The Federal Workforce, One Year Later: Which Agencies Actually Shrank

Our earlier coverage established the topline: roughly 386,000 federal employees left government service between January 2025 and January 2026, shrinking the federal workforce by more than a quarter million net of new hiring — about a 12% reduction, per Government Accountability Office figures, the smallest federal workforce since 1966. That's the aggregate. Here's the agency-level picture underneath it, with a caveat we want to be upfront about: agency-specific figures in this space have moved substantially over the past year, and some of what's publicly reported reflects an early snapshot rather than where things ultimately landed.

The Agency Hit Hardest, By Far

USAID stands apart from every other agency in this dataset. A tracker maintained by federal workforce researchers put the agency's total workforce reduction at approximately 85% as of an April 2026 accounting — effectively a near-total dismantling rather than a standard-scale reduction in force. No other federal agency in the public reporting we reviewed comes close to that proportion.

The Early Numbers, Dated Honestly

Reporting from March 2025 — early in this process, well before the full year of cuts played out — documented specific early agency actions: the Department of Education announced plans to cut roughly half its workforce; the IRS let go of nearly 7,000 employees initially, with internal planning documents reportedly discussing cuts of up to half of its roughly 90,000-person workforce; the National Park Service lost about 1,000 employees; the EPA dismissed more than 300 staff including environmental scientists and enforcement officials; the VA terminated more than 1,300 workers; and HUD cut around 780 positions, with internal documents reportedly discussing cuts reaching roughly 4,000 positions total. We want to be direct that these are early-2025 figures, not a final accounting — treat them as a snapshot of where the process started, not where each agency ended up a year later.

The Mechanism Behind the Numbers

A large share of the departures came through the "deferred resignation" program — an offer, sent to nearly every federal civilian employee in early February 2025, to resign voluntarily in exchange for continued pay and benefits through a set date. Reporting citing internal OPM figures put over 123,000 employees taking that offer, with a separate estimate from the Partnership for Public Service putting the total cost of paying employees who accepted the offer — many on administrative leave doing no work for up to eight months — at roughly $4.5 billion. Whether that counts as "efficiency" is a genuinely disputed framing question we're not going to resolve for you; the dollar figure itself is what's documented.

Where the Jobs Actually Were, Geographically

About 20% of the roughly 2 million federal civilian workforce is concentrated in the D.C. metro area — Washington, Maryland, and Virginia — with the remaining 80% spread across the rest of the country, meaning this wasn't purely a "Washington story" even though the Mid-Atlantic felt it earliest and most visibly. Virginia offers the clearest documented example outside the newswire aggregate: state-level Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism found a net loss of 23,500 civilian federal jobs through November 2025 — erasing six consecutive years of federal job growth in under twelve months. Texas offers a more targeted, single-agency example: at least 2,000 Treasury Department employees in the state, more than 20% of that agency's Texas workforce, lost their positions according to federal data.

What This Doesn't Settle

None of this data resolves whether the cuts achieved their stated efficiency goals or caused net harm to government function — that's a genuinely contested political and administrative question, and the agency-level numbers above are inputs to that debate, not a verdict on it. What we can tell you with confidence: the reduction was real, historically large by the GAO's own comparison to 1966 staffing levels, geographically broader than a D.C.-only story, and unevenly distributed by agency in ways that ranged from ordinary attrition-scale cuts to, in USAID's case, something closer to institutional dismantling.

FAQ

Which federal agency was cut the most? USAID, by a wide margin — a workforce tracker put its total reduction at approximately 85% as of an April 2026 accounting, effectively the elimination of most of the agency rather than a standard-scale cut.

How many federal employees took the "deferred resignation" offer? Reporting citing internal OPM figures put the number at more than 123,000 employees, out of roughly 386,000 total departures over the tracked period.

Were federal workforce cuts concentrated only in Washington, D.C.? No — while about 20% of the federal civilian workforce is concentrated in the D.C. metro area, the remaining 80% is spread nationally, and states like Virginia and Texas show documented, substantial job losses outside the immediate D.C. core.