Imagine that everything that people did for a living was taken away one morning in a middle-sized American city about the size of Spokane or Baton Rouge. This is about how many people lost their jobs in the U.S. federal government in 2025. A study from the Pew Research Center released in March 2026 says that the number of civilian federal workers dropped by 10.3 percent last year, which is equal to a net loss of nearly 238,000 jobs. The number of people working for the federal government had dropped to just over two million by January 2026, which was the lowest level in fifteen years.
Take a moment to think about the numbers that go along with that headline. In 2025 alone, 348,219 people quit, retired, were laid off, or were otherwise separated from their federal jobs. This is 80% more than the previous year. But at the same time, hiring dropped sharply. Only 116,900 people started working for the government last year, which is more than 55% less than in 2024. That’s not leaving. That’s a structure falling apart from both ends at the same time.
The exits were not all in the same place. USAID used to have about 4,900 employees, but by the end of 2025, it only had 370. That’s a drop of more than 92% in just one year for an agency that has been around since the Kennedy administration in some form. Not long ago, the Education Department lost almost half of its staff. AmeriCorps let go of 93% of its staff. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was stripped down to its most basic parts. These weren’t slow-moving wind-downs. Several happened over the course of months or even weeks, with court orders forcing short reversals every so often before more cuts started.
There were some places where the cuts weren’t even. During the same time period, both ICE and Customs and Border Protection, which are part of the Department of Homeland Security, grew. About 7,500 more people worked for ICE at the end of 2025 than at the beginning, a 36 percent increase. The government didn’t try very hard to hide the logic there. As almost everything else was taken apart, border patrol was being built up.
The people who left were not a random group of government workers. People who were younger or still on probation (usually less than two years of service) were hit the hardest. The number of people under 35 working dropped from 18% of the workforce to 16.8 %. The number of probationary workers dropped from 16% of all workers to just over 10%. The law didn’t protect these people very much, and they learned that quickly. There is something quietly sobering about that: a reduction in the workforce that mostly affects the newest generation of public servants says something about who pays for political decisions.
The honest answer is that it’s still not clear where everyone went. Some people took the government’s offer to delay their resignation and left, likely to work in the private sector, even though the job market at the time wasn’t exactly booming. Others retired early, making decisions they had been putting off for years happen faster. Some of them were still stuck in the bureaucracy; they were technically brought back by court orders but put on paid administrative leave while the legal battles went on. In a strange state of affairs, you are technically employed but not actually working because you are waiting for federal judges to decide your professional fate.
Some mid-size metro areas built around federal facilities, places in the D.C. suburbs, and parts of Maryland and Virginia that have a lot of federal workers have been quietly absorbing the economic shock. These aren’t big tech layoffs that get a lot of attention. These are stable middle-class jobs that are going away in places where they were an important part of the local economy. It can take years for data to fully show these kinds of losses.
It is still very unclear whether the cuts will actually make the government more efficient, as the administration said they would. It’s hard to figure out how efficient something is when the agencies that do the measuring have been cut back a lot. The size is easier to understand: in just one year, the federal government cut the number of working people in a city, and the effects are still being felt in other places.
