The Trump administration is moving full steam ahead with one of its most dramatic campaign promises: shrinking Washington’s bloated federal workforce.
According to new estimates, roughly 300,000 federal civilian employees are expected to exit their jobs by the end of 2025 — a reduction of about 12.5% since January.
Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), told Reuters that “80% of those employees would leave voluntarily and 20% would be fired.” If his projection holds, it will mark the sharpest workforce contraction in decades, nearly doubling the attrition rate of recent years.
“I cannot force people to lay people off,” Kupor explained in an interview in Washington. “I have to persuade cabinet secretaries to buy into this vision of government efficiency.”
The federal civilian workforce currently sits at around 2.4 million, excluding the military’s 1.3 million active-duty personnel and roughly 600,000 U.S. Postal Service workers. Pew Research reported that, taken together, federal employees account for just under 2% of the civilian workforce nationwide.
The shake-up is part of President Donald Trump’s second-term promise to make government “leaner, faster, and cheaper.” Upon returning to the White House, Trump launched the Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — a new cabinet-level agency tasked with identifying waste, slashing payrolls, and cutting red tape.
At its inception, DOGE was helmed by billionaire Elon Musk, who compared the mission to the urgency of the Manhattan Project. Musk initially promised that the program would slice $2 trillion from the federal budget, though that target was later scaled back to $1 trillion. By April, Musk told Trump’s Cabinet that the department was on track to shave $150 billion from spending.
But Musk’s tenure ended abruptly amid a high-profile feud with the president, and Scott Kupor — formerly a top executive at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — was tapped to take over as Trump’s HR chief. While Musk brought Silicon Valley flair to the job, Kupor has taken a more methodical approach, emphasizing buyouts and attrition over mass firings.
Still, the scale of the cuts has rattled Washington. The 300,000 projected departures represent more than double the 5.9% attrition rate logged by the Partnership for Public Service in fiscal year 2023. And while most of the exits are expected to be voluntary, Kupor admitted that targeted dismissals remain on the table.
Earlier in Trump’s second term, OPM leadership had pushed agencies to dismiss employees who were relatively new to their roles, according to a court filing. Unions have challenged that approach, warning that politically motivated purges could destabilize the government. Those challenges remain pending in federal court.
Kupor declined to provide a breakdown of which agencies are taking the hardest hits, but he said OPM will publish updated headcount figures later this year. For now, agencies are being asked to submit their own proposals for cuts to White House Budget Director Russ Vought as Trump prepares his next budget request to Congress.
The numbers add fuel to a larger debate over the scope and role of the federal government. Supporters of Trump’s downsizing campaign argue that Washington has become bloated and unaccountable, insulated from the economic realities facing ordinary Americans. Trump himself has railed against “deep state bureaucrats” who, in his words, “get rich off taxpayers while strangling our economy with regulations.”
Critics, however, warn that steep workforce reductions could potentially hobble essential services. Unions representing federal employees insist that buyouts and terminations on such a scale will cause bottlenecks in everything from veterans’ benefits to processing passports.
Trump appears unmoved.
“The federal government is the biggest, fattest bureaucracy in the world,” he said earlier this year. “We’re cutting it down to size. This is the people’s money, and they deserve better than this waste.”