DC government workforce slashed by almost 20% since Trump took office
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According to recent data, the number of federal workers in the Washington, D.C. area has now reached a 30 year low, reduced by 60,000, from nearly 376,000 at the start of Trump’s second term to 312,500 in May.
The graph to the right shows how Trump’s arrival instigated the drop.
The Department of Education took the heaviest blow, with nearly 40 percent of its workforce slashed in 2025 as Trump made clear his goal: to dismantle the agency outright. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Treasury weren’t far behind, each shedding roughly a quarter of their staff, with the IRS bearing the brunt as the administration moved to gut tax enforcement.
Beyond those, USAID, Agriculture, HHS, the VA, and the Department of Labor all saw double-digit percentage losses in their workforce, with USAID and the USDA especially targeted.
What must also be noted is the lack of any significant consequences resulting from these reductions. It has had no impact on life in general. In fact, all economic indicators — which say the U.S. economy is generally doing well — suggest its only impact has been free up Americans and let them get on with their lives.
This however is only a start. A lot more non-workers in DC should get their walking papers. They contribute little or nothing, while squelching the freedom of the rest of us.
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Related:
FELLOW TRAVELERS AND THE MOST SUCCESSFUL SOCIALIST COUNTRIES?
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/fellow-travelers-and-the-most-successful-socialist-countries
There shouldn’t even be a Department of Education
That’s the plan.
Canada’s got one on the U. S. We have a Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation. I wish I was joking…..
If that Ministry has the same effect on artificial intelligence and digital innovation in Canada as the US Dept. of Education has had on education in the US, Canada will be a back-marker in both in no time.
I’ve told my story many times. Dropped out of 6th grade and 7 years later passed a GED with less than 3 months of night school. I’m not stupid, but I’m definitely not smart enough o skip 6 years of education and still be on a level playing field. Could have done a better in college without working 60 hour weeks.
Over $17k per year per student K-12. Clearly most of that never comes close to the classroom. If a reasonable fraction of that made it to the classroom, you wouldn’t hear of teachers spending their own money on supplies, or put up with student fundraisers.
If there has to be a Dept. of Education, Mike Rowe needs to be its czar.
Reminds me of the “outrage” when Federal “workers” received an email requesting the employee state a few of the things (work) they actually accomplished last week.
The outrage told us everything we needed to know. “How dare you” demand I not just work, but do something worthwhile.
The same type of person stated that cutting huuge numbers of X employees would destroy the platform. Seems to be working okay.
We’ve got government workers here in Canada who’re still squawking that they should actually come into their offices now that the “plague” is over.
The recent – and appropriately named – Slaughter decision by the Supreme Court has now opened the way for far greater such reductions as it affirmed the right of a President to fire anyone who works for any part of the Executive branch. I hope the axe falls particularly hard on the treasonous weasels lurking in the intelligence apparat.
I would also like to see the list of Executive branch employees run against publicly available databases of political contributions and anyone having donated more than trivial sums to the Democratic Party be cashiered.
Additionally, I would like most of the Executive branch agency HQs moved out of DC and environs entirely and dispersed broadly around the country. All of the HQs of agencies that are not simply shuttered outright that is. Serious pruning of the entire Executive branch table of organization is very much needed and will, one hopes, be significantly more advanced by the end of Trump’s 2nd term.
Here in Canada, just over 20% of the workforce is employed by the government.
I saw the other day that in Australia 29% of the workforce is employed by one of the three, state, federal and local, branches of goverment.
Add in those in private industry those businesses whose only customer is the government or whose employees only function is to comply with government edicts and regulation and we are likely well over 40%, approaching 50%.
Our Prime Minister has announced the government will “control” AI. That’s the Australian Way. Control something before letting it find out what is necessary in the way of regulation.
It’s similar here in Canada as we have a number of Crown corporations (government-owned firms), such as Canada Post. (CP has been losing sackloads of money for years and, yet, managers are awarded bonuses. Go figure.) In addition, many private companies are heavily dependent upon government contracts, particularly in R & D.
Add all those to those directly employed by the government and the number will be significantly higher.
Many of the jobs that are created nowadays are with–you guessed it!–the government. One result is that actual employment numbers are skewed, so determining how many people are working can be somewhat difficult.
Nearly a half-century ago, I worked for a couple of years as an expat in Western Europe on a multi-national IT project for a US-headquartered multi-national corporation. The project staff were also multi-national and included, among other nationalities, both some Aussies and some Brits. I got along well with both and even roomed together with a couple of the Aussies for a few months in Brussels until I was reassigned to a different country. While lunching with one of the Brits one day he told me that a lot of Brits regard Aussies as, in his words, “British Texans.” I found that delightful and so did my Aussie roommates when I told them about it. Partly, I think, this was because all of us had also made the acquaintance of a Texan bizjet pilot who worked for a different US-based multinational oil and gas company and whom we encountered often in the local eateries. He was character and a fount of stories about derring-do in exotic and primitive parts of the world. So my Aussie friends had direct knowledge of what a Texan was.
Thus it saddens me to see the low, leftist estate to which contemporary Oz has fallen. I think the hinge point was probably when you let your statists disarm you all after that mass shooting in the ’90s. These days, I get the distinct impression that the normative Aussie is more a “British Californian” than a “British Texan” – present company obviously excepted.
To BMJ
A ministry of A.I. makes sense
A responsible path would be to get early artificial intelligence to write the tightest code possible….a zero or a one at the time.
Code so tight it cannot be hacked, even by later, more advanced A.I.
This code would be like what the HAL-9000 was left with when the higher order functions were keyed silent.
Foolproof code hardwired into appliances and such.
A.I. would be airgapped, and it could not crippled the more autonomic systems that our internet uses.
Lastly, if I were king of America, I would require copper lines remain just for telephones and the rare dial-up modems.
Jeff, do you know that such “tight, un-hackable” can exist? Would you be willing to bet the fate of say… humanity on its existence? IFF it can exist, how will you know it is in existence in the AI code you have. Can there be more than one un-hackable AI code? If so, will they be compatible and if not will they do “something about it”?
Don’t forget that I was referring to Canada. It’s the same country where a concrete pad, similar to what many industrial firms and farms might have on their properties, is portrayed as a cutting-edge spaceport which is about to usher in a bright, shiny tomorrow.
A blast from the past regarding leadership, federal workers and unions:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ION6Ex-92HE?si=YzcC54XO4CKzL_nT
The economy is in rough shape, but it really isn’t fair to blame either Trump or Biden for it. The presidency only controls one third of one government in an economy controlled by thousands of organizations throughout the country. If you want to assess blame, good luck. That is very difficult in our system.
I think most US economic problems are caused our addiction to debt. This is not just federal debt, but state, local and consumer debt as well. I think this is a chronic condition caused by a sick obsession with consumption at every level. This is more of a psychological or even spiritual issue rather than a political problem. It can’t be fixed by blaming the federal governments.
The big worry in the short term is that, for most of us, prices are rising faster than wages. I thinks this is largely a leftover symptom of Covid disruptions and spending. We can debate whether all that was necessary but it undeniably a huge drag. Both Trump and Biden were in on it. That has to be paid for with debt and inflation or both, there is no way around it. Both are a drag on the economy. Both parties were in on this, but for what its worth most of the opposition that there was found its home in the Republican Party.
The economy is actually in pretty good shape. All income quintiles show higher average earnings with the lowest two quintiles showing bigger percentage gains than the upper three. Inflation has fallen the last two months and is below the average rate of wage growth, especially for those in the lowest two income quintiles. The rabidly anti-Trump legacy media, of course, have been echoing the Democratic Party fabulism about the alleged wretchedness of the current economy just as they denied the recession and high inflation that occurred on Biden’s watch. I don’t know what you buy, but I haven’t noticed any sharp uptick in the prices of my family’s staple grocery items. Eggs, in fact, have gotten significantly cheaper recently.
There certainly are places with “affordability” problems in the US. And they’re all run by Democrats. The insane unaffordability of housing in California, for example, is a direct result of Democrat policy including open borders – now, mercifully ended and being reversed – and severe restrictions on new construction plus endless mandates that raise the cost of housing. This is worst for young people, especially those with six figures of student loan debt. But the student loan debt crisis is also a product of Democrat policies.
To Chris,
(The cloudflare doohickey doesn’t show up nested)
My goal was to trick a simpler A.I. to give us something more secure…that way a later, more cunning A.I. doesn’t leave itself a back-door to kill us all with.
Today’s A.I. has helped in mathematics.
We are nearing the point where the lone genius who can shut himself away from the world (Andrew Wiles) isn’t enough.
What I am hoping for is perhaps one last savant who isn’t above coding a 1, and a zero in by hand, can look over an program/operating system and tighten it up enough to the point that not even a more sophisticated A.I. could override it.
If we wait and have machines do all coding for us–that’s how humans become the Elon.
Tech bros that Zuckerberg–he’s a Morlock, after all.
What I really liked about Star Trek was how very un-cyberpunk it all was.
My head canon is that Earth did have a Ghost in the Shell transhumanist future right before EMP/nukes reset everything….with logic minded Vulcans allowing more foolproof designs….sparing us from the AM from “I Have No Mouth–”
The TOS communicator has faster than light capabilities no Smartphone today has, but–more importantly–it has no screen…so no doomscrolling.
Kirk can talk to his ship…but he keeps his eyes up.
Instead of Neuromancer, Trek tech looks to have been designed by someone who read Plato’s Republic…. someone who thought “How can I make technology ennobling?”
Of course, the real reason for the simple look is that 1960’s TV sets were simple.
But buttons in cars are making a comeback….haptics are increasingly important.
To quote a character from Cowboy Bebop when it comes to humans ‘ relationship with technology:
“Either it works for you or you work for it.”
20% loss and I never once noticed. Good job.
Cut until people notice then start replacing them with AI systems.
White collar workers are the first to notice AI taking their jobs. Not the trades. Never the trades.
I depends on which trade and at what level. I am in the concrete business and can easily see some of the trades being taken over by smart machines. 40 years ago we didn’t have affordable laser levels, small tracked machines, battery tools, and other goodies. I can see a lot of the formwork, grading and other prep done by machines with minimal supervision. Concrete pours are easily going to more automation. You see it on the multimillion dollar jobs first where labor is such a huge portion of the building cost.
Other construction trades I can more or less guess at some of what’s coming. Heavily dependent on rational design though as most current blueprints are “not well thought out”.
I think you are correct that AI and, especially, autonomous robots, will be taking over quite a bit of blue collar work in coming years, but it will be the simplest, least skill-requisite work that will mainly go. Warehouse work will probably be where the biggest early impact will be seen. Low-skill factory work will go too along with comparable work in the construction field. Pretty much any job that consists mainly of moving stuff around will be robotized.
That will also start to be true of agricultural stoop labor, especially manual crop picking/harvesting. That will have knock-on health benefits too. Robots, unlike human farm workers, do not defecate, so there will be an end to food-borne contagions spread by less-than-adequate human hygiene practices.
Over the next couple of decades, I expect a lot of agriculture to become, in effect, large-scale robotic gardening. Pesticide use can be substantially reduced or eliminated, for example, if robots are trained to pick off and squish the harmful bugs. Robotic weeding will replace herbicide use. “Robo-organic” will become a thing and then become normative.
Given that a massive build-out of new manufacturing capacity is already taking place in the US and will only grow as the PRC fades, then collapses, AI-based autonomous robotics is coming along just in time to fill a lot of the scut-work industrial jobs there will simply be far too few Millennials, Zoomers and whatever the most recent generation is being called, to fill them. We’ll be doing well to find all of the bodies needed to do the actual skilled trades work.
I used to work a HUGE automated robot populated warehouse.
I whole room that was devoted to robots stacking and un-stacking pallets of goods.
The whole rest of the building was filled with three floors of conveyor belts that sent the goods off to 40 pallet loading areas.
It never worked perfectly. We had stoppages twice a shift sometimes and the robot pallet stacker/un-stacker dropped at least a few pallets a week and the whole room they worked in had to be shut down till the mess was cleaned by a person.
This was 30 years ago. and they have since then closed the warehouse down.
Office grunt work is already being totally taken over by AI and the internet.
Just look at your local water utility office. They used to hire hundreds of people to open the bills and data enter the payments. Now they have a very few people doing that and everything else is done by the internet.
The medical industry is going that way fast. Our local ER no longer uses those nifty paper charts and went fully digital. All of the physical paper pushers are gone.
As for construction I just watched a show on 3d printing homes. They are failing because the material is not sticking together correctly and they are cracking badly a year after building. It still took a team of men to prep the land poor the foundation and install the 3d printer. The three guys had to watch the machine and feed the machine. The same amount of skilled men it would take to put up block walls.
White collar work is already being taken over by the internet and AI. Look at all the AI authors/writers out there. All the art being put out by AI.
I can see an HR interview for work being done by AI over the internet now. Do we really need HR directors?
3D printing houses is a joke at this time. I was at a trade show last year (World of Concrete 25) in Vegas and there was a 3D demonstration. I was a bit off guard at the ridiculousness of it and, in the middle of 30-50 other concrete guys said “This guy has never seen a (obscenely)* construction site. The whole crowd cracked up laughing with several letting me know that they were thinking the same.
My personal house is reinforced concrete walls and roof. Designed it to resist F5 tornados, wind borne debris, fire, and critters. Used shotcrete on walls and roof. Same concept as 3D printing except that there were interior forms, integrated insulation, and considerable reinforcement. The insulation and reinforcement is not feasible in 3D printing. The 6/12 pitch on the roof isn’t either. Shotcrete is fairly labor intensive, though not as much as trying to conventionally form everything.
Part of why I went to the show was to take the shotcrete inspectors course as I was unhappy with some of the results on my house. Two things jumped out at me. The instructor had a laugh at 3D printing trying to do the same job that shotcrete and Gunite had already been doing for a century. And that a lot of the labor used on my house was excess and wrong. We can get almost down to the cost of conventional construction with a better** structure.
Anyway, part of the new product I am trying for locally is small storm resistant structures of all reinforced concrete. Storm-n-Storage. 3D in concept only with machine applied shotcrete. Hope to get the costs under that of conventional at some point. Lower labor cost is the key as capable young citizens are mostly not going into construction. Not going for AI, but rather reduced grunt and skilled labor required. If successful, I expect the technique to be copied widely in the future.
* Direct quote would violate site rules.
**Depends on your requirements of course. Our electric bill has been averaging $70.00 a month for 620 square feet in Florida summer.
I heard Iranian concrete was pretty good. They have cinder cones?
I hope anti-gravity really is a think. Jagged Moondust would be great.
> Robots, unlike human farm workers, do not defecate, so there will be an end to food-borne contagions spread by less-than-adequate human hygiene practices.
Really? That’s where it comes from? I’ve never really thought about it, but “contaminated by field workers taking a dump” wasn’t on my radar. I rather wish it still were not.
Contamination of human-picked crops by fecal coli is a perennial problem given current practice. And that’s what it always turns out to be. The current problem with lettuce used by Taco Bell is an utterly typical instance and only the latest of far too many to count going back decades.
Anything machine-picked and/or cooked and canned after harvesting is generally safe, but a lot of fruits and veggies are hand-harvested by illegal immigrants from parts of the world where Western hygiene is not a habit. It doesn’t help that the corporate farming outfits that grow most of this stuff generally tend to be quite mingy about even port-a-potties for workers never mind running water and soap with which to wash after using facilities.
I hope the combination of advancing autonomous robotics and the ongoing round-up and deportation of illegals will produce a tonic effect on the average safety of American produce starting fairly soon.
RZ wrote:
“What must also be noted is the lack of any significant consequences resulting from these reductions. It has had no impact on life in general. ”
Well…this is one of those things where you don’t know what bullets were eliminated (not just dodged) that some fruitcake – had they been still working – might have fired off in some sort of stupid un-legislated rule that everyone has to follow.
But it wouldn’t surprise me if stupid rules were avoided.
As stated by others, the Slaughter decision should now make it possible for wholesale elimination of useless Federal jobs.
Wow! There’s a lot here…. In lots of, eh sections
So you feel that we humans that couldn’t solve those really hard math problems for centuries can “trick” an AI into …well anything. Then after that have some “savant” tighten it up. (And of course we know his intentions well. ) But anyhow, that will keep us safe from all future AI – don’t think about quantum computing though; or the combination of the two.
Context switch!
Star Trek – Star Trek was the perfect society? So inclusive that even (REAL) aliens were invited AND played key roles! But they weren’t real real – they were half human and considered that a bad thing. Hmmmm.
Subroutine!
Star Trek tech – So it makes sense that a flawed tech an advanced communicator without a screen- that is faster than light- is a key item on Star Trek. It also makes sense that the most important person on the ship – Captain Kirk – always went on routine scouting trips to unknown planets. But having the captain on the planet kept the script going and the budget on Lucille Ball’s low budget masterpiece (along with Mission Impossible et al.) kept the set simple and the buttons cheap.
Context Switch!
Buttons – Buttons are making a comeback! Well, not really, They started to. then they were too expensive and are now embedded into the touch screen. So much for haptics.
I agree though, not having buttons to push doesn’t work for me.
“DC government workforce slashed by almost 20% since Trump took office”
A good start. Hopefully Trump slashes even more and moves agency HQs to other states. Little needs to remain in the DC area beyond the State dept and DoW.
I would love to see Virginia gutted of federal jobs since these folks and the federal parasite class caused the state to turn blue.
The problem is that wherever they go, they tend to bring their politics with them.
Spread them thinly enough and that isn’t a problem. Besides, I suspect a lot of people in DC-area executive branch agency jobs wouldn’t care to move to a second- or third-tier city, especially in a red state. My guess is that they would move to some big blue city or the capital of some blue state and try to get hired on by the local or state government there as the case may be.
I can already see our young people praying for the day the government gives them everything they need to survive and robots do all the dirty work.
AI and robots are just the new slave class.
Just how stupid will our future children be if all they have to learn is how to operate their phones and entertainment systems.
Driving is already not required. Walking is not even required.
They are already asking the government for everything free. Food, medical, housing, education, transportation and the internet/phones. Soon it will be clothes and retirement.
I can see the next few generations implementing robots in everything they can and then starting to lower the retirement age, eventually down to never having to even work a day in your life.
Read about the different robot societies in Asimov.
There are certainly some potentially dystopian risks to more and more of the world’s production being done by autonomous robots. But none of that is fated. And there are certainly advantages to be had as well which is why I regard it as effectively inevitable.
That said, I think the key to limiting the number of people who elect to live entirely off of Guaranteed Basic Income – or whatever it eventually winds up being called – is to rescind their voting rights. You can entirely drag free or you can vote, but not both. That is something I think should already be done anent those who are long-term public assistance cases or are homeless for psychiatric and/or drug abuse reasons. Among other benefits, it would keep these people from continuing to be a reserve army of post-election voters the Democrats can use to steal elections.
Moravec’s paradox is perhaps behind the new push for socialism.
Working class stiffs they tried to replace robots with—but the white collar kids wound up getting the axe.
So now these younglings who would tell a coal miner to “learn to code” are on the outs themselves–and they don’t like it.
Since they seem to think their skin has a special value above everyone else’s–now they want to cause trouble.