The Musk-Trump War on Federal Employees Doesn’t Add Up
“DOGE operatives claim that mass layoffs are necessary to prevent the U.S. government from going bankrupt. Let’s do the math.
Source photograph by Jim Watson / AFP / Getty
The Trump Administration’s assault on federal workers is intensifying, but it remains infuriatingly opaque. With no official tally of layoffs, media organizations are doing their own sums based on announcements from individual agencies. Reuters estimates that, so far, “tens of thousands” of people have been fired. At a Cabinet meeting last week, Elon Musk, the de-facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has been leading the retrenchment efforts, refused to tell reporters if he had a numerical goal for redundancies. But he did say, “If the job is not essential, or they are not doing it well, they obviously shouldn’t be on the public payroll.”
Musk also gave a figure for the cost savings that he and his colleagues at DOGE are trying to achieve: a trillion dollars. This is half his original target of two trillion dollars, but in an over-all federal budget of $6.75 trillion it’s still an enormous number. Clearly, more layoffs are on the way, and not just at the behest of Musk. This past week, Russell Vought, the conservative ideologue who is now the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, issued a memorandum to agency heads that claimed American voters had “registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt, federal bureaucracy,” and ordered them to “undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.”
During the election campaign, Donald Trump frequently spoke of dismantling the “deep state,” referring to senior officials, particularly at law-enforcement and national-security agencies, who had supposedly defied his wishes during his first term and pursued him legally after he left office. The Trump campaign also promised to “move parts of the federal bureaucracy outside of the Washington Swamp,” but it made no mention of mass layoffs. In September, Trump said that if elected he would create a government efficiency commission headed by Musk that would provide recommendations on how to reduce waste. He didn’t provide any details, though, and he distanced himself from Project 2025, the radical plan to “dismantle the administrative state” that was drawn up by Vought and others associated with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
The blueprint defined the “administrative state” not as ordinary federal workers but as the “policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government’s departments.” Although it suggested numerous reforms at individual agencies, it didn’t mention layoffs of low-level employees like Andrew Lennox, a former U.S. marine who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and started work at a Michigan branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs in December, only to lose his job as an administrator earlier this month—“I thought, I’m a vet, I’m safe,” he told Mother Jones—or Ryleigh Cooper, a twenty-four-year-old woman who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, also in Michigan, where one of her tasks was marking trees for loggers. According to the Washington Post, Cooper earned about forty thousand dollars a year, and her latest performance evaluation was “highly successful.” Neither of these things were sufficient to save her job.
After the election, Musk, the Times reported last week, took up residence at Mar-a-Lago and made preparations to drastically reduce the federal workforce, with Trump’s support. The official explanation for the layoffs is that they are financially essential. Musk has claimed that the United States will go bankrupt if it doesn’t get the budget deficit under control. But, in repeating this assertion at the Cabinet meeting, he failed to acknowledge the revenue side of the deficit, despite the fact that, the previous day, Republicans in the House of Representatives had approved a budget framework that provides for up to $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, many of them slanted at corporations and rich people like him. Many of these cuts were originally introduced in the G.O.P.’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, but they were so expensive that the only way to reconcile them with congressional budget guidelines was to have them sunset after eight years. Now those eight years are nearly up, and Republicans are determined to extend them at all costs, the deficit be damned.
If, for the sake of argument, we follow Musk’s lead and remove tax revenues from consideration, his spending math still doesn’t add up. Not counting the uniformed military and the U.S. Postal Service, which since 1970 has been a semi-autonomous agency, there are roughly 2.3 million federal workers. According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which oversaw the federal bureaucracy until Musk came along, these workers earn an average salary of $106,870. So sending pink slips to all of them would save taxpayers $245.8 billion a year in federal salaries. (The figure comes from multiplying 2.3 million by $106,870.) To be sure, that’s a large sum. But it is less than a quarter of Musk’s target of a trillion dollars in spending cuts, and it’s less than four per cent of total federal spending.
Of course, these calculations can’t be taken literally. Even Musk has said that he wants to protect essential workers. If the entire federal workforce were eliminated, there’d be no one to make sure that federal benefits got paid or that federal taxes were collected. The spending and revenue figures would crater; essential services like veterans’ hospitals, air-traffic-control systems, and border-crossing stations would be completely abandoned. But this thought experiment does illustrate the point that “bloated” payrolls aren’t what is driving federal spending and deficits. Since the nineteen-seventies, as the accompanying chart shows, the total number of federal employees has remained fairly steady.
Source: Federal Reserve Economic Database; Chart: Andrew Jayoon Park
Unlike the figures from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the chart, which comes from the Federal Reserve Economic Database, counts members of the U.S. Postal Service as federal employees. It does show that the federal workforce has grown in recent years, but it’s still no larger than it was thirty or forty years ago. During the interim, total employment elsewhere in the economy has grown steadily alongside population growth. Consequently, the size of the federal workforce relative to the workforce at large has fallen considerably, as the following chart shows.
Source: Federal Reserve Economic Database; Chart: Andrew Jayoon Park
It’s fair to assume that Musk and Vought are well aware of these figures and trends, but they also know that stigmatizing federal workers as unproductive, wasteful, and cossetted plays well in certain circles. Even though four out of five federal employees already work outside of the Washington metropolitan area, “drain the swamp” remains a popular slogan. And for out-and-out authoritarians in the MAGA coalition, eliminating nonpartisan civil servants fits with the goal of giving Trump and his allies more control over federal agencies.
It’s no mystery what has actually been driving the rapid rise in the deficit and the government debt over the past decade. During Trump’s first term, the Republicans’ feed-the-rich Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 denuded the tax base, causing revenues as a percentage of G.D.P. to fall. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the first Trump Administration and the Biden Administration both adopted emergency spending measures that cost trillions of dollars. Covid-related spending has since fallen back sharply, but over-all outlays have continued to rise, driven partly by spending on popular entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Interest payments on the national debt have also turned into a major item in the budget. At about nine hundred billion dollars in 2024, the interest was somewhat bigger than the defense budget.
Taken together, interest payments, defense spending, and mandatory spending, a category that includes entitlement programs, account for more than eighty-five per cent of the federal budget. This is the real financial challenge that Trump and the Republicans face. They can’t cut interest payments on the debt; they won’t restrain defense spending; and they know that cutting entitlements would be politically unpopular. Given this predicament, the only way they can support a big tax cut without abandoning the pretense of fiscal responsibility is to say one thing and do another. Which is exactly what happened when Trump pledged not to cut entitlement programs right after the House Republicans approved a budget framework that provides for about eight hundred billion dollars of cuts to Medicaid—the government program that grants health insurance to more than seventy-two million low-income Americans, including children, working-age adults, and seniors.
The political dilemma facing Trump and the Republicans is one that an earlier generation of conservative revolutionaries faced forty-odd years ago. “The Reagan Revolution, as I had defined it, required a frontal assault on the American welfare state,” David Stockman, the Republican wunderkind who served as President Ronald Reagan’s budget director, wrote in his 1986 book, “The Triumph of Politics.” “That was the only way to pay for the massive Kemp-Roth tax cut” of 1981, which slashed income-tax rates, corporate taxes, estate taxes, and taxes on capital gains. “To keep the budget solvent required draconian reductions on the expenditure side,” Stockman went on. Even though Reagan talked a big budget-cutting game, Stockman eventually came to believe that his heart wasn’t in it. After the 1981 tax cuts and increases in defense spending caused deficit projections to shoot up, and investors to get nervous, Reagan reached a budget deal with Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, that raised taxes and preserved Social Security. Stockman concluded that Reagan, despite appearances to the contrary, was a “consensus politician,” and that the Madisonian system of checks and balances precluded lasting policy revolutions.
Trump obviously isn’t a consensus politician, and, with Capitol Hill under the control of supine Republicans, the checks and balances are looking less restrictive than ever. But Trump, until recently at least, also wasn’t known as a small-government conservative, and many of his supporters benefit from the programs that the House Republicans have slated for cuts. At recent town-hall meetings, House Republicans have faced tough questions from their constituents about the layoffs and federal contract cancellations that Musk and DOGE have imposed. Add in uncertainty about how long Musk will remain encamped in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and it’s hard to predict what the outcome of the budget process will be. In the meantime, many ordinary federal employees are its needless victims. “
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