The Federal Workforce Will Be a Little Smaller after the Government Shutdown Ends

As promised—or threatened, if you wandered over to Reason by accident—the Trump administration has started using the government sort-of-shutdown as an opportunity to engage in mass layoffs of federal employees. In the game of chicken between Republicans and Democrats over just how much the government should overspend and on what, the losers so far appear to be some of the almost 3 million Americans who thought federal employment would be a comfortable way to collect a paycheck.

Setting thousands of former government workers loose to seek jobs elsewhere—preferably not involving money forcibly extracted from taxpayers—is a step in the right direction.

As we all should know by now, government shutdowns are largely political theater. National parks and museums are closed to inconvenience the public into believing something big is happening even as taxes keep getting collected and government enforcers continue twisting arms to make sure people comply with laws and rules that never should have been imposed.

The Brookings Institution’s David Wessel pointed out last week, “the Justice Department said 90% of its employees would be exempted from the furlough” and “the Department of Homeland Security said in its 76-page contingency plan that roughly 95% of its nearly 272,000 employees would remain on the job if a shutdown occurred.” Agencies accomplish this by defining “essential” employees who remain on the job in the broadest way possible.

Paychecks may be delayed during the shutdown. But after it ends, “employees who were required to perform excepted work during the lapse will receive retroactive pay” and “employees who were furloughed as the result of the lapse will receive retroactive pay for those furlough periods” according to the Office of Personnel Management. Basically, all federal employees eventually get paid whether they continue to work or are sent home for the duration of the “shutdown.”

At least, that’s how it usually works. This time is a little different because the Trump administration came into office promising to downsize the federal government. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was supposed to accomplish that goal, but the shutdown offers another opportunity. Even before furloughs began, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent out a memo noting:

With respect to those Federal programs whose funding would lapse and which are otherwise unfunded, such programs are no longer statutorily required to be carried out. Therefore, consistent with applicable law, including the requirements of 5 C.F.R. part 351, agencies are directed to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities (PPAs) that satisfy all three of the following conditions: (1) discretionary funding lapses on October 1, 2025; (2) another source of funding, such as H.R. 1 (Public Law 119-21) is not currently available; and (3) the PPA is not consistent with the President’s priorities.

The White House is apparently taking this opportunity seriously. “Around 4,200 employees were laid off in total on Friday,” reports Eric Katz of Government Executive. The biggest cuts were at the Department of the Treasury (1,446 employees) and the Department of Health and Human Services (between 1,100 and 1,200 employees). The Department of Education, which President Trump proposes to totally eliminate, also experienced layoffs (466 or nearly 20 percent of its remaining workforce), as did the Environmental Protection Agency, Homeland Security, and Housing and Urban Development.

Everything this administration does seems to involve a bit of chaos, and the latest rounds of reductions in force are no different. While hundreds of employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were included in the layoffs, some were fired by accident and immediately rehired.

“Among those wrongly dismissed were the top two leaders of the federal measles response team, those working to contain Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the team that assembles the C.D.C.’s vaunted scientific journal, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” according to Apoorva Mandavilli and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times.

That’s unfortunate, but after the chaos inflicted on not just the United States but much of the world by the public health establishment and its presumptuous interventions into business, education, social life, and the broader culture during COVID-19, it’s difficult to summon much sympathy for CDC employees. If we end up cutting out a little healthy flesh along with the disease, perhaps they’ll understand.

In a sign of more layoffs to come, the OMB posted an October 14 statement on X promising to “pay the troops, pay law enforcement, continue the RIFs [reductions in force], and wait” for the end of the shutdown.

While further reductions in the size of the federal workforce are certainly welcome, the layoffs will have to become significantly more aggressive to more than scratch the federal Leviathan. While smaller than its peak at 3.4 million workers in 1990 and then again in 2010, the federal government still employed 2.9 million people, not counting military personnel, as of August 2025. That’s almost 3 million people living off the taxes collected by the federal government (or, increasingly, the money it borrows) rather than productively creating goods and services for willing consumers.

And those nearly 3 million people aren’t all just sitting around. Too many of them get up to mischief by exercising the power of the government to interfere in people’s lives and to enforce intrusive rules and laws. Just see my comment above about the public health establishment and the pandemic. Fewer federal employees mean not so many mischief-makers to cause trouble, along with some cost savings.

Some will complain that the federal layoffs, like the shutdown, cause real inconvenience to those dependent on government. But that’s only because government officials have done their best to create dependency on services, permits, and subsidies to make it seem like we need them.

“The problems expressed in political shutdown posturing, and battles arising from government failure to perform duties it has arrogated to itself, provide no endorsement for placing even more power over us into government hands,” Pepperdine University economics professor Gary M. Galles observed in 2021.

Laying off government employees during a phony shutdown is a messy way to reduce the size of government. But we’ll take smaller government however we can get it.