According to data released in July by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), March 2025 was, by a large margin, the single worst month for federal hiring since at least October 2004. In the last 20 years, you can count on one hand the number of months where federal agencies hired fewer than 10,000 people, and March 2025 stands out starkly among them:
- October 2013: 9,958
- March 2017: 9,397
- February 2025: 9,841
- March 2025: 4,929
The effect on many agencies has been striking. Agencies that help people access tax and welfare benefits stopped hiring customer service agents. The Census Bureau could struggle to collect critical data on which private and public sector actors rely. Staffing losses within financial regulatory agencies could hinder their ability to enforce the law.
This post examines the Trump administration’s federal hiring freeze and the mass separations from federal agencies using data from OPM’s FedScope tool. Rather than focusing on employment levels, I focus on hiring and (voluntary and involuntary) departure patterns within agencies. To do this, I analyze FedScope’s “accessions” data (which covers people entering agencies, including through new hires and transfers into agencies) and its “separations” data (which covers people leaving agencies, including through firings, quits, retirements, and transfers out of agencies). The accessions data was used to produce the chart above.
Limitations of the data
These datasets have important limitations. For one, the data ends in March. OPM says that it will be revamping federal workforce datasets this fall, making them “routinely available in an easily accessible, reimagined format.” The granularity FedScope data offers is unmatched, but for now, if you are primarily interested in up-to-date news regarding the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the civilian workforce, outlets such as Reuters have you covered.
FedScope data also has significant limitations beyond the fact that it has a considerable lag. It doesn’t include U.S. Postal Service employees, active military personnel, Foreign Service Officers, most intelligence officials, or most judicial and legislative branch employees.
Importantly for the purposes of this post, people who have been put on administrative leave—which includes everyone who took the deferred resignation offer (“fork in the road”)—are not yet counted in OPM’s “separations” data. Accordingly, the separations data doesn’t currently show much that is out of the ordinary, but that is because the federal government is currently paying people not to work and counting them as employed. We will get a much better picture of the administration’s civil service reshaping efforts when we get data for October 2025, as that is when those who took the deferred resignation offer will no longer be on the federal payroll.
The administration’s alterations
The Trump administration itself has also taken steps to make the data less detailed in a few ways. Starting with the latest data release—which is the first release of this administration and covers April 2024 to March 2025—we can no longer see specifically retirements due to disability, as they are now lumped in with the “Retirement – Other” category.
The administration also reclassified performance-based terminations and deaths—both are now found in the category of “Other Separation.” The category existed prior to the reclassification, but no separations had been placed in it since 2013. (That said, assuming the recent average of about 300 deaths per month, we can deduce that there were roughly 3,800 performance-based firings in February and March 2025. In February and March 2021, the first two full months of the Biden administration, there were only about 1,800 such terminations.)
Additionally, much of the data for the Department of Defense, such as salary, age, and importantly, federal employees’ jobs, has been redacted in the person-level dataset for the first time, a significant reduction in transparency.
Seeing DOGE
Keeping these limitations in mind, it is still possible to see the beginnings of the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the federal workforce. For instance, in March, early retirements among federal employees skyrocketed. This spike was obviously a direct result of the administration’s expansion of the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority as a part of its Deferred Resignation Program. It’s likely that early retirements increased significantly after March given that individual agencies have reported much higher early retirement numbers than FedScope data shows—for instance, the Internal Revenue Service alone had nearly 2,000 early retirements through May 2025.
You can also start to see what are seemingly some of DOGE’s firings in this data. At the General Services Administration (GSA)—an early target for DOGE due to its control of federal real estate and its being a home for some government technologists—there was a surge in separations in March. Most of those were classified as “other separations,” which you’ll recall now consists of both deaths and disciplinary firings. Hopefully we can chalk GSA’s separations to the latter rather than the former.
Attrition is taxing
According to FedScope data, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) hired zero people in February and March 2025. Typically, these are among the most important months for IRS hiring, since April is tax season. In 2017, during Trump’s first few months in office, the IRS hired over 2,500 people in February and March despite there being a hiring freeze in place at that time as well.
We know that these IRS staff cuts have deepened significantly since March. In July, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported that the IRS had already lost 25 percent of its workforce by May, with cuts roughly equal across jobs and divisions. In the past, IRS understaffing has led to a host of issues, but in particular, understaffing often leads to diminished capacity within the agency for auditing the wealthy and cracking down on criminal tax evasion. In August, the IRS reportedly backtracked significantly on some of its planned layoffs.
In normal months, a significant portion of IRS hires are “contact representatives”—essentially customer service representatives who help you with your taxes. The Social Security Administration also employs contact representatives to aid people in the sometimes complex process of receiving Social Security benefits. Between the two agencies, a typical month might see anywhere from a couple hundred to a few thousand people hired for the job, but in both February and March 2025, the agencies hired zero.
Agency attrition stats show stats agency attrition
Like the IRS, the Census Bureau hired zero people in February or March—another stark contrast with Trump’s first term, when the agency hired nearly 600 people during Trump’s first two full months in office. Between the lack of hiring and the relative increase in separations from the agency, the Census Bureau had lost about eight percent of its workforce by March, relative to September 2024 levels—though the loss was likely much higher since those on administrative leave were still counted as employed.
The Census Bureau, our largest statistical agency, collects all sorts of important information that help us to understand the state of our country and our economy. One survey it collects is the Current Population Survey, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to produce the unemployment rate and other measures of the labor market—measures which are widely used by government agencies and private sector actors alike.
Attrition is a material risk
In March, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lost more than 300 people (again, not including those placed on administrative leave), driven by a large surge in retirements (which are typically clustered around December). The outflow isn’t particularly surprising considering that the agency offered some of its employees $50,000 to retire.
In May, SEC Chair Paul Atkins announced that the agency had lost 15 percent of its staff, and alongside those staff cuts, its enforcement actions have dropped precipitously. The agency’s inspector general said in August that the cuts could impact the agency’s ability to review the veracity of forthcoming corporate disclosures. Despite the impacts that the hiring freeze and staff cuts are having on the agency’s ability to enforce the law, Reuters reported at the beginning of September that the SEC is set to offer another round of $50,000 buyouts to select employees.
Where hiring hasn’t slowed
There are a few areas where federal hiring has not slowed down. For one thing, Trump beat out Biden in the early months of the administration with the pace of his Senior Executive Service appointments, mostly due to a relatively large number of hires in March.
But the other place where federal hiring has not slowed down much, is at agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where Trump actually needs people to execute his draconian deportation policy.
Indeed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is housed within DHS, is one of the few agencies where hiring actually picked up in March, as federal hiring overall reached a staggering 20-year low. Given the administration’s all-out efforts to recruit more ICE agents, the March hiring increase is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
If you want to learn more about what understaffing means for the American people, see our federal understaffing spotlight from April, where we highlight the real harms that have followed from understaffing at key agencies in the past.