The days of peak DOGE may be over, but Trump’s quiet transformation of the federal bureaucracy continues.
The Trump administration shrank the federal workforce to its smallest number since the launch of LBJ’s Great Society. This incredible stat, little remarked upon by the media, was dredged up by X user Christian Heiens.
“Since Trump took office, over 352,000 Federal employees have been fired, resigned, or retired and were not replaced,” Heiens wrote on X. “The Federal workforce is smaller today than at any point since 1966.”
Pew Research also noted this considerable decline in the federal workforce in March.
“A total of 348,219 people quit, retired, were laid off or otherwise left federal employment last year – an 80.8% increase from 2024,” Pew wrote. “At the same time, 116,912 people started working for the federal government – a 55.6% decrease from the year before.”
Pew noted that the biggest cuts hit the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, celebrated this all-around good news.
A quick look at the numbers provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the figures to be correct. Since President Donald Trump retook office, his administration has done more to reduce the federal workforce than pretty much any president ever. That includes Trump 1.0.
The only larger drop-off in government personnel occurred at the end of World War II, for obvious reasons. Of course, FDR and Harry Truman were in no way small-government presidents. It was the New Deal in the 1930s that mushroomed the size of the federal government beyond anything the Founders could have imagined.
The Great Society in the 1960s grew the government even more and arguably created the far more pernicious federal leviathan that we have today.
One could argue this administration marks the first serious curtailment of that governmental transformation. Even the limited-government-minded President Ronald Reagan failed to seriously reduce the size of the federal government despite some considerable tactical victories.
This is much more significant.
Early on in Trump’s return to the White House I called this Trump’s “Dark New Deal.”
His administration isn’t just reducing the federal workforce—a gargantuan task given the level of civil service protections and inertia in its favor—he’s specifically targeting the most noxious parts of the bureaucratic perma-state. My wife Inez Stepman, a policy analyst for the Independent Women’s Forum, correctly noted this fact.
This is a historic counterrevolution against the deep state.
It’s happening because the administration is fundamentally changing how the bureaucracy functions.
Don Devine, Reagan’s “terrible swift sword of the civil service,” explained some of what’s going on in Law & Liberty.
Devine wrote in September that Trump is not just “cutting the size of government by firing good civil servants” as the media suggests. Instead, the administration appears to be “fundamentally reforming the federal bureaucracy with the legal support essential to change how government is actually administered.”
The changes came as a result of a few Supreme Court decisions, including the reinstatement of the Professional and Administrative Examination test in August, which allows the federal government to bring an element of “merit” back to civil service hiring. Several agencies, including the Department of Justice, are already reviving merit-based hiring.
It was blocked by courts since 1981 because they ruled that it caused black and Hispanic applicants to be hired at lower rates. DEI has been in our federal hiring practices for some time.
This change is happening while Trump is clearing out the Left’s patronage networks within the federal government, whereby federal bureaucrats shovel money at various left-wing nongovernmental organizations and favorable programs often right under the noses of Republican presidents.
There’s a reason Trump’s return to office was met with panic in Washington.
While this is perhaps bad for the economy in the nation’s capital, it’s a good thing for the future of limited government and an even better thing for the American people.
It’s not often that you can say that our president does anything quietly, but this rarely remarked upon revolution could pay dividends not just today, but in the decades ahead.
While the next Democrat administration will undoubtedly try to return things to how they were, this administration is laying down structural changes that will be hard to immediately undo.
When you combine that with the Supreme Court’s abandonment of the so-called Chevron doctrine, in which courts deferred to federal agencies, you can see through squinted eyes something that actually resembles republican governance.
That’s worth celebrating.
