Tracking Efforts to Shrink the Size of the Federal Workforce: January 2026 Update

As part of the agreement to pass a continuing resolution and reopen the government, Congress and the White House agreed to pause reductions in force (RIF)—the formal process agencies use to lay off federal employees. The pause lasted through the end of January, so most of the decreases in government payroll numbers in this jobs report are deferred resignations of workers who accepted pay through end of December 2025.

What the Numbers Show

January’s jobs report marks the eleventh Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report to capture at least some of the workforce restructuring and agency-level staffing adjustments initiated after the new administration issued Executive Order (EO) 14210 on “Reforming the Federal Workforce to Better Serve Americans.”

As of January 2026, there were 2.69 million federal government workers, excluding active military personnel. However, 592,800 of those workers were Postal Service employees. Excluding Postal Service workers, there were 2.09 million federal government workers. This is a decrease of 32,800 from December, and a total decline in the federal workforce of 316,900 since January 2025.

Revisions to December numbers also reveal that the small increase in employment in December observed in the last jobs report was actually a decrease of 18,300 workers. In total, during the first year of this administration, the federal workforce has been reduced in size by 13 percent.

New Rule Expands the Scope for Workforce Reductions

The administration recently finalized a new Office of Personnel Management (OPM) rule that significantly lowers the bar for disciplining, and potentially terminating, roughly 50,000 senior career federal employees whose roles are deemed policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating. These employees would lose long-standing civil service protections, including the ability to appeal adverse actions to an independent board, bringing them closer to at-will status traditionally reserved for political appointees.

While OPM officials argue the rule is necessary to prevent bureaucratic resistance and ensure faithful execution of presidential priorities, unions warn it could be used to sidestep due process and accelerate workforce reductions outside the formal RIF process.

Back-of-the-Envelope Fiscal Savings Estimate

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has data on the weighted average salary of all federal workers between September 30, 2024, and March 31, 2025. OPM data reveal that this average weighted salary is approximately $110,000. Prior Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis suggests that federal worker salary is only about 60% of total compensation including benefits, meaning total federal worker costs are around $183,000.

Given that 316,900 federal workers are no longer on government payrolls, annual fiscal savings are somewhere in the neighborhood of $58 billion. In other words, federal workforce reduction efforts over the past year amount to more than $600 billion in taxpayer savings over the coming decade, or about half a trillion dollars in present value savings.

Shrinking the Federal Workforce: Trump vs. Clinton

Reducing the number of federal employees by the same amount that the Clinton administration did during his first term would require shrinking the federal workforce to fewer than 2.08 million workers by 2028. Reducing the size of the federal workforce back to the Clinton-era lows of 1999 would require shrinking that number down to 1.88 million.

The first figure below shows the month-by-month comparison between workforce reductions under the Clinton administration and those under the current Trump administration. The second shows the Trump administration’s efforts so far in relation to the ultimate goal of matching the scale of Clinton’s cuts.

This series covers workforce reductions, agency restructuring efforts and any new policies or developments related to these initiatives. Stay tuned for regular updates on the Trump administration’s progress toward achieving its federal workforce reduction goals.

You can read my previous monthly updates from 2025: February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, and December.