The Only People Who Will Benefit From Slashing the Federal Workforce Are the Rich

By the Trump administration’s haphazard design, the federal government is in chaos.

Federal workers are being fired without cause or due process, most of them recent hires and many working jobs not easily found—if found at all—in the private sector. Those losing their jobs are being told that they have failed to show that their employment would be in the public interest. The effects are widespread. Medical professionals joining the already-understaffed Department of Veterans Affairs are having their job offers rescinded, while the capacity of the Internal Revenue Service to collect revenue is being hampered by layoffs mid tax season. Funding critical to biomedical research is being withheld—perhaps illegally. Without this funding, many less-resourced institutions, including historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), will be priced out of conducting research.

It is unclear as to what gains in efficiency are to be made from cutting agencies defending consumers from financial fraud or firing nuclear weapons workers so essential that they immediately need to be rehired.

This state of chaos has been intentionally crafted by Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, and his administration’s efforts to dismantle government programs by slashing the federal workforce.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) has been a central target of the purge, with the administration terminating related offices and programs while revoking anti-discriminatory executive orders. It should be no surprise then that the administration’s mass firings will disproportionately hurt minority populations within the federal government. This is a feature of the cuts, not a bug; what is being sold as a meritocratic endeavor is in reality an effort to demolish a bridge to economic opportunity for thousands of minorities, and to end programs that millions rely on.

(Source: Data obtained from the Office of Personnel Management via FedScope. Postal Workers are not included. Graphic: CEPR.)

Figure 1 displays the makeup of the federal government workforce by race and ethnicity in September of 2024, calculated using employment numbers from FedScope. Note that FedScope does not report all federal employees; it does not include the over 600,000 people who work for the U.S. Postal Service. Unless stated otherwise, all numbers in this paper reference the group of federal workers reported by FedScope.

Non-Hispanic Black people comprise over 18% of the federal workforce, despite comprising just over 12% of the population and the labor force in 2023 according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Federal work has long been a road to middle class wealth and stability for Black workers, a population facing higher rates of joblessness and increased obstacles to entering the private sector. According to a 2020 report by the Center for American Progress, the federal government has hired Black workers at higher rates than the private sector for over a century.

The Non-Hispanic white and Asian populations closely match their labor force share. Hispanic workers, though underrepresented relative to their share of the population, have seen the highest growth in representation within the federal government; FedScope data shows them going from 7.82% of the workforce in 2010 to 10.94% in 2024. Slashing the size of the federal workforce is thus bound to disproportionately hurt Black workers, while freezing the acquisition of new workers is bound to stem the growth in opportunity that Hispanic workers were achieving through the federal workforce.

With the Trump administration reportedly targeting a 10% cut in the federal workforce, 230,000 workers face the prospect of sudden joblessness. The number of federal workers is arguably already too small to handle the tasks of the federal government. The size of the federal workforce has hovered consistently around 2 million since 1950, a relic of a twice-repealed cap on the federal workforce introduced in 1950. Looking at year-over-year change in January federal employment via BLS data and excluding temporary Census workers, the federal government has never seen more than a 5% cut since 1995. Removing 230,000 workers would nearly obliterate all federal jobs added between January of 2010 and November of 2024.

Alongside the path to economic stability it has traditionally provided to minorities, the federal government provides work to over 640,000 veterans. The BLS reports that, in 2023, 11% of all veterans and 19% of veterans with service-connected disabilities worked for the federal government. A uniform 10% cut would mean 64,000 veterans directly losing their jobs, their income, and their benefits.

(Source: Data on savings receipts taken from ABC News analysis of receipts on DOGE website. Cost of extending Trump Tax Cuts obtained from analysis by Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Revised data analysis by NPR. Graphic: CEPR.)

The goal of the attack on the federal workforce is not “efficiency.” What is being sold to the people as an exercise in efficiency is no more than the deliberate erosion of state capacity. It is unclear as to what gains in efficiency are to be made from cutting agencies defending consumers from financial fraud or firing nuclear weapons workers so essential that they immediately need to be rehired. The savings claimed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have been wildly overstated; in February they claimed to have saved $65 billion, but an NPR calculation that corrected DOGE’s error-ridden tally put the actual number at $2.3 billion. Extending the Trump tax cuts of 2017, meanwhile, is estimated to reduce government revenue by at least $3.9 trillion over 10 years.

Depriving traditionally underserved communities of a route to economic security for themselves and their families.

Destroying the federal government’s ability to properly serve the hundreds of millions that depend on it, whether they know it or not.

All of this, a hundred times over, to pay for another round of tax cuts for the wealthy.

Is the cruelty worth it?