The Federal Government Is Not Too Big

President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk justify dismantling the civil service as cost cutting. The federal government has “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse,” Trump claimed earlier this month, and Musk has complained about a “staggering amount of waste of taxpayer money.” Their actions—a barrage of executive orders, memos, layoffs, and attempts to unilaterally eliminate entire agencies—have sparked outrage, but Musk sees that only as proof of their achievements: “They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful.”

For all of Trump’s and Musk’s talk of efficiency, their policies will likely slow down the government. The state needs capacity to perform core tasks, such as collecting revenue, taking care of veterans, tracking weather, and ensuring that travel, medicine, food, and workplaces are safe. But Trump seems intent on pushing more employees to leave and making the civil service more political and an even less inviting job option. He bullies federal employees, labeling them as “crooked” and likening their removal to “getting rid of all the cancer.” A smaller, terrified, and politicized public workforce will not be an effective one.

To start, let’s dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not. As a share of the workforce, federal employment has declined in the past several decades. Civilian employees represent about 1.5 percent of the population and account for less than 7 percent of total government spending. According to the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, seven out of 10 civilian employees work in organizations that deal with national security, including departments—such as Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security—that the public supports.

The reality is that the federal government has long faced a human-capital crisis. Since 2001, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has classified human-capital management—the number of people who are successfully recruited to fill skilled positions—as an area of “high risk” for the federal government. The workforce is older than the private sector, and the federal government already has a hard time hiring people.

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If the federal government should, then, rightly be focused on hiring, it is quite obviously doing the opposite, but the manner in which the Trump administration and DOGE are forcing workers out will only compound the error. Ten thousand USAID employees, for example, were recently placed on administrative leave. Employees on leave must still be paid, so little money will be saved in the short run. And if they’re rehired, the agencies will have to incur the costs that resulted from the disruption in their work. The USAID inspector general’s office has said that the agency has almost entirely lost its ability to track $8.2 billion in unspent aid. (The inspector general was fired the day after his office made that announcement.) Projects such as drug trials and medical treatments have been abandoned.

Mass layoffs of probationary employees have also begun to devastate some agencies. Public-sector workforce motivation is not just about material needs; it arises from a sense of being involved in a team actively taking on important public goals. Senior employees will watch as those they recruited are shown the door, underlining the sense that their work is considered unimportant. And if no new employees are needed, senior employees might conclude that they don’t really need to show up for work either.

Trump’s federal-workforce plans make the conditions of employment generally less appealing. Take his executive order ending remote work for all federal employees. As Musk and his former DOGE co-leader, Vivek Ramaswamy, explained in The Wall Street Journal, a one-size-fits-all back-to-office policy will generate “a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.” Trump has also promised to reassign employees from the D.C. region, even though prior efforts resulted in mass exits, and more than eight out of 10 federal employees are already outside the D.C. area.

The Trump administration has created a toxic work environment. I’ve spent 25 years studying public administration and have never seen anything like the deep sense of dread that federal employees are now experiencing. I spoke with workers who feared reprisal if their names were published. One told me that there’s an “eerie” mood in the Census Bureau office: “No one can openly discuss anything.” Another civil servant said that people who’ve worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for decades are afraid and “can’t believe what’s happening.”

[Read: What could DOGE do with federal data?]

Trump’s attempts to bend nonpartisan federal employees to his political objectives will further diminish the bureaucracy’s ability to perform necessary tasks. On his first day in office, Trump reinstated Schedule F, an executive order from his first term that makes it easier to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants. With fewer job protections, employees may be less willing to speak up and correct information that conflicts with Trump’s agenda. Those who do could be replaced by more political—and less experienced—workers. Trump also signed a memo saying that the Senior Executive Service, the most senior career employees, “must serve at the pleasure of the president.” Some experts view this language as an attempt to turn those high-level workers into at-will political employees who could be fired by the president for any reason, regardless of their performance. One Department of Justice general counsel, who had been promoted to the Senior Executive Service under Trump, was dismissed despite outstanding performance evaluations. At the same time, the Office of Personnel Management has opened the door for even more Trump loyalists by removing limitations on the number of so-called Schedule C political appointees in government.

Nothing is more emblematic of how Trump is reshaping the government than what is happening in the Office of Personnel Management. In his first term, Trump tried, and failed, to eliminate the agency. In his second term, Musk affiliates, including a staffer who reportedly finished high school in 2024, took over, locking out career civil servants from access to data. They created a government-wide email list with a parallel server and used it to send federal employees a “deferred resignation” offer that has no basis in law. Congress has identified ways to provide buyouts (or, more precisely, “voluntary separation incentives”), but OPM did not use this authority and instead simply told employees they could resign and continue getting paid until September. Although the agency is tasked with recruiting government workers, its website urged them “to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

Their exit will be our loss. We rely on public employees every day, usually not noticing how they make our lives better. The costs of dismantling agencies, dramatically politicizing state capacity, and demeaning the idea of public service will still be counted long after Trump has departed the scene.