This tracker was originally published in June 2025, but has been regularly updated. The last update took place on September 16, 2026.

This tracker records cuts made by the Trump-Musk administration to enforcement capacity at agencies responsible for overseeing corporations’ activities and identifying wrongdoing.

“Enforcement capacity” refers to staffing and funding dedicated to monitoring, oversight, investigation, and preparation of cases against corporations for breaking the law. Cuts to and attacks on enforcement capacity can include firings, buyout offers, funding cuts, reorganizations, and other steps the Trump administration has taken to date.

Why Enforcement Capacity?

Multiple organizations, including our collaborators at Public Citizen, are doing the important work of tracking existing enforcement cases against corporations underway across agencies—and the alarming rate at which enforcement cases are being dropped under the second Trump administration. Others have noted that new enforcement actions are being announced at a much slower rate.

This tracker is intended to complement those efforts, looking not at individual cases that are already underway, but at the staffing, funding, and regulatory powers available to agencies to continue oversight of and investigations into corporate wrongdoing to lay the groundwork for future enforcement cases.

Tracking capacity is less clear-cut than tracking individual enforcement actions themselves, but we believe it is an important part of understanding how the Trump administration is dismantling the ability of the federal executive branch to stand between the public and corporate greed and abuses. Only by understanding what this administration is destroying, and how, can we formulate strategies to respond —and rebuild the government’s enforcement capacity under a future administration.

We at RDP have long argued through our Corporate Crackdown portfolio that enforcement capacity is one of the most powerful levers available to the executive branch to protect and support constituents’ wellbeing. By utilizing existing enforcement powers to crack down harder on corporate extraction, pollution, worker abuses, and other malfeasance, the executive branch can practice impactful populist politics while materially benefitting the public, rather than helping the rich and large corporations amass wealth at everyone else’s expense.

Additionally, corporate enforcement is incredibly lucrative for the federal government—in addition to the harmful behavior they deter, agencies like the IRS, SEC, FTC, and DOJ Antitrust Division have routinely collected several times their budgets in corporate penalties over the years by forcing corporations to pay up when they break the law.

The federal government’s ability to serve the public is dependent on its political willingness and material ability to enforce the law against corporations and their executives. We hope this tracker can support efforts to understand how the Trump administration is chipping away at those powers—and to reinstate and protect those powers in the future.

Broad Efforts to Curtail Enforcement Capacity

The Trump-Musk administration has taken several broad actions to reduce federal agencies’ capacity in general, and its enforcement abilities, in addition to taking more targeted steps to attack enforcement capacities of specific agencies. Among these overarching actions are:

Jan 28, 2025: Office of Personnel Management launched the deferred resignation program, offering federal employees multiple months of paid leave to resign from their roles.
Feb 19, 2025: Trump signed an executive order attempting to bring independent agencies under his control. This effort at overseeing the work of agencies designed to have regulatory power independent from the leadership of the executive branch seems clearly designed to curtail their impact in enforcing regulations that mainly affect industry and large corporations.
May 12, 2025: Trump’s DOJ released a new corporate enforcement policy that, while using the rhetoric of targeting ten categories of white-collar crimes, offers corporations a clear pathway (complete with a flowchart) to avoid prosecution through self-disclosure after wrongdoing. Head of the DOJ Criminal Division, Matthew R. Galeotti, announced this policy in a speech that claimed, without evidence, that corporate prosecutions had “come at too high a cost for businesses and American enterprise” under the Biden administration.
July 8, 2025: SCOTUS ruled agencies could proceed with mass firings of federal employees.
- September 12, 2025: District judge in a case challenging the firings issued his final ruling, deeming the firings unlawful but saying SCOTUS had made clear with shadow docket rulings they would allow them to stand.

October 29, 2025: The Trump Administration’s attempt to fire 3,600 federal employees during the government shutdown is halted by a federal judge.

November 21, 2025: The compromise to reopen the government included provisions to rescind the 3,600 RIFs issued to federal workers across agencies throughout the government shutdown, though these jobs are only protected until January 2026.

January 9, 2026: The Trump administration shrank the federal workforce by 220,000 workers through November 2025, representing about a 10 percent cut.

June 30, 2026: The Supreme Court ruled that the president has the power to dismiss the heads of independent agencies without cause, giving Trump the authority to remove the heads of agencies that enforce corporate behavior.

July 3, 2026: DOGE officially ends, agencies begin hiring again.

Agencies Included in the Tracker

The tracker currently includes the following agencies; we will add more as our work on this topic continues and as the Trump administration’s attacks on the executive branch progress.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)
Department of Justice (DOJ)
Department of Labor (DOL)
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)
Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
US Department of Agriculture (USDA)

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: CFPB was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans from abusive financial actors, including Big Banks, debt servicers and collectors, and predatory lenders. An end to CFPB enforcement is an invitation to corporations to gleefully exploit consumers looking to fairly participate in our economy and utilize various financial products .

Who’s affected:

People with credit cards and bank accounts
People affected by racist discrimination by financial institutions
People using by novel, predatory, financial products
Prospective homeowners seeking home loans
Student borrowers
People who use app-based financial products and fintech, like Venmo or PayPal

Who benefits:

Large banks and financial institutions and their executives
Fintech companies
Mortgage loan providers and other lenders
Tech giants, retail companies and corporations expanding into financial services
Elon MusK
- AP: “Problems with mortgages will be the top priority, while issues involving medical debt, student loans and digital payments will receive less attention […] The change in focus could benefit Musk’s efforts to offer financial services through X, his social media company. He has long wanted to allow users to make peer-to-peer payments using his platform, and he announced in January that X would be working with Visa.”

For more see:

President Trump Would Like You To Say Goodbye To Our Food Inspectors (2/12/25)
NYT: New Details Emerge on Trump Officials’ Sprint to Gut Consumer Bureau Staff (4/27/25)
TAP: CFPB Slashed to the Bone, Threatening Financial Markets (4/17/25)
TAP: Hatchet Job on CFPB Even Worse in the Details (4/29/25)

Date	What happened
February 9, 2025	American Prospect: Trump-appointed acting directors of CFPB (Bessent and Vought) ordered stoppages of CFPB enforcement and supervision activity over big banks and financial institutions “Russell Vought, the Project 2025 architect and White House budget director who took over as acting CFPB director on Friday, expanded a shutdown of the bureau’s activity in a Saturday night memo, in ways that conflict with established law. He then attempted to defund the CFPB, only to find that it was already funded for the rest of the fiscal year.”
February 21, 2025	NYT: Trump officials cancelled the lease of the CFPB headquarters “At the headquarters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, faint shadows above the entrance are all that remain of the letters that once spelled the agency’s name. In the Trump administration’s broad dismantling of the federal government, the consumer bureau was one of the first agencies to fall, its offices shuttered and all 1,700 workers sent home. “CFPB RIP,” Elon Musk wrote on social media on Feb. 7.”
March 28, 2025	Federal judge grants request to “reverse agency’s sudden shutdown,” preventing the Trump administration from dismantling the agency (for now) In a temporary injunction, Judge Amy Berman ordered that all terminated employees be reinstated, and ordered the administration not to fire any more CFPB employees or delete any agency data or records. However, she warned in her order, “There is a substantial risk that the [Trump administration] will complete the destruction of the agency completely in violation of law well before the Court can rule on the merits, and it will be impossible to rebuild.”
April 17, 2025	Fox Business:: Approximately 1,500 CFPB employees slated to be cut, leaving ~200 at the agency; employees started receiving layoff notices. TAP: This included 200 of 250 members of the Enforcement division.
April 18, 2025	NYT: Judge halts the firings. “Judge Jackson issued an oral order, followed by a written one, barring the government from carrying out that plan until at least April 28, when she plans to hold an evidentiary hearing on the issue. Her ruling came in a lawsuit brought by the consumer bureau’s staff union and other parties.”
April 28, 2025	Reuters: Appeals court panel reinstates temporary ban on mass firings. “A U.S. appeals court on Monday reinstated a temporary ban on mass firings at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, allowing workers to keep their jobs for now despite the Trump administration’s plan to shrink the agency’s workforce by 90%.”
June 2, 2025	Bloomberg: CFPB leadership asks enforcement staff to write memos on pending enforcement actions, as push to make massive staff cuts continues. “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is asking examiners and enforcement attorneys to write memos on pending matters that many employees believe will be used to close investigations and justify extensive staffing cuts, multiple people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg Law.”
August 12, 2025	Politico: Trump-appointed federal judge clears the way for “restructuring” at CFPB. “A federal appeals court panel has cleared the way for the Trump administration to largely dismantle the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, lifting a lower-court judge’s injunction that had preserved the agency’s structure — and barred mass layoffs — for months.”
November 4, 2025	Fedscoop: “CFPB’s cybersecurity program ‘not effective’ after staff cuts, watchdog says” “In an audit of CFPB’s cybersecurity program, the Federal Reserve’s Office of Inspector General found that the agency is no longer keeping up with its authorizations to operate many systems, and is “using risk acceptance memorandums without a documented analysis of cybersecurity risks.” As a result of those floundering protocols, the Fed OIG said the CFPB’s overall information security program has declined to level-2 maturity (defined) in fiscal 2025, down from level-4 (managed and measurable). “We further concluded, based on the results of our determinations of effectiveness in each domain and function, that the CFPB’s overall information security program is not effective,” the watchdog wrote.”
November 11, 2025	Politico: The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel Declares Statutory CFPB Funding Method Illegal. “The Trump administration has formally determined the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s current funding mechanism is unlawful, a move that puts the agency on track to close in the coming months when its existing cash runs out. […] The administration said it now considers the CFPB legally barred from seeking additional money from the Federal Reserve, which is the agency’s typical source of funding”
April 1, 2026	Bloomberg Law: “CFPB Gives Court New Plan to Fire Half of Remaining Staff” “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau asked a federal appeals court for permission to implement a new reduction-in-force plan that would cut around half of the agency’s remaining employees. The new plan would supersede previous efforts to fire up to 90% of the CFPB’s staff, the Trump administration said in a Tuesday motion filed with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The CFPB would be left with 556 employees, down from 1,174 in fiscal 2026, under the new workforce restructuring plan, according to the motion.” More: April 1, 2026 National Consumer Law Center: “In its latest attempt to shutter the nation’s top consumer watchdog, the Trump Administration has proposed another round of significant staff reductions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The proposal, filed by CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, would eliminate all but about 550 positions – less than one-third of the staff in place when Trump took office.” April 2, 2026 Government Executive: “A consumer watchdog agency would see its workforce cut in by two-thirds from the staffing levels it employed 15 months ago under a new plan the Trump administration is seeking court approval to implement. Under the revised layoff plan, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would retain 556 employees. That would be down from more than 1,100 employees currently and more than 1,700 when President Trump took office. The plan “makes clear that CFPB leadership will not close the agency absent the injunction, contrary to the central factual premise on which the injunction is based,” Trump administration attorneys said in a new filing to an appeals court this week.” April 1, 2026 NYT: After efforts to dismantle the CFPB were blocked by the courts, the Trump administration submitted a new filing seeking permission to terminate most of the remaining staff’s employment.
April 15, 2026	Reuters: The Lease for the CFPB’s headquarters in Washington D.C. is terminated by the Comptroller of the Currency, which agreed to transfer the premises to the GSA. “The U.S. Treasury’s bank regulation agency has terminated the lease for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Washington headquarters after 14 years and ‌agreed to pass the premises to the federal government’s general real estate management agency, records obtained by Reuters show. The move, which ends the lease at least six years early, raises further questions about President Donald Trump’s plans for the CFPB, an agency created by Congress after the 2008 financial crash to police consumer financial products.”
April 17, 2026	Illinois Office of the Attorney General: A letter is sent to acting CFPB director Russell Vought from 23 state attorneys general, critiquing efforts to gut the agency. “The deregulatory agenda laid out in the Strategic Plan would further put the enforcement onus on state attorneys general by creating confusion for entities, particularly those that operate in multiple states or nationwide. Uncertainty in the marketplace raises the likelihood of noncompliance, increasing the burden on state attorneys general to enforce the law.” More: April 18, 2026 Fox61: “Connecticut Attorney General William Tong is now part of a 23-state coalition urging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, to reverse course on its attempts to scale back. Tong notes in a release that the CFPB plans to reduce staffing. He says this will undermine the federal agency’s ability to supervise financial institutions, weaken its enforcement capacity and cause consumers to receive less relief and protection.” April 20, 2026 Insider NJ: “Attorney General Jennifer Davenport and 23 attorneys general sent a letter opposing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) draft Strategic Plan, which would severely reduce staffing, undercut the agency’s mandated duty by law to supervise financial institutions, undermine enforcement, and leave defrauded consumers with a near-toothless financial watchdog. In the past 12 months, 40% of U.S. adults have experienced some sort of financial fraud or scam. Writing to CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought, the attorneys general explain that it is essential that the CFPB ─ as the nation’s only federal agency charged with financial consumer protection as its exclusive mission ─ maintain a robust supervision program to protect consumers and the financial marketplace. “Instead of trying to drive down costs and make life more affordable, the CFPB under President Trump has rolled back critical financial protections that were on track to save consumers billions of dollars. Now, at the height of a national affordability crisis, the CFPB is signaling its plan to decimate its tools to police financial institutions and prevent fraudsters from stealing consumers’ hard-earned dollars,” said Attorney General Davenport. “The Trump Administration has caused prices to skyrocket and paved the way for scams to escalate, and we will not sit idly by when hard-working New Jerseyans are victimized by corporate wrongdoers.”” April 20, 2026 Riverbender: “Attorney General Kwame Raoul today led a coalition of 23 attorneys general in urging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to scale back its plans that would severely reduce staffing, undermine the agency’s statutory obligation to supervise financial institutions, weaken enforcement, and result in less relief and protection for consumers.”
May 12, 2026	Reuters: The CFPB plans to recall staff back to work. “Leadership at the U.S. consumer finance watchdog plans to recall staff to the office more than a year after the Trump administration shuttered its Washington headquarters and tried to eliminate the workforce, according to ‌three people with knowledge of the matter. The return-to-office plan for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has not yet been announced to staff and timing remains uncertain, the people said.”
May 27, 2026	Reuters: The CFPB orders all staff nationwide, including those who had been stationed at regional offices, to report to the agency’s new headquarters in D.C. “The top U.S. government watchdog for consumer financial protection on Wednesday said it would reassign virtually all staff nationwide to its Washington headquarters later this year, the latest move likely to weaken an agency the Trump ‌administration is seeking to minimize if not eliminate, according to an email obtained by Reuters. The decision to relocate roughly 450 employees stationed near the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s former regional offices in San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago and New York and end remote work arrangements was likely to accelerate the recent pace of resignations.”
May 29, 2026 (reported June 1)	Bloomberg Law: As the end of Russ Vought’s tenure at the CFPB in August approaches, the Trump administration has reshuffled senior officials to ensure continuity with efforts to dismantle the agency. “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is preparing for acting Director Russell Vought’s expected departure later this year by promoting one of his closest aides to be the agency’s second-in-command. CFPB Chief Legal Officer Mark Paoletta was tapped as the agency’s deputy director, according to a late May 29 staff email obtained by Bloomberg Law. Paoletta, who has operationalized the Trump administration’s efforts to first eliminate and then reshape the CFPB, will retain his post as the agency’s top lawyer.”
June 19, 2026	Reuters: “US appeals court blocks Trump admin from enacting new plans to slash consumer watchdog staff” “A federal appeals court on Friday blocked the Trump administration’s plans to immediately slash the workforce at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by about two-thirds, delivering a setback to the White House’s protracted ‌efforts to shrink the consumer watchdog. The order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit came in response to a revised plan the Justice Department submitted in late March following repeated legal defeats over its plans to decimate if not eliminate the CFPB.”
July 10, 2026	American Banker: “CFPB job cuts frozen until a new director is confirmed” “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will not cut its workforce for at least 60 days, until the confirmation by the Senate of a new CFPB director, under an agreement between the agency and the union that represents its employees. The rationale is to give the incoming director an opportunity to review a reduction-in-force plan and decide whether to pursue it. On Thursday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ratified the agreement between the CFPB and the employees’ union. The order grants a partial stay of the CFPB’s reduction-in-force plan due to a pending change in the bureau’s leadership.”
July 17, 2026	MS NOW: The CFPB’s return to office mandate that would force all staff across the country to move to DC is designed to further reduce headcount. ““They know that the vast majority of people won’t be able to move, so it’s just a RIF in disguise,” said an examiner in the San Francisco Bay Area who has spent 11 years at the bureau and was granted anonymity for fear of retribution, using the government’s shorthand for a reduction in force. “It’s a way to fire people without firing them.” The examiner said he has limited mobility and cares for a mentally disabled family member. “They’re just forcing me to retire is what they’re doing if I can’t move,” he said. “If we don’t win something further beyond the November date, I’ll just have to go ahead and retire.””
August 4, 2026	Reuters: “US consumer watchdog supervisor warned staff of ‘unpleasant’ fallout if they go too hard on firms” “A top supervision examiner at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned staff they would face “most unpleasant” consequences if they were too aggressive in their oversight of financial firms, according to an internal email reviewed by Reuters. The threat, which Reuters is reporting for the first time, was emailed on May 13 by ‌Chief Examiner Fatima Batie to many of the agency’s mid-level supervision staff as they were preparing to resume inspections of financial firms following a long hiatus, according to the email and two people familiar with the matter.”

Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: Initially founded to regulate futures contracts for agricultural commodities, the CFTC now oversees the U.S. derivatives markets which includes trading in futures, swaps and options. The agency’s enforcement division investigates and prosecutes cases of fraud and manipulation in commodity transactions. As the definition of commodity has expanded to include digital assets such as Bitcoin, the CFTC also polices fraudulent activity in that domain.

Who’s affected:

People who stand to be defrauded and exploited by financial services companies
Petroleum, precious metals and other commodity traders
Farmers who rely on futures markets
Retail digital asset traders
People who gamble using so-called “prediction markets”

Who benefits:

Hedge fund managers, crypto executives, and other finance executives who will experience less pushback and resistance when breaking the law in their pursuit of profits

For more see:

Real Politicians Stay Bought by Fake Money Tycoons (12/14/22) – On crypto industry lobbying for the CFTC to be its main regulator, rather than the SEC, as the CFTC is dependent on the appropriations process for its budget and therefore more susceptible to congressional lobbying
The Blockchain Association Just Bought the CFTC (5/22/25)
How Crypto Is Buying DC One Revolver At A Time (6/18/25)
Oligarchs and the Trump Admin: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (8/14/25)

Date	What happened
February 20, 2025	Bloomberg: CFTC fires “about a dozen probationary employees” in line with Trump-Musk efforts to downsize the federal government. Terminated employees reportedly included “attorneys in the agency’s enforcement and market oversight divisions.”
April 21, 2025	Investment News: Trump’s February executive order aiming to bring independent agencies under his control is implemented.
July 17, 2025	Reuters: The CFTC begins firing dozens of staff. “The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Wednesday began staff firings that are expected to affect over two dozen people, according to an agency source, after the Supreme Court last week cleared the way for mass government firings. Employees from the CFTC’s enforcement, market oversight, administration and data divisions are expected to be affected as part of a more general reorganization at the regulator, the source said.”
August 26, 2025	Bloomberg: CFTC is down to one commissioner, of its usual five, after four step down amid Trump attacks. “The CFTC has overseen a head count reduction of at least 15% since the beginning of the Trump administration and its enforcement wing may see even greater staffing cuts, according to the agency’s fiscal 2026 budget request. Congress hasn’t clarified whether it intends to give the agency more resources to take on the lift of drafting new crypto regulations and potential enforcement actions.”
November 19, 2025	Decrypt: CFTC Chair Nominee Mike Selig refuses to comment on whether the agency requires more resources despite increased regulatory responsibilities and recent staff firings. “During a generally friendly Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, CFTC Chair nominee Mike Selig refused to say the agency needs more resources, even as the CFTC is poised to take on new duties in regulating the crypto market. And while not directly pushing back on the idea of non-Republican commissioners at the CFTC, as required by law, Selig would not commit to advocating for their inclusion.”
December 19, 2025	Bloomberg: Michael Selig confirmed as new CFTC chair
January 20, 2026	Decrypt (via Yahoo! Finance): Inspector General warns CFTC faces daunting task taking over crypto oversight with depleted staff. “In a report on Tuesday, the Office of Inspector General identified digital asset regulation as a top management and performance risk for fiscal year 2026, citing pending legislation that could dramatically expand the CFTC’s responsibilities. Expanding the CFTC’s authority would require the agency to hire more staff, build technical expertise, and develop new data systems as its mandate grows more complex, the report adds. The warning lands as the agency’s workforce has contracted sharply. Staffing fell from about 708 full-time employees at the end of fiscal year 2024 to roughly 556 a year later, a reduction of about 21.5%, the office said.”
February 10, 2026	Barrons: “As Prediction Markets Boom, the CFTC’s Flagship Office Has Lost Its Last Enforcement Attorney” “he Chicago enforcement division of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is known as a group of heavy-hitters. Trial attorneys and investigators in the Chicago office have had a role in most major CFTC enforcement actions since the birth of the agency in 1975, including prosecuting self-serving traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the late ’80s and pursuing civil charges against cryptocurrency fraudsters like Sam Bankman-Fried. In recent months, that office has become a ghost town. A team once comprised of 20 enforcement attorneys now has one, people familiar with the office tell Barron’s. After this story was first published, Barron’s learned that the last remaining lawyer resigned. That attorney has not responded to requests for comment.”
February 27, 2026	Barrons: “Senators Warn of ‘Significant Weakening’ at the CFTC” “Five U.S. senators led by Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) and Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) sent a letter to the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Thursday night asking about the lack of enforcement attorneys at the regulator’s storied Chicago office. The significant drop in enforcement staff at the Chicago office was first reported by Barron’s, and “represents a significant weakening of one of the agency’s most important enforcement hubs,” the senators wrote in the letter viewed by Barron’s.”
March 19, 2026	Bloomberg Law: CFTC and SEC announce they are working to align regulation between the two agencies and eliminate overlapping oversight. “The latest moves all point toward a “de facto merger,” said Lee Reiners, a lecturing fellow at Duke University’s Financial Economics Center. Reiners, who revived a conversation on the benefits of an SEC-CFTC merger during the Department of Government Efficiency’s regulatory downsizing campaign, sees the latest alignment as an attempt to reassure a crypto industry concerned about overlapping rules and litigation risk, without the full-scale sharing of agency resources.”
April 17, 2026	Fedscoop: With staffing depleted, CFTC chairman says agency is increasingly using AI. “During a House Agriculture Committee hearing Thursday, CFTC chief Michael Selig was asked by ranking member Angie Craig how the independent regulator can still be effective amid rapid market changes “with staffing levels significantly less than what the first Trump administration had requested.” The Minnesota Democrat said the CFTC’s staff is down 20% from the end of fiscal 2024, but Selig claimed the agency is “running more efficiently and effectively than ever before,” crediting the “right-sizing of the government” under President Donald Trump. “It’s absolutely vital that we continue to monitor, surveil and police our markets. And we are doing just that,” Selig continued. “We are utilizing new tools, from AI to automation and other surveillance systems that we’re building out, and we take this responsibility very seriously.””
April 28, 2026	Coindesk: “CFTC’s AI will review U.S. crypto registration applications, chairman tells CoinDesk” “Selig, who is set to appear at Consensus 2026 in Miami next week, said AI and automation can make up for the personnel cuts under President Donald Trump’s campaign to reduce federal staffing. He said the agency — on its way to become a leading U.S. regulator for the crypto sector — is pushing toward using the technology to review registration applications and even help in market surveillance.The CFTC registration process currently relies on the manual submission of documents, Selig said, so “we’re building out systems to automate that, to make it much more efficient.” “AI tools can be used to review the applications, flag certain things for the staff, make their jobs easier, make it much faster for them to provide feedback and also reject certain things that aren’t materially complete,” he said. “We can see something come in with blank space or inadequate descriptions or things that are clearly wrong, picked up by AI, and it can reject those or put them at the back of the line.””
May 18, 2026	Forbes: “The CLARITY Act Hands Crypto Oversight To A CFTC That Just Lost 21% Of Its Staff” “The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has 556 full-time employees. The Securities and Exchange Commission has more than 4,000. The CLARITY Act, which the Senate Banking Committee marked up this week, would put the smaller agency in charge of regulating U.S. crypto spot markets, a sector that processed $18.6 trillion in global volume last year and is on pace to grow in 2026. The political fight over CLARITY is well-trodden territory. SEC versus CFTC. Banks versus exchanges. States versus the federal government. The implementation fight will be smaller and stranger. It will turn on whether the CFTC can write the rules, staff the supervision teams, and process the registration applications in the window the bill provides.”
May 24, 2026	New York Times: “The Commodity Futures Trading Commission purged its ranks, dialed back its enforcement and boosted industries in which President Trump’s family is heavily invested.” “By Christmas, the agency had put two top officials who had raised questions about the companies on leave, barred them from the office and placed them under internal investigation. Three other senior officials who had enforced laws involving cryptocurrencies — another industry linked to the Trumps — suffered the same fate. None of those officials were told what they had done wrong. But current and former agency staffers said in interviews that the commission’s work force took away a clear message: Don’t cause trouble for those industries. The suspensions were just one of many ways in which the C.F.T.C., the primary regulator of a specialized sector of the financial markets, has been mowed down by the powerful business interests it is supposed to oversee, a New York Times investigation found. In the past 16 months of the Trump administration, the commission has shrunk its work force, purged career officials, sharply curtailed crypto enforcement and helped out prediction markets at virtually every turn, The Times found. The gutting of the agency is particularly notable because of the Trump family’s deep ties to the crypto and prediction industries. The Trumps have sold their own digital currencies, generating enormous wealth for the family, while striking deals with prediction market operators as well.”
June 1, 2026	PoliticoPro: “Wall Street regulator offers staff buyouts” “A top Wall Street regulator is offering buyouts and early retirement packages to certain staff, according to an internal email seen by POLITICO. Just as Congress weighs handing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission new power over the more than $2 trillion cryptocurrency markets, the agency told some of its workforce late last week that they had until midnight Tuesday to indicate interest in the offer. Those who elect to participate could be placed on administrative leave as early as July 1, according to the email. They would receive full pay and benefits until their official “separation date” of Dec. 31. How many staff were eligible to participate in the offer was not clear based on the email.”
July 21, 2026	Reuters: Sen. Elizabeth Warren calls for a probe of the CFTC. “President Donald Trump’s deep staffing cuts at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission could hamper its ability to enforce the law and ‌should be investigated by the congressional watchdog agency, a top Senate Democrat said on Tuesday. In a letter to the Government Accountability Office, Elizabeth Warren, the No. 2 member of the Senate Banking Committee, said the CFTC’s workforce had ⁠fallen about 25% since the start of last year, coinciding with a sharp drop in enforcement actions, and cited recent media coverage that said CFTC-regulated industries benefited from the firings.” More: July 23, 2026 Banking Dive: “A top Senate Democrat wants a government watchdog to investigate mass layoffs at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and their impact on the CFTC’s ability to regulate markets. Agency staff has shrunk by 25% since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, and despite Chairman Michael Selig saying the CFTC is hiring, the agency was reportedly offering buyouts and early retirement to its staff as recently as June, Politico reported. “The CFTC has simultaneously seen a precipitous drop in enforcement activity,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, wrote in a letter Tuesday to Orice Williams Brown, acting comptroller of the Government Accountability Office. “Therefore, I request that GAO investigate staffing cuts at the CFTC and their impact on the CFTC’s enforcement capabilities and broader mandate to regulate American derivatives markets.””
September 4, 2026	Crypto.news: The CFTC’s remit has rapidly expanded at the same time it is short on both staff and leadership. “The Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversees Bitcoin, Ether, and fourteen other assets named as digital commodities, every regulated derivatives venue in crypto, and the entire American prediction market industry. It does all of it with one confirmed commissioner and a shrinking staff. Here is the current state.”

Department of Justice (DOJ)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: DOJ is responsible for enforcing federal laws and protecting civil rights.

Who’s affected:

People negatively impacted by white collar crime, including fraud, wage theft, and embezzlement
People forced to pay higher prices due to corporate consolidation and monopoly power, if the DOJ Antitrust Division is less able to hold corporations accountable

Who benefits:

Large corporations and their executives

For more see:

Date	What happened
February 5, 2025	Bloomberg: AG Pam Bondi announced DOJ would be “scaling back enforcement of laws governing foreign lobbying transparency and bribes of foreign officials” and also “disbanded the National Security Division’s corporate enforcement unit, a high-priority initiative of Biden-era Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and reassigned team members to their earlier posts.” “Bondi also directed the DOJ’s money laundering office to prioritize cartels and transnational crime.”
February 7, 2025	Bloomberg Law:The DOJ issued a directive to “all 93 US attorneys two business days to explain why prosecutors they’ve hired in the past two years who aren’t focused on Trump priorities such as immigration and public safety should be retained.” This implies the threat of elimination of attorneys focused on areas like white collar crime: “Recent hires who don’t fall into those three specified categories would potentially include prosecutors specializing in white collar, civil fraud, and civil rights investigations.” New York Law Journal: “[T]he department is reassigning attorneys from white collar units to focus on immigration enforcement, with similar changes are under way at the FBI and the Departments of State and Defense.Third, various DOJ supervisors have been reassigned to low-level positions; should a significant number of such former supervisors resign rather than accept these new positions, their departures could impact the Department’s ability to staff matters adequately. The combined effect of these developments has been to deprioritize white collar enforcement dramatically at the federal level.”
February 10, 2025	Winston: Trump issued an executive order directing AG Bondi to cease new investigations and enforcement actions into foreign lobbying and bribery of officials and review all currently ongoing investigations.
March 25, 2025	Bloomberg: Deputy AG Todd Blanche issued a memo outlining proposed cuts to the DOJ. The memo includes plans to close the antitrust division’s field offices in San Francisco and Chicago, which would undercut the division’s important work to challenge corporate consolidation and extraction from consumers The cuts would also involve “reassigning” some personnel from the Tax Division, which some have argued could effectively stop the division from fulfilling its function of enforcing federal tax law (which, in concert with IRS cuts, could significantly impact the federal government’s ability to collect taxes and prosecute tax cheats, most prominently corporations and the wealthy).
May 12, 2025	DOJ released a new corporate enforcement policy that, while using the rhetoric of targeting ten categories of white-collar crimes, offers corporations a clear pathway (complete with a flowchart) to avoid prosecution through self-disclosure after wrongdoing.
June 16, 2025	Bloomberg: “Justice Department to Eliminate Tax Unit as Workforce Shrinks.” “The Justice Department plans to eliminate its tax division and transfer the enforcement work to the respective criminal and civil divisions as part of a broader reorganization of the department.”
June 16, 2025	Bloomberg: The Justice Department announced 4,500 employees accepted the Trump Administration’s buyout offer. “Approximately 4,500 Justice Department employees have accepted the Trump administration’s offer to participate in its deferred resignation program, according to new budget documents. The DOJ’s budget request to Congress for next fiscal year proposes eliminating 5,093 positions, which includes approximately 4,500 that are already vacant as a result of the administration’s effort launched under Elon Musk to scale back the federal workforce and spending, according to a summary released by the Justice Management Division’s budget staff.”
December 1, 2025	Bloomberg Tax: In the wake of a massive staff exodus, the Justice Department shutters its 100-year old tax division, splitting its remaining staff work across the civil and criminal divisions. “All tax enforcement functions are now split between the new tax litigation branch in the civil division and the tax section in the criminal division. The reorganization was finalized Nov. 30, according to a DOJ spokesperson. Critics of the tax division split say it sends a signal that enforcement won’t be a top priority. The spokesperson said the change won’t impact the mission to “fairly and consistently” enforce tax laws.”
April 19, 2026	PBS News: “FBI and Justice Department try to rebuild after wave of resignations and firings” “The FBI and Justice Department are scrambling to rebuild a depleted workforce after a wave of departures over the past year, with leaders easing hiring requirements and accelerating recruitment in ways that some current and former officials see as a lowering of long-accepted standards. The FBI has turned to social media campaigns to attract applicants, offered abbreviated training for candidates from other federal agencies and relaxed requirements for support staff seeking to become agents, according to people familiar with the changes and internal communications seen by The Associated Press. At the same time, the Justice Department has opened the door to hiring prosecutors right out of law school to help fill vacancies in U.S. attorney’s offices across the country.Some current and former agents also say the FBI is promoting into positions of leadership employees with less experience than would be customary for the jobs. The moves reflect a broader effort to stabilize a workforce strained by retirements and resignations prompted in part by concerns over the Trump administration’s politicization of the department, along with the firings of lawyers, agents and other employees deemed insufficiently loyal to the Republican president’s agenda. Critics of the changes say they amount to a reduction in standards for a law enforcement institution that has long prided itself on professional expertise and is responsible for everything from preventing terrorist attacks to building complex public corruption prosecutions.”
May 4, 2026	The New Republic: “Trump’s Justice Department in Crisis as Thousands of Lawyers Quit” “Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the department’s staffing woes. There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Donald Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved: Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) had left the department, either by their own volition, by accepting the Trump administration’s buyout, or by being fired. Just a fraction of those experienced employees have been replaced, causing a massive backlog of work. The immigration court system—which has been placed under tremendous pressure as a result of Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda—has been particularly hampered, experiencing a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases by the end of February 2026, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine whether their future will be spent inside or outside of the United States.”
June 3, 2026	Government Executive: “Lawsuit claims DOJ is retaliating against employees with disabilities who request telework” “A new lawsuit alleges that the Justice Department discriminated and retaliated against two of its employees with disabilities “as part of a systematic, agency-wide practice of refusing to grant requests for telework as a reasonable accommodation.” Both employees teleworked for years in their roles as supervisory IT program managers in the Criminal Division’s Office of Administration without any adverse impacts to their work, according to the complaint. But President Donald Trump’s January 2025 return-to-office directive for the federal workforce upended that.”
June 8, 2026	Government Executive: “Another lawsuit alleges DOJ is illegally rejecting telework requests from employees with disabilities” “A group of employees with disabilities at the Executive Office of Immigration Review alleged in a lawsuit on June 3 that agency officials are categorically denying reasonable accommodation requests for telework following President Donald Trump’s directive in January 2025 mandating that federal staffers return to in-person work. While that order ended telework and remote work flexibility for most government workers, civil servants with qualifying disabilities are exempt from its requirements. Plus, agencies are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations (e.g. flexible schedules and accessible technology) to such employees unless doing so would cause an “undue hardship.” But staffers with disabilities alleged these rules have been flouted by officials at EOIR, a Justice Department agency that adjudicates immigration cases.”
June 16, 2026	Quartz: “Trump’s DOJ cleared the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal before its own staff could weigh in” “The Justice Department closed its investigation into Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery before career staff investigators who had spent eight months scrutinizing the deal had a chance to raise formal objections, according to The Wall Street Journal. A team of career lawyers had been leaning toward recommending a lawsuit on the grounds that combining two major movie studios would be anticompetitive, The Journal reports. Closing the investigation without a final recommendation from the team is a standard part of the deal-review process that was skipped. Staffers learned Friday the department had already made its decision.”
June 25, 2026	Wall Street Journal: “Top DOJ Official Tells Staff He Wants to Avoid Antitrust Trials” “A top Justice Department official has told antitrust enforcers he prefers they stop taking cases to trial and instead seek to settle them, according to people familiar with the matter. Some lawyers at the department interpreted the comments from Stanley Woodward, the department’s third-ranking official, as a directive to resolve any litigation against companies and avoid future litigation, some of the people said. Woodward, who now directly oversees antitrust enforcement, has said internally that he favors avoiding drawn-out, manpower-intensive litigation. He made the comment most recently to lawyers in the Justice Department’s Chicago office, some of the people said. He has also made similar comments in other settings, others said. Woodward’s posture could weaken the department’s ability to challenge anticompetitive mergers and could put settlements of monopolization lawsuits on a faster track. The Justice Department is actively battling Apple and Visa in federal court over monopolization claims.”
June 26, 2026	Bloomberg Tax: “DOJ Civil Tax to Hire Attorneys After Losing a Third of Staff” “The civil tax branch of the Justice Department is hiring again after losing more than a third of its staff amid the Trump administration’s effort to downsize the federal government and revamp the department. The decades-old DOJ Tax Division split at the end of last year, a move that critics said signaled that tax enforcement wasn’t a priority for the Trump administration. The Tax Litigation Branch of the Civil Division now has 189 full-time employees, said Joshua Wu, deputy assistant attorney general overseeing civil tax, during a Friday panel at the New York University Tax Controversy Forum in New York. The branch has 129 trial attorneys and 23 appellate attorneys. The staffing is about 30-40% less than what the civil tax division had at the beginning of 2025, Wu said.”
July 7, 2026	Independent: “Over 1,200 ex-DOJ workers beg Senate not to confirm Todd Blanche saying he’s instilled ‘culture of fear’” “More than 1,200 former Justice Department employees are calling on Senators to reject President Donald Trump’s nomination of his former personal attorney, Todd Blanche, to become the next Attorney General, saying he had instilled a “culture of fear” in the department. The former government lawyers, who have worked across 14 Republican and Democratic administrations, accused Blanche of degrading the workforce by demonizing career employees, driving lawyers out through unethical orders and pulling staff away from mission-critical work to remain loyal to Trump. “The culture of fear Blanche has instilled within DOJ’s workforce must end,” the group of lawyers wrote in the letter sent by Judicial Connection to leaders on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Tuesday.”
July 9, 2026	MS NOW: “Trump appointees are overruling DOJ lawyers scrutinizing corporate mergers” “Trump administration appointees have overruled moves by career attorneys who had proposed suits or launched reviews to assess how the company mergers and acquisitions might lead to unfair price gouging for both consumers and taxpayers, according to the three people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal DOJ processes.”
July 10, 2026	Emerald Pages: “DOJ’s Civil Rights Division Hires Over 100 Mostly White Attorneys and Staff” “The demographic makeup of the new recruits reflects a broader, intentional reorientation of the division’s priorities. Under the new leadership, the DOJ has explicitly announced it will now prioritize claims of “reverse discrimination” against white and U.S.-born workers, combat what it terms “gender ideology,” and roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies across the federal government and private sector. The change in personnel is not an accident. Sources familiar with the hiring process indicate that the new recruits were selected specifically to carry out this transformed mission. The massive hiring class was rushed in to fill the void left by departing career lawyers, many of whom had dedicated decades to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act.”
July 14, 2026	Federal News Network: Judge orders DOJ to reinstate telework for disabled employees in preliminary injunction. “Two federal employees with disabilities were granted a preliminary injunction on Friday in their lawsuit challenging the Justice Department’s cancellation of reasonable accommodations to telework. A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ordered DOJ to restore full-time telework accommodations for the two plaintiffs as litigation in their case continues. The decision came during a July 10 hearing for the case.”
August 12, 2026	The Daily Record: “At Trump’s DOJ, watchdogs gutted as misconduct complaints soar” “In one courtroom after another, federal judges have accused U.S. President Donald Trump’s Justice Department of an extraordinary spate of misconduct, including making false statements, failing to comply with court orders and improperly using the legal system to harass political opponents. Such rebukes might be expected to trigger a flurry of activity within the department’s two internal watchdogs tasked with policing the government’s most powerful law-enforcement agency.But shrinking staffs and fears of political retribution have largely sidelined the offices, limiting new investigations into the administration, according to Reuters interviews with four former DOJ staffers and a review of department employment and investigations data. Nearly half the workforce at the Office of Professional Responsibility has left during Trump’s second term, while about 17% have departed the Office of Inspector General, government records show. Many retired or took buyouts the administration offered to shrink the federal workforce, according to the records and three people familiar with the departures. The number of new OPR investigations has declined to a 20-year low even as misconduct complaints soar, the review found. The government watchdogs are “afraid of doing any watching,” said one former DOJ official who left last year.”
August 13, 2026	Washington Post: “In turnabout, Blanche lauds DOJ career staff in first speech as attorney general” “The conciliatory and measured tone, delivered from the Great Hall at Justice Department headquarters, came after months of accusations by Trump, Blanche and administration allies that the department is riddled with politically motivated lawyers who have recklessly weaponized their prosecutorial power. None of that was on evidence Thursday.”
September 4, 2026	Wall Street Journal: “DOJ Staff Were Told to Pause Antitrust Work With Canadian Government” “The Justice Department’s antitrust division was instructed earlier this week to pause all work with the Canadian government, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the latest development in the escalating trade dispute between the two countries. In a Wednesday email with the subject line “Pause on Canada,” Lynda Marshall, the chief of the antitrust division’s international section, ordered officials to stop all cooperation on cases and engagement on policy issues with Canadian authorities. She provided no reason for the directive but said she would “circle back if the guidance changes.” On Friday, section chiefs in the division were asked in another email to provide lists detailing areas of cooperation with Canada by the end of the day. After this article was published, Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Covington said the official who sent the Wednesday email directing the pause had misunderstood a directive. She had been told to push back a scheduled meeting, Covington said, adding that there is no pause on the division’s work with the Canadian government. Marshall, in an email to staff sent later Friday afternoon, said she was mistaken and that cooperation with Canada could continue.”

Department of Labor (DOL)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: The Labor Department’s mission is to “foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.”

Agencies within DOL, like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), are responsible for ensuring the safety of workplaces, holding law breaking companies accountable through inspections and fines, and enforcing whistleblower protections related to violations of workplace safety requirements.

Who’s affected:

Workers, particularly those in dangerous industries and those trying to fight wage theft by employers
Workers at companies with federal contracts who will face less protection from discrimination based on race, gender, and other protected identities

Who benefits:

Employers (like the many corporate executives who have donated millions to get Trump in office) who won’t be forced to comply with safety laws, fined when they fail to keep workers safe, or held accountable for stealing workers’ wages

For more see:

What Cuts to the Department of Labor Will Mean for You (Century Foundation, 4/3/25)
U.S. Sen. Hawley demands Tyson child labor probe. Trump’s cuts to DOL could make that difficult (Missouri Independent, 6/4/25)

Date	What happened
January 20, 2025	DOL received the Trump Office of Personnel Management (OPM) memo with instructions to review probationary employees. Approximately 170 people were terminated according to DOL’s Chief Human Capital Officer Sydney Rose in court documents with termination dates of March 7, 2025.
March 7, 2025	Reuters: “The U.S. Department of Labor has reinstated about 120 employees who were facing termination as part of the Trump administration’s mass firings of recently hired workers, a union said on Friday.” CBS News: All 170 probationary employee firings were rescinded, effective March 7 (reported March 17).
April 4, 2025	AP: Almost forty DOL offices that “inspect mines and other workplaces for safety” are being considered for closure (36 MHSA offices in 19 states).
April 7, 2025	AP: Grant programs shuttered for DOL’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), including efforts to combat child labor. The Trump administration “has canceled millions of dollars in international grants that a Department of Labor division administered to combat child labor and slave labor around the world.”
May 12, 2025	AFGE: “Agency action will gut division that protects contractor workers from discrimination” “The OFCCP was established by executive order in 1965 to protect American workers from race and gender discrimination by federal contractors. However, President Trump revoked that executive order on Jan. 21. While employees were still able to investigate discrimination by federal contractors based on disability (under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973) and veteran’s status (under the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974), management at DOL chose to put that work in abeyance while employees waited for the other shoe to drop.”
May 28, 2025	Investigate Midwest: “Senator demands Tyson child labor probe. Trump’s cuts to DOL could make that difficult.” “Despite rising child labor violations and new Senate demands to investigate the nation’s largest meat processor, the U.S. Department of Labor remains silent on whether it has the staff to conduct future probes amidst a major reduction in its workforce. At a May 22 congressional hearing, newly appointed Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said 2,700 department employees have taken a deferred resignation program offered to nearly all federal employees as a part of Trump administration-led staff reductions. However, she said enforcement staff with the Wage and Hour Division, who are responsible for investigating child labor, are exempt from the program.”
May 30, 2025	Bloomberg Law: “Trump Seeks 25% Cut to Labor Department Staff in Budget Plan” “The latest budget document provides more details about the Trump administration’s ambitious plan to combine the various workforce development and apprenticeship pipelines within the federal government. It also reveals the scope of cuts to staffing and programs sought under Trump’s broad federal reorganization efforts, including proposals to shutter the Job Corps training program for young adults and the Women’s Bureau. Trump also plans to completely shutter DOL’s contractor watchdog, reassigning its anti-discrimination enforcement for veterans and disabled workers to other agencies including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Overall, the DOL would receive $8.6 billion in funding for 2026 under the White House budget plan, 35% less than it received last fiscal year.”
June 5, 2025	TAP: Trump nominees to DOL have history defending corporations and attacking workers. “Jonathan Berry, Trump’s nominee for the Department of Labor’s solicitor—its chief legal representative—was arguing in court as recently as this January (while still in private practice) that the 1974 congressional act that extended the minimum wage to domestic workers was unconstitutional. Trump’s key appointees to the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division—the division charged with making sure businesses don’t violate minimum-wage and overtime laws—appear to be strangers to the very idea of enforcing those laws.”
June 17, 2025	DOL: Trump administration announces intention to cut OSHA staff by 20%. “Secretary Chavez-DeRemer testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on June 5, 2025, about the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget cuts for the DOL, including significant reductions for OSHA and MSHA.The proposed budget aims to cut OSHA’s funding by $50 million and reduce its workforce by 223 positions, shifting focus to compliance assistance over direct enforcement.”
January 8, 2026	Bloomberg Law: Major staffing declines have coincided with a shift away from enforcement and towards employer assistance. “A lower number of investigators under Trump could have jeopardized WHD’s ability to police employment laws, according to former officials and worker advocates. According to a May report from Rutgers University, the WHD employed 611 investigators nationwide, the lowest on record. Those numbers may be lower now after the administration initiated widespread layoffs and coaxed staffers into leaving through buyouts and early retirement incentives. The DOL lost roughly 20% of its employees from the deferred resignation program although some were offered reinstatement. Worker advocates warned that any cuts to staff could harm the agency’s ability to enforce child labor, minimum wage, or other worker protections.”
January 9, 2026	NY Post: “Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer under investigation for ‘inappropriate’ relationship with employee” “Sources also accused her of being a “boss from hell,” by forcing aides to run personal errands or perform other menial tasks while on the clock. Chavez-DeRemer, chief of staff Jihun Han, and deputy chief of staff Rebecca Wright — whom the complaint alleges are “involved and have knowledge of these issues” — are all now under investigation by the DOL’s Office of Inspector General, according to sources and documents.”
January 12, 2026	Politico: “Labor secretary’s top aides sidelined amid inspector general complaint” “Two of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s top aides were placed on administrative leave Monday amid an investigation into their conduct by the agency’s in-house watchdog, according to two department officials. A complaint filed with DOL’s inspector general accuses Chief of Staff Jihun Han and his deputy, Rebecca Wright, of devising official events for Chavez-DeRemer in order to facilitate her personal travel, the New York Post reported late Friday. Both Han and Wright worked for Chavez-DeRemer while she served in the House.”
March 3, 2026	Politico: “Labor secretary’s top aides stepping down amid internal investigation” “Han and Wright have been the subject of complaints within DOL that they treated other staffers poorly, were more loyal to Chavez-DeRemer than the Trump administration and were attempting to meddle in DOL grantmaking decisions, according to current agency officials. They were part of a group of carryovers from Chavez-DeRemer’s sole term in the House of Representatives who helped build out her core team atop DOL, a sprawling Cabinet agency that polices workforce infractions, employee benefits and employment-based immigration programs.”
March 25, 2026	NY Post: A fourth aide to the secretary is forced out as probe into ethics and abusive workplace created by department leadership expands. “Since January, DOL Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito’s office has been probing allegations of misconduct — first exposed by The Post — that also claimed Chavez-DeRemer was abusing her position and even drinking in her office during the workday. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has also demanded information about the alleged sexual and workplace misconduct — including evidence that the secretary took subordinates to an Oregon strip club shortly after she was confirmed by the Senate in April 2025.”
March 31, 2026	Center for Economic and Policy Research: “DOL Rule Will Prevent Workers from Suing Employers for Putting Retirement Savings at Risk” “On March 30, the Department of Labor (DOL) released its proposed regulations to implement President Trump’s Executive Order (EO) allowing employers to include private equity, private credit funds, crypto, and all manner of risky alternative assets in defined contribution retirement plans — mainly 401(k) plans — without worrying about employees suing them over high fees or poor performance. The President released EO 14330, “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors,” in August 2025. It instructs the Department of Labor and the Securities and Exchange Commission to develop “safe harbors” that will protect employers from being sued by employees who believe that their employer inappropriately allowed high fee or risky investments in their retirement accounts.”
April 14, 2026	Lockton: Industry-backed assistant secretary, Daniel Aronowitz, issues a bulletin offering guidance on enforcement priorities for the Employee Benefits Security Administration that removes focus on previous priorities including hidden fees and provider self-dealing. “In September, the U.S. Senate confirmed Daniel Aronowitz as the new assistant secretary of labor for the EBSA, which regulates employer-sponsored health benefit plans in accordance with the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Employer groups generally supported Aronowitz’s confirmation. With a background as president of a fiduciary insurance firm, it’s believed he brings a turnaround-focused, plan sponsor-friendly, and litigation-reforming approach to the agency. Aronowitz has expressed a desire for greater collaboration and innovation with industry stakeholders. Already, EBSA’s enforcement strategy under Aronowitz represents a noticeable pivot from that of his predecessor. He takes over as the EBSA faces challenges from staff turnover and budget cuts, raising concerns about adequate oversight for the 180 million Americans covered by employer- and union-sponsored retirement, health, and disability plans. On April 14, Aronowitz issued a bulletin (opens a new window)titled Guiding Principles for EBSA Enforcement Priorities. It lays out four main priorities for the Office of Enforcement, including focusing enforcement on egregious conduct, providing clarity to the regulated community, increasing internal oversight, and responsive and timely investigations.” AND “The EBSA no longer lists previous enforcement priorities like transparency, hidden fees, and service provider self-dealing, but these topics remain relevant due to ongoing legislative, regulatory, and litigation developments. Plan sponsors should continue to remain vigilant in these areas.”
April 20, 2026	People’s World: Top House Democrats urge IG investigation into DOL’s advisory panel on pensions, a key body the secretary has not staffed that advises on enforcement and oversight of retirement investment law. “The advisory panel is supposed to give DOL valuable, bipartisan advice on the key pension protection law, ERISA—a law unions pushed through Congress in 1974. The Secretary is supposed to call quarterly council meetings, but there were none last year and none scheduled so far for this year. One-third of the seats on the advisory panel are vacant, and it has no executive director to run daily operations, the two lawmakers added. And Trump’s DOL pulled all 2024 Biden-era advisory council documents from the DOL website. After a complaint, it restored them with no explanation. With ERISA and its protections becoming ever more important as the nation’s working population ages and its population of retirees grows, including retirees whose pensions are dumped on the federal government when firms go belly-up, having such advice is important, the two lawmakers said. ERISA also legally created Individual Retirement Accounts. And the scandal is that Chavez-DeRemer, daughter of a Teamster, has effectively shut the ERISA advisory panel down.”
May 4, 2026	Bloomberg Law: Staffing cuts across several offices in the labor department have left millions of dollars in appropriated funding unspent and career staff sidelined. ““We were not allowed to do the work we were doing anymore. We were not allowed to email people anymore, everything got cut,” said Micelli, who resigned in August. “It’s painful when you go from running an agency that was punching way above its weight to having to come into the office five days a week and just sit there.” Miceli’s diminished workload is emblematic of the reduced responsibilities for DOL staff in the offices the Trump administration has sought to cut, but Congress still continued to send funding. The jobs and the office exist, but there’s little effort to complete tasks or fill empty positions. Across the Women’s Bureau, Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, and Bureau of International Labor Affairs, the administration slashed staff sizes and cut core functions, leaving the subagencies with tens of millions of dollars to fund work now performed by few employees with little to do.”

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: The EPA is responsible for developing and enforcing regulations to carry out anti-pollution laws written by Congress.

Who’s affected:

All of us, as the future of life on earth throughout ecosystems is threatened by corporate pollution-driven climate change, and the EPA works to ensure clean water and clean air and reduce people’s exposure to toxins like lead, asbestos, forever chemicals, and pesticides.

In particular, communities around the country that are treated as “sacrifice zones,” where the worst effects of industrial pollution are concentrated and create health hazards

Who benefits:

Corporations (and their executives) who continue to profit with fewer restrictions on their actions, as they continue to exacerbate climate change and harm communities and ecosystems

For more see:

RDP Trump Environment Tracker
Climate Action Campaign’s Trump Tracker
Columbia Sabin Center for Climate Change Law’s Climate Backtracker
LA Times: Trump is cutting the nation’s environmental programs. Here are the health risks to Americans (4/5/25)
Trump Brings Fossil Fuel, Far-Right Think Tank Agenda To Government (10/6/25)

Date	What happened
February 3, 2025	NYT: EPA told over 1100 employees they could be fired at any time
February 7, 2025	The Hill: EPA put over 160 workers at the Office of Environmental Justice on leave
February 14, 2025	The Hill: EPA fired almost 400 probationary employees
March 11, 2025	Climate Action Campaign: Closing EJ Offices. “EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin ordered the closure of environmental justice offices at the agency’s headquarters and at all 10 regional offices and eliminate all related staff positions “immediately.” The reversal comes just days after the EPA reinstated environmental justice and civil rights employees put on leave in early February.”
March 12, 2025	Columbia Climate Backtracker: Rolling back climate change regulations & changing enforcement priorities. “EPA Announces Plans to Reconsider Dozens of Climate Change Regulations. The Agency’s announcement lists thirty-one actions it plans to take, including reconsidering dozens of existing climate regulations, reviewing the 2009 endangerment finding, terminating the agency’s environmental justice efforts, and realigning enforcement priorities.”
March 14, 2025	Politico : Easing enforcement against energy facilities. “EPA has instructed staff to ease up on enforcement and compliance actions against energy facilities and to stop basing any agency actions on environmental justice, according to a memo obtained by POLITICO.”
March 17, 2025	CAC Trump Tracker: Laying off scientists who monitor pollution. “Leaked documents describe plans to lay off as many as 1,155 scientists from labs across the country. These chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists are among the experts who monitor air and water quality, cleanup of toxic waste, and more.” Cuts of this kind, if implemented, would have a downstream effect on enforcement capacity, as fewer scientific determinations about pollution levels that could support enforcement actions would occur.
March 26, 2025	CAC Trump Tracker: Offering coal- and oil-fired plants exemptions to regulations. “The EPA invited coal- and oil-fired power plants to apply for exemptions to limits on mercury and other toxic pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Mercury is an extremely dangerous pollutant…” Inviting corporations to apply for exemptions creates a workaround whereby existing regulations will be waived, undercutting the impact of environmental laws and preventing enforcement actions from occurring.
April 2025	The EPA released agency plans including an emergency fuel waiver to allow continued sale of more polluting, higher-ethanol fuel, and offered “flexibility for pesticide users and growers” in protecting endangered species.
June 12, 2025	Washington Post: “EPA just delayed reporting safety data on 16 toxic chemicals.” “The Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that it will push back the deadline for reporting unpublished health and safety data for 16 toxic chemicals — some of which are linked to cancer or developmental problems in babies — used in everyday products and manufacturing. The move signals a shift from the Biden administration’s approach to regulating harmful chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a sweeping law aimed at protecting public health.”
June 16, 2025	CNN: “The Environmental Protection Agency has told staff overseeing the country’s industrialized Midwest — a region plagued by a legacy of pollution — to stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies, multiple sources told CNN.
September 5, 2025	CNN: “The Environmental Protection Agency has moved to suspend more than 100 staffers who signed a letter of dissent against the Trump administration’s policies in July, a representative of the union covering the agency’s staff told CNN on Friday.” “The EPA previously moved to fire a handful of employees late last week, but now it is taking disciplinary action against more than 130 employees also suspected of signing the letter, the representative said. These employees were sent letters indicating they would be suspended for 14 days without pay.”
September 29, 2025	The Conversation: “Combining EPA data on staffing changes with conservative estimates of the pending cuts, the initiative has calculated that 25% of EPA staff are already out of the agency.” “That calculation does not include other announced cuts, including a third round of deferred resignations taking effect at the end of September 2025 and December 2025. Those cuts may see the departure of similar numbers of full-time equivalents as in the past two rounds – approximately 500 and 1,500. The agency has also reportedly planned to be cutting as much as two-thirds of research staff. With those departure figures included, the initiative estimates that approximately 33% of staffers at the agency when Trump took office will be gone by the end of 2025.”
January 26, 2026	Waste Dive: Trump signed an $8.8 billion EPA budget bill, cutting funding by 4%. “President Donald Trump approved a funding bill package on Friday that includes $8.8 billion for the U.S. EPA. That budget is $320 million less than the previous year’s fiscal year budget, but avoids the major cuts the White House had previously proposed, which would have slashed the budget by more than half. The approved budget covers the agency through the end of the fiscal year in September.”
February 5, 2026	NPR: “Trump’s EPA issues record low legal actions against polluters, watchdog group finds” “The Environmental Protection Agency enforces the country’s environmental laws. But a new report shows the Trump EPA has initiated a record low number of actions against polluters, compared to past administrations. That’s according to the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), which says the numbers were lower in 2025, even compared to Trump’s first term in office. By examining court records, the group found that only 16 legal actions were taken against alleged polluters on the EPA’s behalf by the Department of Justice. That’s 87% lower than Obama’s first year of his second term and 76% lower than Biden’s first year. And that’s 81% lower than even the first year of Trump’s first term in 2017.”
February 12, 2026	CCN: “Trump delivers a deadly blow to EPA’s ability to regulate climate pollution” “The Trump administration delivered a deadly blow to longstanding US climate policy on Thursday, finalizing rules that revoke the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate climate pollution. First issued in 2009, the endangerment finding determined that six greenhouse gases could be categorized as dangerous to human health under the Clean Air Act. It has underpinned the EPA’s authority to limit planet-warming pollution from the oil and gas industry, power plants and vehicles since the Obama administration and is considered the federal government’s most powerful tool to tackle climate pollution and the country’s contribution to the global crisis.”
March 5, 2026	North Dakota Monitor: “EPA change to mercury emissions rules a win for North Dakota lignite coal industry” “The Environmental Protection Agency recently finalized the repeal of a 2024 regulation that one North Dakota official had called a “death penalty” to the state’s lignite coal industry. The repeal reverts federal regulations of emissions from coal-fired power plants to the rule implemented in 2012 under the Obama administration. […] The 2024 rule would have required coal-fired power plants to continuously monitor emissions instead of conducting periodic checks.”
March 6, 2026	Inside Climate News: The EPA’s total staff count hits a 40-year low, as over 4000 employees have left, including a majority of team leads. “The EPA lost more than 4,000 employees in the first year of Trump’s second term, bringing its staffing down to a total of 12,849—a level not seen since the Reagan administration. That represents a reduction of 24 percent, more than double the rate of losses across the entire federal workforce. The loss of expertise, particularly in science and health, runs deeper still. Proportionately, there were even greater reductions of staff with doctorate degrees, team leaders and those working in health occupations, a broad government employment category that includes public health experts.”
March 10, 2026	Inside Climate News: The EPA has functionally ended all enforcement of the Clean Air Act. “One example: The EPA has stopped enforcing the Clean Air Act, Whitehouse said, negotiating only one settlement since the Trump administration took office, compared to 26 in the first year of Trump’s first term and 22 in Biden’s first year. Clean Air Act enforcement actions often involve the fossil fuel and motor vehicle industries that account for most air pollution. Superfund cleanup settlements, Whitehouse said, have also hit new lows.”
April 3, 2026	Bloomberg: “EPA Budget Would Be Cut in Half With Trump’s 2027 Proposal” “The White House wants to hack the EPA’s budget by 52% in fiscal 2027, according to President Donald Trump’s annual spending request released Friday. The funding plan would lower the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget to $4.2 billion, which would be its lowest level since the Reagan administration. Some of the biggest cuts are the continued full elimination of the EPA’s environmental justice program, which the White House said promotes ‘divisive racial discrimination’; the nixing of the Atmospheric Protection Program; and an end to ‘unrestrained research grants, woke environmental justice work, radical climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that influences regulations.’”
April 27, 2026	NYT: The EPA’s Office of Research and Development, which has for decades been in charge of studying adverse health effects of pollutants and how to regulate them under the Clean Air Act, is dismantled. Over 90 percent of the staff at ORD were laid off, the office was disbanded, and the remaining employees moved into a new office that reports directly to Trump political appointee Lee Zeldin. “They are among more than 1,500 biologists, chemists and other experts at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development who have been laid off, reassigned or pressured to retire. Today, only 124 researchers remain, and this month they must decide whether to remain employed they will abandon their work and move to different parts of the agency, or the country. Those who stay will no longer serve in an independent unit designed to be free from political interference. Instead, they will be overseen by Trump appointees or in a new unit directly under the administrator, Lee Zeldin. An internal memo in one office reviewed by The New York Times says its future research must “align with agency and administration priorities.””
July 23, 2026	E&E News: The Trump Administration stripped EPA lawyers of civil service protections, opening the door to culling legal staff. “EPA has stripped members of its powerful legal corps of civil service protections as part of President Donald Trump’s campaign to reshape the federal workforce. Records obtained by POLITICO shed light on how many employees at the agency have been moved into a new job category created by the Trump administration, making their positions essentially “at will.” In total, 98 staffers so far have been reclassified as Schedule Policy/Career and now can be more easily fired from their career posts.”
July 31, 2026	GAO: The EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation alone has shed hundreds of staff and declined to implement recommendations from the Office of the Inspector General about ensuring that staffing is adequate to oversee the agency’s grant programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: The FDIC is an independent agency that insures deposits in financial institutions up to $250,000. To prevent bank failures and ensure faith in the United States’ financial institutions, the agency enforces laws, rules, and regulations on “unsafe or unsound banking practices, breaches of fiduciary duty, and violations of final orders, conditions imposed in writing or written agreements.”

Who’s affected:

Anyone with money in an FDIC-insured bank
People at risk of being defrauded by banks and financial institutions

Who benefits:

Financial institutions and their executives

For more see:

Trump’s FDIC Hastens the Next Banking Crisis (1/28/25)
Week Seven: One Nation Under God, Indivisible (3/7/25)
Making Banking Supervision Suck Again (10/31/25)

Date	What happened
January 27, 2025	WaPo: FDIC rescinded 200 job offers for examiners due to the Trump administration hiring freeze, at a time when the agency is already short-staffed, making its role of monitoring banks for viability and compliance with the law even more challenging
February 14, 2025	Bloomberg Law: “Trump Gets Ready to Move Bank Regulators After Workforce Purge” to consolidate banking supervision within Treasury’s OCC. “The Trump administration appears to be preparing to transfer employees from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as part of a broad reshaping of bank supervision. The OCC has created email distribution lists for FDICTransferees@occ.treas.gov, CFPBTransferees@occ.treas.gov, and CFPBTeam@occ.treas.gov, according to Outlook templates obtained by Bloomberg Law from multiple sources at different agencies who were granted anonymity to prevent retaliation. The potential reshuffling comes as President Donald Trump and his team purge the FDIC and CFPB workforces—part of a broader campaign to slash the federal bureaucracy. The Trump administration is mulling whether to consolidate the bulk of bank supervision inside the OCC, The Wall Street Journal reported.”
February 14, 2026	Bloomberg Law: “FDIC Sheds 500 Employees in ‘Buyout’ Offer Before Restructuring” “Around 500 employees at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., or about 8% of its workforce, have accepted the Trump administration’s deferred resignation offer, as the banking regulator prepares for a broader overhaul. The FDIC “will be smaller” when the Trump administration finishes restructuring the agency, acting Chairman Travis Hill said at an all-hands staff meeting Friday, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. The Office of Personnel Management gave federal agencies until March 11 to present plans to cut their workforces, Hill said at the staff meeting, according to an FDIC spokesperson.”
February 17, 2025	Bloomberg: FDIC fired ~170 probationary workers, in addition to losing around 500 to deferred resignation “buyouts” the Trump–Musk administration has offered, representing about 10% of the agency’s staff
February 18, 2025	Truthout: Trump signed an executive order attempting to bring independent agencies under his control. The order states that “going forward, ‘the president and the attorney general, subject to the president’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.’ The order goes on to require that “all executive departments and agencies” — including those granted some independence from the presidency by Congress — ‘shall submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register.’” This effort to centralize review of regulations passed by independent agencies could lay the groundwork for reduced enforcement activity, as the agencies lose autonomy from the administration over how to pursue their regulatory agendas and the enforcement cases that follow from them.
March 3, 2025	RDP: “FDIC rescinded a Biden-era policy which scaled up scrutiny of large bank mergers.” “The prior policy subjected bank mergers leading to assets over $50 billion to public hearings and feedback, while also requiring deals that would have resulted in banks with assets over $100 billion to be intensely examined. The reversal eliminates the public’s role in a process that aimed to strengthen financial stability and protect consumers from documented harms, including reduced access to credit, increased costs of bank services and branch closures.” Public Citizen: “While personnel cuts at the FDIC will mean fewer people monitoring bank risk-taking, President Trump’s executive order on independent agencies aims to bring these agencies under closer White House control, limiting the ability of the FDIC and other financial regulators to act on the risks they do identify.”
April 21, 2025	Bloomberg: FDIC leadership notified staff it planned to cut a total of 1250 positions, of a total of 6200 at the start of the year. The email also said, “If not enough FDIC staff agree to leave voluntarily, the agency will conduct a formal reduction in force effort beginning May 13.”
May 7, 2025	Bloomberg: “Trump Has Cut Thousands of Wall Street Cops While Markets Wobble.” “Donald Trump’s administration is set to shrink the ranks at the top US financial regulators by more than 2,300 workers, a group that includes bank examiners, criminal investigators and economists.”
November 14, 2025	Bloomberg: FDIC Under Trump Shrinks Workforce by More Than 1,300 Positions “The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. previously intended to eliminate more than 1,200 positions, or around 18% of agency personnel, under the Trump administration’s plan to slash the federal workforce. The final number for 2025 will be slightly higher, according to the people who requested anonymity to discuss internal FDIC matters.”
December 17, 2025	Banking Dive: FDIC’s new budget has across the board cuts, including major staffing cuts. “The 2026 budget reflects declines from 2025 “in every major expense category,” Bob Nolan, deputy director in the FDIC’s finance division, said during Tuesday’s meeting. “Salaries and compensation savings of $325 million fully reflect 2025 workforce optimization efforts, as well as additional staffing reductions proposed for 2026,” Nolan said. Proposed FDIC authorized staffing, minus the Office of Inspector General, totals 5,386 positions. That’s 1,337 fewer than initially approved as part of the 2025 budget. About 1,009 of those are non-examiner roles cut with operational efficiency in mind, including 185 executive and managerial positions and 93 administrative support positions, he said. “Examiner staffing is reduced by 328 positions, resulting in 13% fewer risk management examiners and 21% fewer compliance management examiners,” Nolan said. “This reflects changes to the continuous examination process, extension of the compliance examination cycle for certain favorably rated banks, and continued industry consolidation.””
January 12, 2026	Bloomberg Law: “FDIC Tells Staff to Narrow Bank Examinations [scope]” “The memo also instructed FDIC examiners to either restructure or close out “matters requiring board attention” and supervisory recommendations—formal findings that banks are engaging in risky practices or potentially violating the law—to ensure they match the new focus on material financial risks. MRBAs and supervisory recommendations are meant to highlight risks lurking in a bank’s balance sheet, but the Trump administration’s bank regulators say the examination tools have become too focused on minor process fouls. Newly confirmed FDIC Chairman Travis Hill has questioned, for instance, how examiners missed core financial risks at Silicon Valley Bank before it collapsed. The FDIC’s memo is part of the administration’s broader push to overhaul banking rules, bringing the agency closer in step with the OCC and the Federal Reserve. But to some advocates calling for tougher banking rules, the push to ease up on bank exams is opening the door to another financial crisis.”
March 26, 2026	Bloomberg Law: “FDIC Losing Institutional Memory With Staff Drop, Watchdog Says” “Steep staff reductions at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. have left the regulator less equipped to supervise banks or respond quickly to failed lenders, the agency’s internal watchdog reported. The FDIC lost around 20% of its staff over the course of 2025 through voluntary buyouts, retirements, and other departures as part of the Trump administration’s push to shrink the federal workforce, bringing the total number of employees down to just over 5,000 as of Jan. 1, according to a Thursday report from the FDIC’s inspector general.”
April 1, 2026	Fedweek: “Report Lays Out Impact of Staff Loss at…FDIC” “With respect to consumer compliance supervision, as part of its workforce optimization, the FDIC reduced examination frequency for most institutions with assets between $350 million and $3 billion, with a concomitant reduction in compliance examiner staffing requirements,” it said. In addition, “The FDIC has further proposed reductions for 2026 due to changes the FDIC made to its Continuous Examination Program, which will involve fewer targeted reviews and fewer dedicated examiners at institutions with between $10 billion and $30 billion in assets.””

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, is an independent agency that regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil. FERC also reviews proposals to build liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals and interstate natural gas pipelines as well as licensing hydropower projects. […] As part of that responsibility, FERC: […] Enforces FERC regulatory requirements through imposition of civil penalties and other means.”

Who’s affected:

People and ecosystems affected by errors and disasters with pipelines and other parts of the energy supply chain

Who benefits:

Oil companies, pipeline operators, and other corporate actors routinely attempting to cut corners without consequences for poisoning communities and the planet

For more see:

FERC skimps on winter storm details as staffing cuts threaten future reporting (Utility Dive, 6/3/25)

Date	What happened
April 18, 2025	E&E News: “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will likely lose 9 percent of its employees as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce, Chair Mark Christie said Thursday.” “Fifty-five employees out of the agency’s 1,500 have opted for deferred resignations, Christie said. The administration has also offered early retirements and implemented a government-wide hiring freeze.”
July 7, 2025	E&E News: “FERC proceeds cautiously with Trump-ordered ‘sunset’ for energy rules.” “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is poised to start rulemaking to “sunset” certain regulations, according to a draft “notice of inquiry” obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News.”
September 5, 2025	Politico: “‘Brain drain’ at FERC hits legal and policy staff” “Former FERC Chair Mark Christie said in April that the agency was on track to lose 9 percent of its staff this year due to voluntary resignations. As of September, the figure is 11 percent, with 175 voluntary departures among the agency’s 1,500 employees.”
May 1, 2026	Energy Intelligence: “FERC continues narrowing the scope of environmental reviews” “The Republican-led Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has pivoted away from efforts to broaden the agency’s environmental reviews of gas pipelines and LNG projects, effectively speeding up the approval process even without legislative permitting reform.”
May 21, 2026	Pipeline and Gas Journal: FERC proposed changes to its blanket certificate programs that could accelerate natural gas pipeline development and reduce regulatory burdens. “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has proposed changes to its blanket certificate program that would allow interstate natural gas pipelines to undertake larger projects without requiring a case-specific authorization order, part of a broader effort to streamline infrastructure development and reduce regulatory burdens.”
June 22, 2026	E&E News: “FERC slashes cumulative NEPA environmental reviews” “Federal energy regulators announced Thursday that they plan to curtail cumulative environmental reviews of new energy projects, in response to a landmark Supreme Court ruling last year.”

Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: “The Federal Trade Commission enforces a variety of antitrust and consumer protection laws affecting virtually every area of commerce, with some exceptions concerning banks, insurance companies, non-profits, transportation and communications common carriers, air carriers, and some other entities. The agency leverages its resources and targets its enforcement efforts at practices that cause the greatest harm to consumers.”

Who’s affected:

Consumers forced to pay higher prices as corporations amass more monopolistic power across industries (e.g. people with diabetes subjected to price gouging, because there’s not enough staffing at FTC to hear a case against pharmacy benefit managers illegally raising the price of insulin)
Small businesses and entrepreneurs that are blocked from entering new markets, squeezed out of existing markets, or subjected to predatory pricing practices

Who benefits:

Large corporations that will see fewer challenges to their ability to concentrate market power and wealth, and their already-wealthy executives

For more see:

Corruption Calendar Week 10: Bad Signals All Around (3/18/25)
Release: Trump’s Attempt To Fire Democratic FTC Commissioners Makes Americans Easy Targets For Corporate Abuse (3/18/25)
The Federal Trade Commission keeps tabs on big business. Trump fired 2 of its members (NPR, 3/20/25)

Date	What happened
February 18, 2025	Truthout: Trump signed an executive order attempting to bring independent agencies (two of the most prominent of which are the FTC and SEC) under his control. The order states that “going forward, ‘the president and the attorney general, subject to the president’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.’ The order goes on to require that “all executive departments and agencies” — including those granted some independence from the presidency by Congress — ‘shall submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register.’” This effort to centralize review of regulations passed by independent agencies could reduce enforcement activity as the agencies lose autonomy over how to pursue their regulatory agendas and subsequent enforcement actions.
March 3, 2025	The Verge: “At least a dozen probationary staffers at the Federal Trade Commission were terminated last week, The Verge has learned. The terminations took place across the agency, according to two sources familiar with the matter, one of whom said that included both the Bureau of Consumer Protection and Bureau of Competition.”
March 12, 2025	CNN: “FTC asks to delay Amazon trial over staff shortages following Musk-led cuts” “The US Federal Trade Commission asked a federal court in Seattle on Wednesday to delay a September trial in its case alleging Amazon misled consumers over its Prime subscription service, citing “severe resource shortfalls in terms of both money and personnel.”Jonathan Cohen, an attorney for the FTC, told US District Judge John Chun during a hearing that the agency faces a “dire resource situation” amid cost cutting measures enacted under President Donald Trump’s administration. “We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on our case team,” Cohen said.”
March 18, 2025	NYT: Trump attempted to illegally fire the two Democratic members of the FTC. There is no legal basis for ending the seven-year terms of these Biden-appointed commissioners early, as independent agencies like the FTC are intended to be independent of executive branch whims between administrations.
May 15, 2025	Law360: “FTC Chair Says Staffing Cuts Needed After Hiring Spree” “Ferguson said when he took over as chair, the commission was paying employees with carryover funds from the previous budget, which he said is not sustainable or responsible. The FTC currently has 1,221 full-time employees, down from 1,315 at the start of the fiscal year in September. He said the goal is to bring the number down to 1,100, largely through attrition, voluntary retirement offers and the deferred resignation program, while trying to avoid layoffs. Ferguson’s written statement did acknowledge that a targeted “reduction in force” could potentially be employed.”
July 18, 2025	AP: “A federal judge has restored a Democrat to the Federal Trade Commission, ruling that President Donald Trump illegally fired her earlier this year in his efforts to exert control over independent agencies across the government” “The decision allows Rebecca Kelly Slaughter to resume her duties as commissioner. The FTC website had been updated by Friday morning to show that Slaughter is among four sitting commissioners.”
September 22, 2025	NYT: SCOTUS reversed the federal judge’s ruling and allowed Commissioner Slaughter to be fired. “In an emergency order, a divided court announced that it would allow President Trump, for now, to fire Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a F.T.C. commissioner, and that it would hear argument in the case in December, a signal that a majority of the court is ready to revisit a landmark precedent limiting presidential authority.”
January 14, 2026	Global Competition Review: Understaffing at FTC risks undermining antitrust enforcement. “The Federal Trade Commission lost nearly a quarter of its employees last year, reigniting concerns that downsizing could hamper antitrust work.”

Department of Health and Human Services

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: The Department of Health and Human Services consists of 13 sub-agencies, with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Indian Health Service (IHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS) being the five largest and best-known. These agencies enforce policies related to food and drug safety, among others.

Who’s affected by cuts:

Elderly, immunocompromised, and racially and economically marginalized people are at elevated risk from contagious diseases
All food consumers
People who access healthcare through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA)

Native American communities with IHS Programs
People with Alzheimer’s, HIV, and cancer who are reliant on ongoing research and innovation to improve treatments

Who benefits:

Big pharma
Big tobacco
Insurance companies

For more see:

DOGE Envisions A Future Without Critical Public Health Services (2/20/25)
Social thread on cuts (3/27/25)
CDC in Chaos: Director Fired, Top Leaders Resign in Protest (9/4/25)
From Industry Watchdog to Industry Wish List (9/22/25)

Date	What happened
January 24 2025	NYT: Trump wrongly fired the HHS Inspector General, along with IGs at 16 other agencies
February 6 2025	WaPo: The White House contested reports that leadership at HHS were directed to rank probationary employees in preparation for large layoffs.
February 13 2025	NPR: RFK Jr. was confirmed as Health Secretary, and previewed plans to systematically fire at least 600 employees at NIH and an unspecified number at FDA.
February 14 2025	Stat: 5200 firings—almost 6% of the Department’s workforce—are announced to HHS leadership, with directions that fired employees would lose access to work systems by the end of the day.
February 15 2025	Bloomberg: The Trump administration laid off “around 1000” more employees at CMMS, CDC and the FDA. “around 1,000 termination notices went out to employees at the NIH over the weekend […] Cuts were also made at HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, which funds child care and Head Start programs.”
March 7 2025	PBS: $25,000 buyout offer made to 80,000 HHS employees
March 27 2025	GovExec: HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy announced he would cut the department’s overall workforce by 20,000. HHS has already eliminated half that number, through a combination of layoffs, deferred resignations, and early retirements; the rest will reportedly be reached through another round of layoffs.
June 2, 2025	Healthcare Dive: “HHS releases more detailed 2026 budget disclosing scope of cuts”
October 10, 2025	Axios: “Trump officials say plan to layoff at least 4,100 federal workers has begun” “The latest: In the court filing responding to a union suit to stop the layoffs, senior OMB adviser Stephen Billy confirmed that RIF notices have either already gone out or would be going out to an estimated 1,100 to 1,200 employees in Health and Human Services, 1,446 in Treasury and 466 in Education.”
October 14, 2025	Reuters: “CDC set to lose quarter of staff with latest layoffs, union says” “Layoff notices sent over the weekend to U.S. CDC staff would see the agency lose almost a quarter of its workforce since President Donald Trump, took office this year, the union representing them said on Tuesday. The CDC notified some 1,300 employees they would be laid off on Friday night only to rescind around 700 on Saturday. The Department of Health and Human Services blamed a “coding error” for the notices it said went out mistakenly.”
April 1, 2026	Healthcare DIve: “One year after HHS layoffs, a department in disarray” “The layoffs and subsequent attrition have winnowed staffing levels to such an extent that sources in divisions particularly affected described feeling like they were working on a skeleton crew. And the work of the HHS is suffering as a result, they said. ”
April 17, 2026	The Guardian: “Inside the CDC’s leadership vacuum: work at a ‘standstill’ and low morale as 80% of top posts remain vacant” “Fourteen months after Robert F Kennedy Jr was sworn in as US health secretary, the country’s prime public health agency over which he presides is in a state of disarray. Eighty per cent of the top director positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stand vacant, with no permanent leader to drive policies affecting the health of millions of Americans. No one is in place to coordinate the agency’s day-to-day work fighting infectious disease, combatting heart conditions or screening for cancer.”
May 18, 2026	Federal News Network: “HHS sends RIF notices to dozens of staff it missed during office-wide layoffs last year” “The Department of Health and Human Services is sending out a second round of layoff notices to dozens of employees initially spared from staffing cuts that eliminated entire offices and programs last year. In an email obtained by Federal News Network, HHS said it will send reduction in force notices to 78 employees who avoided the widespread layoffs that began in April 2025.”
May 20, 2026	Politico: “RFK Jr. fires leaders of group that determines what insurers must cover” “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired the leaders of the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force, an influential group of external experts who decide which medical services are preventative and much be covered fully by insurers under the Affordable Care Act.”
May 23, 2026	Newsweek: “‘Decimated’ CDC Could Struggle in Face of Ebola Outbreak” “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been left ‘decimated’ by various policy changes over the last year, weakening its ability to respond to a growing Ebola outbreak, experts have told Newsweek. […] The administrative strain comes at a critical time. In February 2025, the Trump administration cut the CDC workforce by 10 percent, forcing the agency to operate at reduced staffing levels while key senior leadership positions remain vacant. Meanwhile, a recent Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has left over 100 dead with more than 550 suspected cases.”
June 4, 2026	Politico: “Some HHS employees just got easier to fire” “President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that will make it easier to fire many federal employees — including workers within the federal health department. […] Some employees within the Department of Health and Human Services — which has already been hit especially hard by downsizing efforts led by the Department of Government Efficiency in 2025 — have already been notified that the classifications would soon take effect.”
June 10, 2026	The Conversation: “How cuts to CDC are dismantling its capacity to protect Americans’ health” “We found a CDC workforce concerned by a declining ability to achieve the agency’s public health mission, a shrinking and overworked staff and wide-ranging effects that threaten Americans’ health.”
June 22, 2026	Federal News Network: In the face of major understaffing, the CDC is barely hiring anyone at all, bringing in only 29 new full-time staff compared to shedding 700 since the start of 2026. The shortfall is undermining the CDC’s ability to fight Ebola and screwworm outbreaks. “But so far this fiscal year, the CDC has hired just over two dozen new employees. Nine current CDC employees who spoke to Federal News Network, who all spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, said the agency is focused less on making full-time hires and more on moving staff into vacant positions through temporary reassignments. CDC has lost more than a quarter of its staff since fiscal 2024. Since late 2025, it’s been authorized by HHS to make about 900 new hires. Meanwhile, the agency is ramping up its response to several emerging public health issues — including outbreaks of Ebola and hantavirus overseas. It’s also partnered with the Agriculture Department to respond to an outbreak of the New World screwworm in the United States.”
August 28, 2026	Politico: HHS leads the administration in moving to replace career civil servants with political staff. “The surge in political appointments is a trend across Donald Trump’s second administration as the president consolidates power in the executive branch by assigning allies to positions that do not require Senate confirmation. Kennedy’s HHS now has more political appointees than any other department, including much larger ones such as Defense and Justice. It has hired 264 non-Senate confirmed political appointees as of June, up from 175 in the final year of the Biden administration and the highest since at least 1996, according to data from the White House’s personnel office and the Plum Book, a routinely published list of appointed administration jobs.”

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: HUD administers programs which provide housing and community development, and also enforces federal anti-discrimination laws to attempt to ensure fair housing practices.

Who’s affected:

Low-income people reliant on HUD support for housing
Communities in need of more housing
Transgender people experiencing unstable housing and seeking access to shelters
Communities of color and people with disabilities experiencing predatory and discriminatory renting and housing practices by landlords and companies

Who benefits:

Real estate developers, corporate landlords, and others seeking to profit from exorbitant rents and discriminatory housing practices

For more see:

President Trump Would Like You To Say Goodbye To Our Food Inspectors (2/12/25)
Updated list of all Trump’s actions that impact housing (Housing Wire, 6/4/25)

Date	What happened
February 10, 2025	NY Post: Secretary Scott Turner announced a halt to enforcement of HUD’s Equal Access Rule, a 2016 rule formally entitled “Equal Access in Accordance With an Individual’s Gender Identity in Community Planning and Development Programs,” which Turner’s HUD has taken to referring to as the “Gender Identity Rule.” An Obama-era rule designed to prevent discrimination of transgender people seeking access to single-sex housing shelters based on their gender identities. As Politico reported, the rule “directed HUD grantees to amend their policies to grant equal entry to individuals based on their self-identified gender identity without requiring documentation or asking intrusive questions.”
February 21, 2025	AP: Leaked documents indicate plans to slash 4000 positions, primarily targeted HUD employees “who support disaster recovery, rental subsidies, discrimination investigations and first-time homebuyers.” According to the head of the union representing HUD employees, as Bloomberg Law reported, cuts would also affect “employees in the offices that enforce civil rights laws, compile data about the housing market.”
February 27, 2025	AP: “President Donald Trump’s administration has begun terminating grants to organizations that enforce the Fair Housing Act by taking complaints, investigating and litigating housing discrimination cases for Americans across the country, according to documents and information obtained by The Associated Press on Friday.” More info from Time: “On Feb. 27, HUD and DOGE terminated 78 grants in 33 states totaling more than $30 million that provided congressionally-approved funding for fair housing organizations, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA). Rather than developing housing, these nonprofits work to combat housing discrimination, enforce fair housing laws, and educate people on their rights.”
March 21, 2025	National Mortgage Professional: HUD begins shuttering the office responsible for enforcement in the field, potentially eliminating on-the-ground oversight across as many as 34 states. “Meanwhile, HUD has begun closing its Office of Field Policy and Management, which includes teams overseeing fair housing, labor standards, and lead hazard control. Approximately 150 employees are facing reductions in force. Additional layoffs are expected in the coming weeks, potentially eliminating HUD’s local staffing in up to 34 states, which could hinder its ability to underwrite mortgages and manage key housing programs.”
June 6, 2025	Bloomberg: “US Housing Agency Vulnerable to Fraud After DOGE Cuts, Documents Warn” “The confidential report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of General Counsel warns that the loss of lawyers due to staff cuts and early resignations is “significantly increasing litigation risk and the risk of fraud, waste and abuse” across housing programs.”
September 22, 2025	NYT: “Trump Appointees Roll Back Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws” “The emails are among dozens of pages of internal communications, memos and other documents reviewed by The New York Times that show efforts by the Trump administration to limit enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, the landmark civil rights law that has prohibited discrimination in housing for nearly six decades.”
September 29, 2025	New York Times: “Two HUD Civil Rights Lawyers Dismissed After Raising Concerns About Fair Housing Act Enforcement” “Two government civil rights lawyers who spoke out about the Trump administration’s efforts to limit enforcement of the Fair Housing Act were removed from their posts on Monday morning. The lawyers, Palmer Heenan and Paul Osedebe, said they were escorted out of the Housing and Urban Development Department by administration staff.”
October 10, 2025	PoliticoPro: Key agencies at HUD have seen staff cuts of 35 percent or more, including the Office of the General Council, which enforces the Fair Housing Act, and the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which enforces a variety of fair housing laws and oversees complaints. “Since President Donald Trump took office, several key HUD offices received more drastic cuts — by about 45 percent of 2023 staffing levels. The Office of Field Policy and Management, which ensures that HUD’s policies and priorities are effectively communicated and implemented to local communities, now has 191 full-time staff members compared to 342 listed in the 2023 plans. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which enforces federal housing laws and handles housing discrimination complaints, has seen its staff shrink from 572 to 315 people. Additionally, the Office of General Counsel, which provides legal advice and services at HUD including enforcing the Fair Housing Act and representing HUD in litigation, was cut by 35 percent compared to 2023 staffing levels.”
October 14, 2025	The Sacremento Bee: “Trump fires federal workers in California as part of shutdown layoffs” “On Friday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development informed a federal employee union representing federal workers in California that it would layoff workers involved in programs ‘not in alignment with the President’s Management Agenda or the Administration’s priorities.’ According to a recent court filing, at least 442 HUD employees received layoff notices but it’s not clear where those employees were based. According to a federal employee database, over 500 HUD employees work in California.”
October 23, 2025	NOTUS: “Mass Layoffs at HUD’s Fair Housing Office Could Cause Enforcement to Grind to a Halt” “The already diminished Department of Housing and Urban Development office that enforces fair housing laws was slashed again in recent layoffs, and housing policy experts warn the cuts could make it next to impossible for the office to fulfill its mission of combating housing discrimination. […] The latest layoffs at HUD were concentrated at the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, where 170 people were issued reduction-in-force notices, at least 149 of them within regional offices.”
December 19, 2025	The Nation: “HUD Is Refusing to Enforce Anti-Discrimination Law – and Won’t Let Anyone Else Do It, Either” “The initial chaos of layoffs and resignations has been followed by a concerted effort by the Trump administration to halt the enforcement of the Fair Housing Act at HUD. According to dozens of emails and communications reviewed by the New York Times, Trump appointees have made it ‘nearly impossible’ for those normally tasked with this work to do their jobs. HUD whistleblowers say they’ve been subjected to a ‘gag order’ that prevents them from communicating directly with external parties, cutting then off from talking to victims of discrimination or the entities being accused without getting approval from a Trump appointee, approval that is ‘rarely granted.’”
February 13, 2026	Legal Defense Fund: “LDF Calls on HUD to Maintain Longstanding Civil Rights Enforcement Tool and Ensure Fair Access to Affordable Housing” “Today, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) submitted a public comment to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in response to the agency’s proposal to gut regulations that help ensure lenders, landlords, other housing providers and governmental entities don’t maintain unjustified discriminatory policies barring Black communities and other groups from accessing housing.”
April 16, 2026	NPR: “‘Dear America’: HUD workers say they’re being blocked from doing their jobs” “A small number of current and former employees of the Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a website Thursday to accuse the Trump administration of blocking enforcement of federal fair housing laws. They chose to remain anonymous out of concern they’d be fired for speaking out.”
May 5, 2026	ABA Banking Journal: “HUD official discusses changes to Fair Housing Act enforcement” “The Trump administration is committed to pursuing only cases of intentional discrimination in enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, which includes increased scrutiny of lenders that participate in special purpose credit programs, a top fair housing enforcement official said today at the American Bankers Association’s Risk and Compliance Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. Craig Trainor, assistant secretary of the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said that the previous administration took an expansive view of fair lending enforcement in pursuit of ‘dubious ideological adventures.’ His office will instead focus on ‘real harm suffered by real people,’ he said.”
July 23, 2026	Politico: Understaffing at HUD is undermining confidence in the department’s ability to implement the ROAD to Housing Act. “Some of the lawmakers who pushed for the law worry that the Department of Housing and Urban Development — which has shed more than 30 percent of its core policy workforce in just three years following budget cuts — is too understaffed to quickly issue new rules and implement its provisions, aimed at making building and buying homes cheaper and easier.”
September 9, 2026	Federal News Network: HUD posted and then removed a reorganization plan in the Federal Register that would indicated an intent for no more downsizing, but reconstituting the internal structure of the department in a way to overcome being 35 percent under historical staffing levels. “It’s not clear why the notice was withdrawn or whether HUD plans to pursue a reorganization in the future. Federal News Network’s emails seeking details from HUD on the draft reorganization plans and the reason for rescinding the notice were not immediately answered. According to the draft proposal, the large-scale reorganization is meant to streamline the department in response to markedly lower staffing levels. The reorganization would not relocate any employees or further reduce staffing, HUD wrote. The document described plans to merge some smaller departmental units and move some divisions under different chains of command.”

Department of the Treasury – Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: The IRS collects taxes and initiates investigations and audits into individuals and companies suspected of violating tax laws.

Who’s affected:

People dependent on government services that will be under-funded as a result of the budget shortfall that could come from cutting IRS capacity to collect taxes from the wealthy and corporations

Who benefits:

Wealthy people and corporations who will have an (even) easier time dodging taxes

For more see:

IRS Cuts and the Signal Chat Scandal: The Latest Indicators of the Trump Administration’s Recklessness (3/26/25)
Week 11: Incomprehensible AI Number-Crunching Slop Sets The Scene Of Trump’s Global Tariff Shakedown (4/4/25)
Option A: No More Tax Days for the 1 Percent (4/17/25)
What’s Going on at the IRS? (Lawfare Media, 5/13/25)

Date	What happened
January 21, 2025	Tax Policy: Trump singled the IRS out among agencies as being under an “indefinite” hiring freeze (not just 90 days)
February 20, 2025	Pro Publica: ~7000 probationary employees at the IRS received letters “telling them they were being fired for poor performance.” A judge later ordered them reinstated. After they were reinstated, the Treasury Department put them on paid administrative leave, rather than allow them back to work. (The judge who issued the order reinstating the workers contested this move, saying it did not meet the terms of his order). The workers targeted in these initial cuts came disproportionately from the IRS unit “that specifically audits billionaires,” and the Taxpayer Advocate Service.
March 2025	Bloomberg & ABC: ~4700 employees took the Trump administration’s first “deferred resignation program” buyout offer
March 13, 2025	NYT: The administration replaced the IRS’s top lawyer, Chief Counsel William Paul, as they attempted to use IRS taxpayer data to deport immigrants.
March 18, 2025	Wapo: the Trump administration plans to cut “nearly 20,000 agency employees, specifically targeting new hires in taxpayer services and enforcement divisions” by May 15, 2025. To date, cuts have resulted in the IRS dropping multiple ““investigations of high-value corporations and taxpayers.” The announced cuts also disproportionately target the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an “internal watchdog” unit that provides support to taxpayers navigating technical and financial issues or struggling to pay their taxes.
March 28, 2025	International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: DOGE-related layoffs at the Internal Revenue Service are disproportionately impacting the unit that specifically audits billionaires.”
April 15, 2025	Bloomberg:“[A]t the start of April, a notice went out to many of those workers [the ~7000 fired in February and later reinstated, but put on administrative leave]: Be prepared to return to ‘full duty’—if only temporarily—by April 14, it said. Just in time for Tax Day.”
April 15, 2025	NYT: “About 22,000 employees at the Internal Revenue Service have signed up for the Trump administration’s latest resignation offer, according to four people familiar with the matter, an exodus that could weaken the agency’s ability to collect taxes.” In combination with previous rounds of “deferred resignations” and layoffs, these cuts would mean the IRS losing about a third of its work force.
April 17, 2025	AP: IRS plans to end its new Direct File Program, allowing people to file their taxes for free online after “intense blowback to Direct File from private tax preparation companies that have made billions from charging people to use their software [who have] spent millions lobbying Congress.”
April 28, 2025	GovExec: IRS seeks to terminate its taxpayer experience and DEI staff, whose role is to ensure taxpayers have their civil rights respected and are protected from discrimination
August 21, 2025	GovExec: “IRS is canceling its layoff plans, will ask some it fired or pushed out to return”
September 3, 2025	CFO Brew: “‘Screaming into the void’: IRS staff cuts lead to fewer audits, more frustration” “The Yale Budget Lab, making the assumption that IRS layoffs will result in less compliance, estimates that staff losses like the ones seen this year will significantly increase the size of the “tax gap,” or the difference between what taxpayers owe and what the IRS actually collects. Layoffs of 22,000 IRS personnel, it posits, will add an additional $160 billion to the tax gap by 2026, which currently sits at $700 billion. (The IRS is set to lose around 26,000 staffers this year.)”
September 4, 2025	Federal News Network: “House lawmakers advance steeper IRS cuts than what Trump proposed.” “The House Appropriations Committee voted 35-28 to advance the financial services and general government funding bill for fiscal 2026. The bill, which is now headed for a full House vote, would give the IRS a $9.5 billion budget next year, a 23% cut from current spending levels.The Trump administration in June proposed giving the IRS $9.8 billion in FY 2026 — about a 20% cut from current spending levels. In addition, House lawmakers rejected the Trump administration’s request for more than $850 million to help the IRS hire an additional 11,000 call center representatives and roll out new automation tools to assist taxpayers.”
October 14, 2025	Federal News Network: “IRS layoffs that were ‘off the table’ this summer now deepen short-staffing concerns” “The IRS, midway through preparations for next year’s filing season, is once again facing staffing cuts, now that the Trump administration has sent layoff notices across the federal workforce. The Trump administration, in court filings posted last Friday, said it laid off approximately 1,446 employees at the Treasury Department — as part of a broader reduction-in-force that targeted about 4,200 federal workers.”
December 1, 2025	Yahoo! Finance: “After Eliminating 25% Of Its Staff, The IRS Is Turning To AI Agents. ‘It Would Be Negligence’ Not To Use AI Tools” “The IRS laid off or lost a quarter of its workforce between January and May, dropping from 103,000 to around 77,000 employees, according to the October Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report. Now, it’s turning to artificial intelligence to help fill the gaps.”
April 6, 2026	Nextgov: “The IRS wants to shrink its workforce by nearly 4,000 — and use technology to make up the difference” “The IRS has pushed out more than 28,000 employees since Trump’s inauguration. Now, it wants to lose another net 4,000 staff, according to new IRS budget documents. The tax agency is banking on technology improvements to help it sustain performance at its lower headcount, it says in its fiscal year 2027 budget justification.”
April 22, 2026	Federal News Network: IRS head calls for deeper cuts to budget and staff at the agency. “Top Treasury officials are telling Congress that the IRS pulled off a remarkable feat — carrying out a busier-than-usual filing season with a much smaller workforce. But the Trump administration is still pursuing further workforce and budget cuts for the IRS next year. Officials overseeing the IRS say the agency’s long-anticipated investments in technology are paying off, and its adoption of artificial intelligence and automation tools means the agency can do more with less. So far, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee are on board with additional cuts to the IRS budget. Congress is still in the early stages of drafting a spending plan for next year. The Treasury Department’s budget request for fiscal 2027 calls for a $1.4 billion budget from the current IRS budget and eliminating nearly 2,000 positions from its total headcount. IRS enforcement would bear the brunt of these spending and job cuts.”
May 19, 2026	Federal News Network: “Amid staffing cuts, IRS sees overtime hours spike and digitization efforts ‘fall short’” “The IRS is seeing an uptick in overtime hours, after shedding more than a quarter of its workforce last year. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reports that regular work hours at the IRS decreased by 14% between 2024 and 2025. Last year, the IRS shed more than a quarter of its workforce largely through deferred resignation and early retirement offers. During this same period, the agency saw a 12% increase in overtime hours. According to the TIGTA report, the IRS spent $27 million more on overtime in 2025 than in 2024. Because of deep staffing cuts, the IRS is requiring employees in certain divisions to work mandatory weekend overtime hours to address backlogs.”
June 15, 2026	Fedscoop: “IRS IT department has shrunk 42% under Trump” “More than 2 in 5 IRS IT employees have either been separated from the agency or involuntarily reassigned to other positions during the second Trump administration, according to a watchdog report released last week. In its third workforce snapshot since President Donald Trump began his second term, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that the IRS lost 30% of its workforce (31,273 staffers) from January 2025 through January 2026, though it also added 2,000-some positions for a net decrease of 28%. Those departures were a mix of voluntary separations, deferred resignations or other incentive-induced exits. Among the tax agency’s IT staff, 42% are gone, including 29% (2,497 individuals) who departed via separation or workforce reduction efforts. The remaining 13% (1,143 employees) were reassigned to the chief operating officer’s staff, per the report.”
June 16, 2026	Fedweek: “IRS Workforce Cuts Reached 30 Percent Before Backfilling Began, Says IG” “Cuts to the IRS workforce in the 12 months staring last January reached 30 percent before the agency started backfilling positions, bringing the total cut to 28 percent, an inspector general report has said. The report mirrored earlier assessments in finding that the cuts have fallen especially hard on certain key job series, including the loss of 33 percent of revenue agents, 32 percent of tax examiners, 31 percent of management and program analysts and 30 percent of clerks and assistants. Total separations, mostly through deferred resignation offers and buyouts—two separate planned RIFs were canceled after being blocked by court orders—were about 31,300, while about 2,000 positions have been backfilled, bringing the total staff to about 74,000. Separately, some 2,900 of the 7,300 probationary employees who initially received termination notices early last year either have returned to work or are in the process of being rehired.”
September 1, 2026	CBS News: “IRS audit revenue plunged following workforce reductions, Treasury watchdog finds” “Revenue from IRS audits plunged 35% in fiscal 2025 as the agency shed thousands of enforcement workers, according to a new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, an agency watchdog. The IRS collected a total of $6.5 billion from audits in fiscal 2025, which ended Sept. 30, down from $10 billion a year earlier, TIGTA said in its Aug. 26 report. The group said that the number of IRS employees working in auditing and collections had dropped to 17,517 as of January 2026, a decline of almost 10,000 workers from fiscal 2024. The report added that the impact of the staff reductions may “become more apparent over time.”” More: September 2, 2026 NPR: “The IRS slashed its staff. One result? More taxes going uncollected” “The IRS slashed its auditing staff last year in what was billed as a cost-cutting move, but if the effort was designed to improve the government’s bottom line, it has backfired. A new report from the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration shows that revenue from audits plunged 35% in fiscal year 2025, meaning billions of dollars in taxes went un-collected. The drop coincides with a 27% cut in enforcement and collection staffing at the IRS, as part of Elon Musk’s campaign to boost government efficiency.”

Broader Treasury Department:

Last updated: 12/15/2025

Role: “The Department of the Treasury manages federal finances by collecting taxes and paying bills and by managing currency, government accounts and public debt. The Department of the Treasury also enforces finance and tax laws.”

March 25, 2025

Bloomberg: according to court documents in a related case, Treasury is planning to lay off a “substantial” number of employees to align with Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal government

April 9, 2025

FedNews: “Treasury plans to cut up to 50% of IRS enforcement staff, 20% of other components”
“At Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, employees have just received an incentive offer for anyone who volunteers for early separation or early retirement. Employees who apply for the incentive and who are then accepted will receive five months of payment as a lump sum, OCC leadership said Wednesday in an all-staff email.”

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: The NHTSA is responsible for setting and enforcing vehicle safety standards, with the goal of reducing traffic injuries and fatalities on US roads.

Who’s affected:

Pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and anyone else sharing roads with Teslas, Waymos and other cars, particularly those with self-driving features, which have already killed over 50 people, by one count, and injured many more.

Who benefits:

Vehicle manufacturers (particularly those who have faced frequent NHTSA investigations or face scrutiny for their automated features, like Elon Musk)

For more see:

President Trump Would Like You To Say Goodbye To Our Food Inspectors (2/12/25)

Date	What happened
February 21, 2025	Washington Post: “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is losing about 10 percent of its workforce through firings and buyout offers, according to people briefed on the cuts.” “A small government team regulating the sort of autonomous cars that Elon Musk says represent the future of Tesla, his car company, is getting cut nearly in half by the Musk-led U.S. Doge Service, according to people briefed on the reductions. The loss of personnel from the specialized unit is part of a 10 percent overall workforce reduction at the federal agency tasked with ensuring safety on America’s roads. In all, the agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will lose between 70 and 80 people, split roughly evenly between firings of probationary employees and buyouts, according to three people, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.”
February 24, 2025	Detroit Free Press: NHTSA sees a 4% cut to staffing (from a baseline of approximately 800 employees). Of the employees laid off, many of them worked specifically on automated vehicle safety, meaning they were specifically the team overseeing Tesla.
April 9, 2025	Financial Times: “Musk’s Doge fired self-drive car safety experts at agency that regulates Tesla” “Job cuts at the US traffic safety regulator instigated by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency disproportionately hit staff assessing self-driving risks, hampering oversight of technology on which the world’s richest man has staked the future of Tesla. Of roughly 30 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration workers dismissed in February as part of Musk’s campaign to shrink the federal workforce, many were in the “office of vehicle automation safety”, people familiar with the situation told the Financial Times.”
April 24, 2025	FT: NHTSA announces it will gut existing automated vehicle safety rules, making it easier for vehicle manufacturers to put their experimental cars on the road. This was a longtime demand of Elon Musk and Tesla.
July 17, 2025	Reuters: “The U.S. auto safety agency is shedding more than 25% of its employees under financial incentive programs to depart the government offered by the Trump administration, according to data provided to Congress seen by Reuters. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Transportation Department, is shrinking from 772 employees as of May 31 to 555 under the program. The Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration are also both losing more than 25% of their staff.”

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Role: The SEC’s mission is “to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” Specifically, the SEC is responsible for bringing enforcement actions against corporations that violate laws governing how different types of securities are bought and sold—more recently including cryptocurrencies.

Who’s affected:

Individual investors who receive no restitution as a result of dropped enforcement cases

Who benefits:

Crypto companies no longer subject to tough oversight (including the new cryptocurrency Trump’s family members launched)

For more see:

We Can’t Count on Trump’s SEC to Tell Us If He Is Manipulating the Market (TAP, 5/9/25)
US SEC buyouts hit legal, investment divisions hardest, data shows (Reuters, 5/16/25)

Date	What happened
January 21, 2025	NYT: SEC Chairman Mark Uyeda signaled a shift away from enforcement actions targeting crypto companies when he announced a “Crypto Task Force” intended to create a regulatory framework for the industry, criticizing the previous administration’s “reli[ance] primarily on enforcement actions” to address crypto firms breaking the law. NYT: “The task force is a rebuff to what the crypto industry saw as the heavy-handed approach taken by Gary Gensler, the previous S.E.C. chair.”
February 4, 2025	NYT: SEC scaled back a crypto enforcement unit that had consisted of 50 lawyers and staff, moving some lawyers to other departments within SEC, and moving one of the unit’s “top lawyers” out of the enforcement division entirely.
February 10, 2025	SEC removed a requirement for investors to report certain personally identifiable information to the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) system. Democratic SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw: This move will impair “regulators’ ability to understand suspicious activity, unwind events, or stave off market disruptions. […] It leaves unanswered the most basic questions. For example, will it be more difficult for regulators to spot fraud? How much harder will it be to identify certain types of market manipulation? Will it be more difficult to identify and address concerns relating to certain foreign ownership? Will it be more difficult to identify and compensate the victims of swindlers? In times of market disruption and ongoing fraud or manipulation, loss of time means loss of money and loss in market confidence. There is no question that this decision is a loss for markets and investor protection.”
February 10, 2025	NYT: Trump issued an executive order to pause implementation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—a law banning companies from bribing foreign officials—which the DOJ and SEC are jointly responsible for enforcing
February 11, 2025	NYT: SEC Chairman Uyeda directed the SEC’s legal team to pause enforcement of “a rule that would require thousands of publicly traded companies to provide investors with detailed information about the impact of their businesses on climate and the environment.”
February 19, 2025	Common Dreams: Trump signed an executive order attempting to bring independent agencies (two of the most prominent of which are the FTC and SEC) under his control. The order states that “going forward, ‘the president and the attorney general, subject to the president’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.’ The order goes on to require that “all executive departments and agencies” — including those granted some independence from the presidency by Congress — ‘shall submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register.’” This effort to centralize review of regulations passed by independent agencies could lay the groundwork for reduced enforcement activity, as the agencies lose autonomy from the administration over how to pursue their regulatory agendas and the enforcement cases that follow from them.
February 20, 2025	Patterson Belknap: “The SEC announced that it would replace the Enforcement Division’s Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit with a Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit (CETU). As reflected in its name, CETU will move away from crypto enforcement actions and instead focus on fraud facilitated by emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence.”
March 10, 2025	Patterson Belknap: SEC issued a rule “revoking the authority of the Director of the Division of Enforcement to issue formal orders of investigation”—a step that is necessary for SEC to be able to issue subpoenas, in order to investigate corporate wrongdoing and bring enforcement actions.
May 19, 2025	SEC Chairman Atkins addressed the ~15% staff reduction at SEC. Reuters reporting indicates that the Offices of Chief Counsel and Enforcement were among the hardest hit. The Corporate Counsel: “Chairman Atkins said that headcount had decreased by 15% since the current fiscal year began last October. He also said that at its height last year, the SEC had a total of 5,000 employees and 2,000 contractors, and that today it is down to approximately 4,200 employees and 1,700 contractors. Chairman Atkins didn’t specify the extent to which particular offices and divisions were impacted by staff departures, but a couple of Reuters reporters did a little digging via FOIA and came up with their own numbers. According to their reporting, the Office of the Chief Counsel took the biggest hit, with nearly one in five staffers (19.5%) departing! Investment Management (16.7%), Trading and Markets (14.7%), and Enforcement (13.0%) were also hit hard. Corp Fin did relatively better, with only 8.7% of its staff opting to head for the exit.”
March 24, 2025	Investment News: “SEC workforce to get decimated as hundreds take buyout offers” “The Securities and Exchange Commission is bracing for a sharp reduction in personnel as hundreds of employees have accepted voluntary buyouts and resignation offers amid a wider federal workforce restructuring driven by the Trump administration. Between 500 and 700 staffers are expected to leave the agency, according to people familiar with the matter, with many set to depart its enforcement, examination, and legal divisions. The departures follow the rollout of $50,000 buyout packages and other incentives to encourage voluntary separation from federal service. The final deadline to accept the offers is on Friday.”
May 6, 2025	Reuters: “US SEC’s new chief says 15% of staff have left, contract cuts to come, sources say” “The new head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission told staff on Tuesday the agency has lost 15% of its headcount across offices and divisions and he expects to conduct a “targeted” reorganization, according to sources familiar with the matter. Paul Atkins, who was sworn in two weeks ago, said the agency would begin reviewing the SEC’s contracts for business services on Wednesday, especially in information technology, four of the sources said.”
May 16, 2025	Reuters: “US SEC buyouts hit legal, investment divisions hardest, data shows” “Wall Street’s top regulator saw the biggest drop in staff numbers at divisions handling legal affairs, investment management and trading and markets following buyout programs offered by the Trump administration, data showed on Thursday. The data, obtained by Reuters through a public records request, show those divisions at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lost 15% to 19% of their full-time headcount over the course of several weeks, representing a significant workforce drawdown.”
June 6, 2025	Law360: “SEC Seeks To Cut Enforcement Staff To 2010 Levels” “The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could see its lowest level of enforcement attorneys since the first Obama administration if Congress approves the agency’s requested budget, with the proposal indicating that even more workers could leave the SEC in the next fiscal year.”
September 29, 2025	Quartz: “The SEC will fast-track Trump’s push to scrap rules on quarterly earnings reports.” “Wall Street’s top watchdog will fast-track President Donald Trump’s plan to scrap quarterly company reporting as part of a deregulation drive on businesses, its chief has said.”
March 27, 2026	Bloomberg: “SEC Division Overseeing Private Credit Firms Lost 24% of Staff” “Nearly a quarter of the staff in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s division overseeing hedge funds, private credit firms, mutual funds and many investment products, left the agency last year, according to a new report. The SEC’s Division of Investment Management lost 24% of its staff during fiscal year 2025, with the division identifying “lost expertise on rulemaking,” the US Government Accountability Office said in a report released Friday.”
March 30, 2026	Fedweek: “GAO Told of Lost Expertise, Lowered Performance Goals from SEC Staff Cuts” “The GAO has issued the latest of what has become a series of warnings about the impact of agency downsizing last year, in this case focusing on loss of expertise at the SEC as it lost nearly 900 employees, 18 percent of its staff. While the agency did not conduct any RIFs—more than two-thirds of those who departed took deferred resignation offers and the rest left for early retirement or other reasons—more than half of the employees GAO spoke with “said that departing employees had either unique knowledge or specific subject matter expertise, resulting in a loss of institutional knowledge.””

US Department of Agriculture (USDA)

Last updated: 9/16/2026

Enforcement Role: The USDA is responsible for enforcing laws related to food safety, GMOs, animal welfare, and use of public lands for food production.

Who’s affected:

Anyone consuming food produced and circulated in the country
Workers at meatpacking and other food processing facilities that will be subject to less oversight and fewer enforcement actions when they allow workers to be injured and hurt on the job, and allow contagious diseases like bird flu to be spread

Who benefits:

Big Ag and corporate food systems actors who will be subject to less oversight and consequences for cutting corners and making food less safe to consume

For more see:

President Trump Would Like You To Say Goodbye To Our Food Inspectors (2/12/25)
Tracking Food and Drug Safety During the Trump Administration (5/5/25)

Date	What happened
February 12, 2025	GovExec: USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) reportedly interrupted its normal hiring processes in response to Trump administration’s hiring freeze
February 13-14, 2025	NPR: Firings of almost 6000 probationary employees
March 5, 2025	NPR: Court order demands fired workers be reinstated with 45-day stay
March 12, 2025	US News: USDA eliminated two advisory committees—the National Advisory Committees on Microbiological Criteria for Foods and on Meat and Poultry Inspection— that were dedicated to food safety, undercutting efforts to enforce food safety regulations
March 19, 2025	USDA website status update saying they are working to comply with the court order
March 21, 2025	RDP: “USDA Announced It Will Allow Meat Processing Facilities To Accelerate Their Line Speeds. Brooke Rollins’ USDA announced a new policy that allows the department to issue waivers to meat processing plants who want to increase the speed at which they process meat and poultry. […] Apart from leading to severe health side effects for meat packing workers, speeding up line work could also spread diseases, such as bird flu.”.
April 1, 2025	USA Today: USDA offers buyout offers to employees (Deferred Resignation Program) – can opt in by April 8
April 10, 2025	E&E News: ~12,000 USDA employees have accepted resignation offers. ~1,200 of these workers were at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
April 23, 2025	Government Executive: “USDA’s National Animal Health Laboratory Network office, which manages a network of labs throughout the county that provide disease surveillance and can quickly meet diagnostic needs during outbreaks, has lost half of its staff responsible for quality assurance and proficiency testing nationwide.”
May 3, 2025	NPR: USDA begins hiring for 73 open positions including “scientists, budget analysts, technicians, inspectors and a veterinarian to carry out its mission to protect the health, welfare and value of America’s plants, animals and natural resources,” despite also paying for the public servants who had previously occupied those positions to stay home via the deferred resignation program.
May 14, 2025	Reuters: 98 of 167 food safety scientists have resigned from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, which “detect[s] pathogens, prevent[s] foodborne illness, and identif[ies] chemical and other contaminants in food.”
June 2, 2025	Politico: “USDA faces billions in cuts…The Trump administration is looking to cut nearly $7 billion from agriculture funding for fiscal 2026.”
July 24, 2025	Guardian: “Outcry as US agriculture department to cut salaries and relocate staff. Experts warn ‘half-baked’ restructuring will further erode support for US farmers and hamper wildfire response”
September 25, 2025	IPM News: “USDA’s DEI Purge: How Trump and Rollins are reshaping American agriculture”
December 12, 2025	GovExec: “USDA received overwhelmingly negative feedback on its reorg plan from employees, lawmakers and locals governments” “The department solicited comments and those who wrote in said a potential exodus of staff and loss of local interaction would prove harmful to farmers.”
January 4, 2026	Farmers’ Advance: “USDA begins 2026 down 20% in staff with plans to cut more”
January 21, 2026	Civil Eats: “Updated Federal Data Shows States With Little to No USDA Staff” “Recently updated federal data shows the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has 21 percent fewer employees since the start of the Trump administration, leaving some state offices entirely unstaffed. […] The updated data, which reflects staffing levels as of the end of November 2025, includes 37 instances where a state-level USDA agency no longer has even a single employee present. This includes six states that no longer have employees at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and five states that no longer have a local Food and Nutrition Service staffer, according to an analysis of the data.”
February 16, 2026	Food Navigator: “Trump purge at FDA and USDA triggers food safety ‘brain drain’” “Government data shows deep staff cuts as food safety leaders warn of fewer inspectors, loss of institutional knowledge and delays in lab and outbreak work”
March 30, 2026	Senate Agricultural Committee: “Klobuchar, Shaheen, Colleagues Raise Concerns to USDA on Data Quality” “This erosion of trust in USDA data comes after a loss of over 30 percent of National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS) employees and nearly 25 percent of Farm Service Agency (FSA) employees, the agencies responsible for estimating and collecting data of crop acres planted and harvested, in the first half of 2025 alone.”
April 3, 2026	E&E News: “Trump asks Congress to cut one-fifth of USDA’s funding” “President Donald Trump proposed a 19 percent funding cut for the Agriculture Department on Friday and included a call for Congress to slash some bipartisan programs the administration deemed ‘woke radical left projects.’ The White House’s fiscal 2027 budget request proposes that Congress give USDA $20.8 billion in discretionary budget authority for the upcoming fiscal year, a $4.9 billion cut from the previous year’s enacted level.”
April 17, 2026	Government Executive: “USDA is moving forward with various reorgs despite legal questions and bipartisan concerns” “The Agriculture Department told lawmakers on Thursday it is moving forward with various restructurings despite some bipartisan skepticism over the legality and wisdom of those moves. The overall USDA reorganization will help streamline a ‘runaway bureaucracy,’ Secretary Brooke Rollins said in her prepared testimony before the House Appropriations Committee. The department is already selling buildings and relocating the headquarters of some of its components, she and other officials said Thursday, despite Congress placing roadblocks on various aspects of those changes.”
May 7, 2026	Federal News Network: “Three-quarters of USDA researchers tapped to relocate tell union they’re not going” “The American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403, which represents USDA researchers, expects to see similar results this year. An internal survey conducted by the union found that 76% of its members have indicated they are not planning to relocate. AFGE Local 3403 said in a statement that these relocations, which are expected to go into effect by the end of the summer, will trigger a “brain drain” within the department.”
May 13, 2026	Investigate Midwest: “After USDA cuts, complaints over food safety spike” “The number of complaints filed about the safety of meat, poultry and egg products jumped nearly 40% last year, from 1,443 to 2,016, according to a new federal report. The report comes a year after the Trump administration approved some of the most sweeping staffing cuts to the U.S. Department of Agriculture in recent memory. Between January and June of last year, USDA reduced its workforce by 18%. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the agency responsible for placing inspectors in slaughterhouses and processing plants, lost about 9% of its staff.”
May 28, 2026	Federal News Network: “USDA relocation of food assistance employees will lead to major staffing losses, union warns” “But the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 226, which represents FNS employees, says more than 80% of staff who took an internal survey claim they will not relocate to keep their jobs. Another union survey of other USDA employees tapped to relocate found similar results. About a third of all current FNS employees took the survey. The Food and Nutrition Service has a workforce of about 1,200 employees.”
June 11, 2026	Reuters: Efforts to combat the reemergence of screwworms are dealing with having lost 25 percent of its animal health experts. “The USDA has been working since early last year with animal health companies, state livestock officials, farm groups and other federal agencies to prepare for the potential incursion of screwworm into the U.S., according to agency statements and Reuters interviews. Yet the agency is operating with 25% fewer animal health experts than it had at the start of Trump’s second term, after hundreds took a financial incentive program offered as part of the administration’s earlier effort to shrink the size of the federal workforce.”
June 11, 2026	National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition: “The past sixteen months have seen an unprecedented staffing crisis unfurl across the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)” “Analysis of federal personnel data from the US Office of Personnel Management confirms widespread headcount reductions across all USDA agencies, with the exception of staffing increases in the immediate office of the Agriculture Secretary, which grew by 18% in 2025. NSAC urges Congress to use every available tool to address the USDA staffing crisis and pass a bipartisan farm bill that restores the department’s capacity to serve farmers and rural communities.” More on staff cuts from NSAC: June 12, 2026: “NRCS lost 23% of its staff between January 2025 and January 2026. NRCS staff work directly with farmers and landowners to identify conservation practices that are well-suited to their needs and local natural resource concerns. They provide vital technical assistance for farmers and landowners and help them apply for and manage contracts with conservation programs that help share the cost of conservation practices.” June 16, 2026: “USDA reduced the number of front-line staff at the US Farm Service Agency (FSA) by 8% in 2025, according to data recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Over one-third of FSA local offices lost FSA County employees by year’s end, with 42 offices ending 2025 with no FSA County staff. Cuts to FSA County staff were USDA’s largest termination of community presence in over a decade. These findings build on federal data released in March 2026 showing widespread loss of FSA Federal personnel in 2025.”
June 12, 2026	Farm Progress: Sec. Rollins has insisted staff cuts have nothing to with the recent screwworm outbreak, despite shedding over 1000 animal and food inspectors, leaving some counties with zero. “Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins traveled to the first screwworm detection site in Zavala County to reassure ranchers that USDA is working to eradicate the pests. The secretary and USDA have come under fire for DOGE-era staffing cuts that critics say have hampered U.S. response efforts. DOGE is the Department of Government Efficiency. According to data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, USDA’s Animal Health Inspection Service and Food Safety and Inspection Service lost more than 1,000 employees between the end of 2024 and the end of 2025. That’s about 10% of those agencies’ frontline positions. Those cuts were even more pronounced in Texas, which saw its number of frontline APHIS employees cut in half. Out of the 254 counties in Texas, 88 lost APHIS staff in 2025. Fifty-five Texas counties lost all of their APHIS frontline staff. Still, Rollins contends DOGE cuts had “zero to do with it.” During remarks to the media June 11, she said there were only 10 full-time USDA staff focused on NWS in January 2025. Today, she said, USDA has more than 120 full-time staff focused on NWS.”
June 17, 2026	Biodefense Network: Bipartisan legislation is introduced to reverse cuts at USDA offices that play important roles in food safety and biosecurity. “The bill targets three USDA agencies that form the backbone of rural agricultural support: the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the Farm Service Agency (FSA), and Rural Development. While APHIS leads USDA’s biosecurity mission, NRCS, FSA, and Rural Development each play important enabling roles. NRCS creates the physical and environmental conditions — proper waste management, wildlife-livestock separation, and clean water access — that reduce disease exposure on farms in the first place. FSA provides the financial safety nets, through emergency loans, disaster payments, and indemnity programs, that allow producers to cooperate with containment and response measures without facing economic ruin. Rural Development builds the underlying infrastructure — water systems, rural healthcare facilities, and broadband connectivity — that makes agricultural communities resilient enough to respond effectively when disease threats emerge. Together, the three agencies form a supporting architecture that meaningfully reinforces the nation’s overall agricultural biosecurity posture.”
June 22, 2026	Nebraska Examiner: The USDA’s FY 2027 budget request would cause a further reduction in staff of 3000, that would leave entire states with single digit local support staff. “NRCS offices across the country, including the one in New Orleans, were impacted by the Trump administration’s sweeping federal cuts. The service lost more than 2,500 employees in the first six months of last year, according to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of the Inspector General. More cuts could be coming. The USDA’s next fiscal budget takes away about $700 million from NRCS technical assistance which pays for staff. That means cutting another 3,000 employees. In Louisiana, that would mean going from 37 full-time employees to just five for the entire state.”
July 2, 2026	Federal News Network: “USDA expects ‘significant number’ of staff facing relocation to leave their jobs” “The Agriculture Department is counting on a ‘significant number’ of employees not to relocate to keep their jobs, according to internal documents, deepening staffing cuts across its operations. USDA is asking thousands of its employees to relocate across the country as part of sweeping reorganization plans it began unveiling last year.”
July 2, 2026	Reuters: Unions representing USDA employees file suit to block agency reorganization. “The unions and other plaintiffs in Wednesday’s filing said the agency is forcing workers to choose between moving to far-flung areas ⁠or losing their jobs, a move that will likely cause dramatic attrition, impair vital services and interrupt important research. Some workers could be relocated as soon as next month, according to the filing.”
July 22, 2026	NOTUS: “USDA Workers Don’t Plan to Stay on the Job as Offices Relocate” “Workers at the Department of Agriculture are trying to stop mandatory relocations, which they warned are mass layoffs in disguise. Employees throughout the department told NOTUS their colleagues overwhelmingly did not plan to move to new offices across the country. This month, employee unions and nonprofit organizations asked a federal judge to halt the USDA’s plans. Their warnings: A reduction in force at this scale will delay policy changes, damage research, slow getting federal dollars out the door and hamper wildfire response.”
August 7, 2026	Triple Pundit: The overwhelming majority of cuts have been outside the D.C. area and left farmers with little support amid worsening climate distress and a resurgent parasite outbreak. “Despite the supposed focus on shifting the agency from Beltway-centered to be more closely connected with rural communities, almost all (98 percent) of the USDA staff lost since last year were based outside of Washington, D.C., according to a National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition analysis. As the agency lost 1 in 5 staff, farmers are facing a financial strain at levels not seen in decades. Farm debt is at an all-time high, and 70 percent of farmers said they couldn’t afford the fertilizer they needed this spring. That’s all while a Super El Niño weather event threatens a return to the Depression-era “dust bowl” conditions of the 1930s, while a parasite eradicated 60 years ago has reemerged on U.S. livestock farms.”
August 11, 2026	Bloomberg: “USDA Says Argentine Beef That Missed Inspection Is Recalled” “Nearly 30,000 pounds of Argentine beef that wasn’t fully inspected before being distributed in Texas and Florida are being recalled, the US Department of Agriculture said. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced that Florida-based Corte Argentino LLC was recalling several cuts of beef that missed a “reinspection” step when they entered the US. No illness or injuries have been linked to the imports, but the USDA is concerned that some of the cuts may already be in fridges or freezers, and urged consumers to throw them out.”
August 18, 2026	Gov Exec: Internal documents in court filings show USDA’s relocation plan is intended to continue reducing the department’s staff levels. “Internal documents shared with the court show that USDA requested an extension of its Voluntary Early Retirement Authority in February 2026 as part of its reorganization plans and to “support USDA’s efforts to Downsize the Federal Workforce.” More than 28,000 employees have separated from the Agriculture Department, largely through voluntary separation incentives, since the start of the second Trump administration. Factoring in hiring, the department has seen a net decrease of nearly 16,000 employees. Agriculture officials told OPM it expected another 5,000 employees to accept its extended VERA offer. If the department fell short of that goal, USDA wrote that it would try to shrink its workforce through relocations, reassignments and downgrades – but not through RIFs.”
August 24, 2026	New York Times: “Farmers Struggle to Get Basic Services From Depleted Agriculture Dept.” “The ripple effects of the Agriculture Department’s depleted work force illustrate how the Trump administration’s mission of shrinking the federal bureaucracy has undercut a competing priority: delivering for farmers, a core political constituency. Strained government resources also risk posing additional challenges for a farm economy that administration officials have described as “dire,” increasing barriers to entry for new farmers who need more assistance, impeding assistance to producers already facing tough economic conditions, and hampering basic services and government aid in the most remote and poorest places. “All these practical things that make the wheels go around in a community were facilitated by U.S.D.A., and it was with staff who knew how to navigate and had the trust of the local community,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Senate subcommittee on rural development, said in an interview. “It’s something that was working, was working well, and was very cost-efficient. And now it is being demolished.””

Corporate Crackdown Ethics in Government Independent Agencies

TRACKER: Cuts to Corporate Enforcement Capacity

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)

Department of Justice (DOJ)

Department of Labor (DOL)

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)

Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

Department of Health and Human Services

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

Department of the Treasury – Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

US Department of Agriculture (USDA)

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