President Donald Trump counts making deep cuts to the federal workforce among his top accomplishments of the past year.
The president celebrated the completion of the first year of his second term Tuesday at a White House press conference where he ticked off some of his favorite early moves in office. Among them: booting government workers.
“We removed over 270,000 bureaucrats from the federal payroll,” the president said Tuesday. “We’ve slashed tremendous numbers of people,” he added. “We have jobs where they had 10 people for every job.”
The size of the federal workforce dropped by nearly 220,000 between Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025 and November 2025, according to data released recently by the Trump administration. More than 320,000 employees left their government jobs after Trump’s inauguration, the data shows, including staffers who accepted the administration’s incentives to resign or retire early.
