Small reductions to the federal work force could have an outsize impact.
Elon Musk has promised to take a chain saw to the federal government with his Department of Government Efficiency. It has been difficult, though, to figure out exactly how many jobs have been, or will be, cut.
For a department that loves to post its receipts (inaccurate as they can be), there is no single, public count.
There are a few numbers we do know. The federal government has about three million employees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. About 75,000 federal workers took Musk up on his offer of deferred buyouts — a figure that represents only about half the number of workers who typically quit or retire in a given year.
At least 25,000 workers have been laid off, according to a New York Times tally, bringing the total of confirmed layoffs and buyouts to roughly 100,000. But that figure is most likely an undercount; it doesn’t account for every agency. It also doesn’t reflect the thousands of probationary workers who were fired and then temporarily reinstated by judges.
And there are more cuts coming. Federal agencies faced a deadline late last week to submit their plans for broad reductions in force, but not all of them released those details to the public. My colleague Eileen Sullivan has a helpful roundup of those plans.
Even as the total numbers remain unclear, the impact of individual cuts is coming into focus. A few recent Times stories illustrate worries that even small reductions may have significant, and in some cases unintended, consequences:
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This morning, my colleagues Sharon LaFraniere, Minho Kim and Julie Tate reported that the National Nuclear Security Administration has lost a cadre of scientists, engineers and safety experts. The cuts come as the agency is undertaking a major effort to upgrade the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Many of the workers who took the buyout offer have a top-secret security clearance that gives them access to information about how the country’s nuclear weapons are designed, produced and used.
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Current and former employees of the Social Security Administration told my colleague Tara Siegel Bernard that the proposed job cuts there could blow holes in the agency’s infrastructure and endanger access to benefits for some of the 73 million people who rely on the program. One union official told Tara that it’s not clear who will be around to fix problems if they arise. “They are firing first and aiming later,” she said. The agency says it is “identifying efficiencies and reducing costs, with a renewed focus on mission-critical work.”
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And last week, my colleagues Roni Caryn Rabin and Nicholas Nehamas reported on how the Department of Veterans Affairs’ inability to renew the job of a single research coordinator running a clinical trial for patients with advanced cancers put the entire trial on hold. (The agency moved to fix the problem facing research staffers after my colleagues asked about it.)