Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says his agency doesn’t have a “specific headcount” yet for how many employees will lose their jobs in the Trump administration’s downsizing effort.
“We don’t have a specific goal in mind,” he said in a Wall Street Journal podcast Tuesday. “The goal is to make sure that we’re doing a great job at the task that we have, the missions that we have, and so there is no specific headcount number that we’re targeting.”
His comments fall less than a month after federal agencies were required to submit plans for “large scale reductions in force” to the White House. An internal White House document reported on by The Washington Post showed as many as 1 in 4 employees were being considered for cuts at the more than 60,000-strong Interior Department.
Slashing the size of the federal workforce is part of a broader agenda by the Trump administration to reduce the size, cost, services and oversight role of the U.S. government. The effort has been spearheaded in part by the Elon Musk-driven Department of Government Efficiency and coincides with Republicans in Congress working to extend, and find funding to pay for, President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
