Donald Trump’s administration in its first two weeks has offered up a dizzying series of moves in an apparent bid to remake the federal workforce.
On the first day of his second, non-consecutive term as U.S. president, Trump signed an executive order that would allow his administration to fire at will tens of thousands of career civil servants.
The order, known as Schedule F, would conceivably permit Trump to fill those positions with hand-picked loyalists. He made a similar move late in his first presidency, but successor Joe Biden signed his own executive order to nullify those plans.Â
Then, earlier this week in an email with the subject heading “Fork in the Road,” civilian employees except those in immigration and national security-related positions and U.S. Postal Service employees were offered a “deferred resignation program.”
Employees were given until Feb. 6 to respond about the program, which would see them paid into September.
“At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency, but should your position be eliminated you will be treated with dignity,” the email read.
Many federal workers are represented by unions and have significant employment protections, and some quickly advised their ranks to not take up the offer.
Here’s a brief look at the history and characteristics of the U.S. federal workforce:
From a gun to the stroke of a pen
President Andrew Jackson, who Trump has professed admiring, was an ardent practitioner of populating the federal workplace with Democratic Party loyalists and supporters in the 1830s. This so-called spoils system — as in, “to the victor go the spoils” — flourished for decades.
President James Garfield, elected in 1880, had proposed some reforms to that system, while others within his Republican Party demurred. But as was custom then, the White House and State Department were inundated with letters from job seekers in Garfield’s first weeks on the job — with people even showing up in person to state their case for employment.Â
One of those was Charles Guiteau, a fitfully employed and impoverished eccentric who had made a habit of introducing himself to officials at previous party events. He beseeched the new administration with requests for a plum diplomatic role overseas, either in Austria and France.
Garfield was said to have written about Guiteau’s “unparalleled audacity and impudence,” according to the book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard.
Guiteau tracked Garfield to a Baltimore train station and shot him in July 1881, the president dying weeks later from much-debated medical complications.
Garfield’s successor Chester Arthur in 1883 signed the Pendleton Act, named after Ohio Sen. George Pendleton, who introduced the bill. The legislation enshrined protections against arbitrary dismissal and spurred a move toward a meritocratic hiring system, including entrance exams, for many civil service positions.
Trump, the government and Project 2025
Trump during his first term railed against a “deep state” that he saw as impeding his agenda, particularly in the Justice Department, as the FBI investigated contacts between his presidential campaign and Russian influence. Both he and Republicans in Congress also took aim at slashing the budget of the Internal Revenue Service.
After Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation led a host of conservative groups in contributing ideas to what it dubbed Project 2025. Released in 2023, Project 2025 promised to “dismantle the administrative state.”
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, told New York Times Magazine what he hoped to see if Trump was re-elected.
“People will lose their jobs. Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that,” he said. “Buildings will be shut down. Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry.”
Meanwhile, Russell Vought, a Project 2025 co-author, has faced contentious confirmation hearings for a potential return as director of the Office of Management and Budget — an appointment that signals Trump’s intention to use Project 2025 as a blueprint, despite his attempts on the campaign trail to distance himself from the plan.”
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Sizing up the federal workforce
Pew Research, based on data from the Office of Personnel Management and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, estimated that as of March 2024 about 80 per cent of federal employees work outside of Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas like Maryland and Virginia.
California and Texas have the largest contingents of federal employees — about 278,000 people combined — while solidly red states like Alabama, Mississippi and Montana have a significant number of federal workers relative to their populations. In addition, an estimated 30,000 federal employees work overseas.
Reflecting the wide range of federal departments from transportation, energy, health and the interior, which oversees U.S. national parks, there are any number of occupations within the government. For example, Pew tallied from the available data: 2,500 welders, 580 cartographers, 43 zoologists and 21 bakers.
As far as total number of employees, there are an estimated 2.3 million civilian workers. In addition, more than 600,000 people work for the U.S. Postal Service, an independent federal agency with semi-autonomous status.
In terms of department size, Veterans Affairs employs some 500,000 people, while there are about 220,000 in the Department of Homeland Security, which didn’t exist until 2003. The four branches of the military combine to include about 760,000 civilian personnel; the 1.3 million active duty service members are generally not considered federal employees.
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Is the government super-sized?
While the numbers sound big, according to political scientist Don Moynihan, “as a percentage of the total population, the federal workforce is at historic lows.”
“We have about the same number of federal employees that we had in the 1960s, even though the government does and spends a lot more now,” Moynihan, the Harris Chair of Public Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy, wrote in November.Â
While incremental growth in numbers of the federal workforce has been tracked between 2000 and 2024, as being 550,000 additional employees, that’s still shy of a peak just before the early 1990s recession.
The U.S. public sector is also, on a relative basis, smaller than in countries like Canada, Britain and France, according to the International Labor Organization.
‘A very, very bad way to go’
Among developed countries, the U.S. is also an outlier in terms of its existing level of politicization, Moynihan has written.
About 4,000 positions in the government are considered political appointees who routinely change from one presidential administration to the next.
Political scientist David E. Lewis, in the 2010 book The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance, contrasted the U.S. political appointments — around 3,000 at that time — to France, Britain and Germany, where the comparable number then was more likely to be less than 200.
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Political scientist John Dilulio Jr., on a podcast hosted by former Reagan administration official William Kristol last year, said if the goal is to to hire as many apolitical or unbiased personnel as possible, there are remedies on the front end of the process to better accomplish that, through screening, interviewing and testing applicants.
In addition, he said, a more fruitful avenue for cutting bloat can be found in the billions of dollars in government contracts to private vendors.
A repurposing of Schedule F, Dilulio said, would be akin to a “hostile takeover” as seen in the private sector each time the administration changes political parties.
“There can be no long-term planning,” he said. “You’re going to cultivate people who are essentially just waiting for the next administration to come in and change everything over. You’re going to have people doing nothing, because doing nothing is the safest thing to do. It’s a very, very bad way to go.”
The legality of the deferred resignation move was being questioned by Democrats in Congress and public sector unions, but whether it succeeded might be beside the point, suggested American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley in a statement.
Kelley said it was “clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.”