The good news on federal workers you probably never heard about

One of the most unheralded policy successes of President Donald Trump’s second term has been the purging of many unnecessary federal jobs.The federal government has reduced its workforce by 300,000 jobs since Jan.20, 2025, bringing it down to a still-bulky 2.7 million employees.Not since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society vastly expanded the scope of the national government has the federal workforce been at this level.It’s not merely that the feds have shed superfluous jobs — there are still over 4 million contract workers, after all.It’s that the White House has been targeting all the right institutions.The bloated War Department, with over 61,000 departures, and the equally bloated State Department, with 37% of its staff gone, experienced the biggest reductions.But most of the buyouts were aimed at agencies and departments that should have been shuttered a long time ago.Take the US Agency for International Development, which for years was used to funnel billions to hard-left ideological projects around the world: Virtually its entire staff is gone.The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the unaccountable bureaucratic brainchild of progressive Sen.

Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), has lost roughly 88% of its workers, though it’s still far too big.The Agriculture Department, which despite its name is principally a welfare agency that has little to do with farming, experienced tens of thousands of departures.So has another welfare-state institution, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, whose most notable achievement has been helping inflate housing prices.Not every agency is being clipped fast enough, though.Early in his term, Trump signed an executive order directing the dismantling of the Education Department — yet this intrusive agency, which spends its time propping up unions and undermining local initiatives, has lost only 40% of its staff.Every time Republicans threaten to cut federal jobs, though they rarely follow through, Democr...