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LOADINGERROR LOADING WASHINGTON – More than 211,000 people have been forced out of their federal jobs since President Donald Trump took office in January, with cracks showing in the government’s ability to provide people with needed services, according to a new analysis by Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit focused on better government. The group has been tracking Trump’s decimation of the federal workforce, which was composed of about 2.3 million civilian employees in 2022. It found that another 10,295 federal employees have left or been pushed out of their jobs in the last month. Advertisement A few factors triggered the latest round of people losing jobs. Most were hit after the government shutdown began in early October, when Trump arbitrarily eliminated their jobs at the Commerce, Treasury, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Homeland Security departments. Some were cut by the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review. Some opted for expedited retirement at the Defense Department. The Defense Department has been bleeding personnel more than any agency. More than 61,600 people there have left or been forced out in the last nine months. About 6,000 of them left in the last month. The Treasury and Agriculture departments have also lost huge numbers of people, with more than 31,000 and 21,000 pushed out this year, respectively. Advertisement The volume of federal employees being forced out isn’t the only alarming aspect of how Trump is hobbling the government, said Max Stier, the CEO of Partnership for Public Service. The administration is carrying out this process “in an entirely nonstrategic way.” “It’s really ‘fire, fire, fire,’ rather than ‘ready, aim, fire,’” Stier said. “Every corner of our government has seen substantial loss of critical talent, and as a result, performance of our government across the board is being diminished.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Advertisement Cracks are already showing in the government’s ability to provide people with services they rely on with hundreds of thousands fewer staff. When Texas was hit with deadly floods in July, key positions were vacant in National Weather Service offices in the state, prompting questions about staffing shortages affecting the flood’s forecast. The loss of doctors, nurses and support staff at the Department of Veterans Affairs has added wait times for veterans seeking care in areas like cardiology, gastroenterology and oncology. The Social Security Administration’s ability to process claims has reportedly slowed by 25% amid staffing shortages and backlogs. Still, Stier warned, most of the damage Trump is doing to the government is to its long-term capacity. Today’s federal employees report feeling demoralized by the Trump administration, and are currently working without pay amid the shutdown. These are the same people necessary for recruiting the next wave of federal workers, like air traffic controllers, food safety inspectors and VA doctors. Advertisement Between Trump’s hiring freezes, attrition and people being forced out of their jobs, that preparation for the next wave of hires simply isn’t happening. “To look at the president’s past, I mean, he’s been a master at bankruptcy,” said Stier. “He is, in essence, taking our government to bankruptcy by spending our resources now and not investing in resources that we need for the future.” The person driving Trump’s efforts to hollow out the government is Russ Vought, the powerful, behind-the-scenes director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought is an architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s far-right policy blueprint for Trump’s second term. Pushing out career civil servants and replacing them with political appointees is central to Project 2025’s goals. Advertisement An OMB spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about how the government is supposed to function with 10% fewer employees. But a senior administration official had to this to say to HuffPost: “Much better.” “He is, in essence, taking our government to bankruptcy.” Vought hasn’t been shy about his plans in a second Trump administration. He is singularly focused on slashing federal spending, pushing the limits of Trump’s executive power (even if violates the Constitution), and making federal employees so miserable they’ll quit their jobs and leave the government a shell of its former self. Advertisement If that sounds dramatic, take it from him: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a private speech in 2023 unearthed by ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so,” he said. “We want to put them in trauma.” Contrary to the idea that Vought is flushing out “Washington bureaucrats,” the vast majority of federal employees work outside of the D.C. area. More than 80% of them are scattered across the country and around the world. Advertisement Nearly one-quarter of them are veterans, too. Stier said the public needs to understand that what is happening is “horrifyingly bad management” that will cause pain far beyond Trump’s term in office.
