to some calamity. Especially if theirs are subject to the same pressures as the appointees from the original administration.
So?
If you didn’t pick up on it, most of the arguments for clipping the federal workforce are based on fundamental misunderstandings over what the federal government actually does and what federal workers actually do. The decision makers carrying those arguments into reality have neither the incentive nor curiosity to discover those key details.
If the federal government eliminates 75 percent of its civilian workforce, that’s 1.5 million new unemployed people. For context, the number of reported unemployed people in December 2024 was 6.9 million.
Generally, if you’re going increase the number of jobless Americans by 20 percent(!), it would be lovely to at least have a good and clear reason why to successfully guide the execution of all that turnover.
What do we do about it?
Can I say “don’t” hard enough that someone who matters will listen? Probably not.
But if you’re going to do it anyway in search of The Money Lever That Fixes Everything?
Set up a legitimate jobs transition program.
If Trump decision-makers really think that the private sector can take on their unwanted freight, they need to show their work. Deferred resignation seems to be OPM’s way of hoping everything works out in eight months. I have my doubts.
If you corner a recruiter, they will tell you there is a degree of suspicion in considering candidates who are long-time career federal staff. Either because of suspected lack of commitment to the profit motive, or because most non-government hiring managers assume all feds are supposed to remain feds until they die and if this person wants out, something is up.
So how do you effectively counter that? Unfortunately, probably federal financial incentives to private employers for real commitments to hire offboarding feds and provide any needed on-the-job training to acclimate them to their new roles.
Let’s be clear about how this would have to be set up, because train-and-pray isn’t it:
Not a promise to look at a resume. Not just something like Civic Match. Not an opportunity for first refusal.
Actual commitment to hiring people and giving them the tools they need to transition successfully.
Otherwise, the Administration is taking a risk with the economy it never had to take, without a safety plan that makes sure those cans of kerosene it’s juggling never meet an open flame.
Card subject to change
FRIDAY: A survival guide for current federal grantees dealing with threats to their awards from the new administration.
Next TUESDAY: Why hasn’t skills-based hiring taken off more? It asks employers to do something many can’t.
If you clicked the link, yes, that really happened at a candidate forum.
Smith finished fourth with 2 percent of the vote. Stephen Fincher, who won the nomination and later took the seat, eventually retired from his seat in 2016 following conservative backlash to his bipartisan effort to save the Export-Import Bank.
I helped out with reductions in force a few times in my time in federal service. I don’t think the level of firing and layoffs the Trump Administration has in mind can be carried out without an act of Congress or at the very least a significant rulemaking they don’t have the patience for. They might find it challenging to get around bumping rights—meaning you have to fire a lower-seniority person and give a higher-seniority person their job—that could preserve some of the people they want to replace.
Strangely, the OPM email did not cite most of the regulations and laws actually governing these things.
Compared to 2010, deregulation seems to have fallen off in importance to “We have to fire feds to show we can fire feds.” Not to give anyone ideas, but Congress actually ending the laws that regulate the things that they want deregulated is much easier than just firing a bunch of feds, which takes away the people who can help the regulated with their work. Lawmakers sure don’t seem willing to take the political backlash that comes with repealing laws that regulate nuclear energy, water quality, and the financial services sector.
If it wasn’t confessed to career staff by an appointee who seemed to think that most feds also are on BetterHelp.