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The ranks of U.S. government workers fell for a fourth straight month in April with non-postal employment falling by 8,500 as President Donald Trump and adviser Elon Musk aim for drastic cuts in the federal workforce.
With the latest reductions, reported on Friday in the monthly nonfarm payrolls report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, federal government non-U.S. Postal Service employment has declined by more than 23,000 so far this year. That makes Trump the most aggressive president in cutting the federal workforce since Ronald Reagan, who oversaw a reduction of about 46,000 in early 1981.
Including postal workers, federal civilian employment fell by 9,000 in April and has declined by 26,000 so far in 2025.
The White House, citing a media report, on Thursday said 200,000 federal workers had been laid off since Trump took office and put Tesla CEO Musk at the helm of the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency tasked with thinning the ranks of government workers. DOGE itself has not provided its own figures.
More than 75,000 federal workers have agreed to a form of buyout called deferred retirement, but they will remain on government payrolls until later this year. In all, over 260,000 federal workers have been fired, taken buyouts or retired early, according to a Reuters tally.
The online betting site Kalshi currently predicts Trump and Musk will cut about 300,000 federal workers by year end from a workforce that exceeded 2.4 million at the end of 2024, according to BLS data.
Should Trump’s cuts come close to that, they would rank as the largest reductions to start a new presidency since BLS started tracking federal employment in 1950, exceeding the current record of 195,000 during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first year in 1953.
(Reporting By Dan Burns; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
