As he marked one year since being sworn into office, President Donald Trump on Tuesday touted the actions of his administration — including praising the major reductions to the federal workforce throughout 2025.

“I don’t want to cut people, but when you cut them and they go out and get a better job, I like to cut them,” Trump said during a nearly two-hour press briefing, while also stating his administration “slashed tremendous numbers of people off the federal payroll.”

The White House on Tuesday also released a list of “365 wins” over the last year, commending the administration’s efforts to ensure a “merit-based” federal workforce. The list includes federal workforce actions overhauling the probationary period; eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion across government; requiring employees to work on-site full-time; slashing federal jobs; and limiting agencies to one new hire for every four employees who exit the civil service.

“I say, get rid of everybody that’s unnecessary, because that’s the way you make America great again,” Trump said. “When you have all these jobs where people are sitting around doing nothing and they get a lot of money from the government, it’s no good.”

But good government groups such as the Partnership for Public Service tell a much different story of the administration’s impact on the federal workforce. Max Stier, the Partnership’s president and CEO, described 2025 as “the most significant reduction in federal government capacity that we’ve ever experienced in our history.”

“And that reduction in capacity is best represented in our most important asset: our federal workforce,” Stier told reporters on a press call last week.

Governmentwide, federal workforce data shows that about 320,000 federal employees left government during 2025, while just tens of thousands joined the civil service. The Office of Personnel Management reported a net loss of about 220,000 federal employees over the course of the year.

“It tells a disturbing story about who we’ve lost in our government and what is actually happening to the workforce,” Stier said. “But it doesn’t tell you anything about what is truly most fundamental — their morale and what they think about what’s happening right now.”

The Partnership, a non-profit organization that advocates for non-partisan, “good government” reforms, released a report on Tuesday, noting that the Trump administration’s actions over the last year created “confusion, distrust and stress within the federal workforce.”

“There were large-scale layoffs of employees, cuts to government programs and the ending of many grants, altering how the government does — or does not — serve the public and the outcomes it can achieve,” the report states. “Not only did the government lose invaluable expertise, it became less responsive to public needs and less prepared to keep Americans safe.”

“It is impossible to gain a full picture of the layoffs and their impact,” the Partnership added. “The administration has provided few specifics about what positions have been eliminated and which personnel have been laid off or incentivized to resign.”

The Partnership’s report also detailed the specific impacts of federal workforce losses over the last year, including effects at agencies like the IRS, Social Security Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, FEMA and many others.

As a result of the governmentwide staffing cuts, the Partnership argued, agencies are less prepared to deliver disaster assistance during emergencies, and less efficient in administering crucial government programs, leading to delays in basic services and increased wait times.

By contrast, OPM Director Scott Kupor has argued that the Trump administration’s federal workforce overhauls will lead to better employee accountability, merit and performance across government. Kupor also touted the loss of one-third of OPM’s internal workforce during 2025, while saying the agency’s service delivery improved.

“President Trump was clear from day one: The federal workforce must be accountable, performance-driven and focused on serving the American people,” Kupor said in a Dec. 31 press release. “This year, OPM delivered on that vision — modernizing government operations, rewarding excellence and putting taxpayers first.”

But Rob Shriver, director of the Civil Service Strong program at Democracy Forward, questioned the Trump administration’s workforce reductions, saying there are no forward-looking plans for continuing to effectively deliver services after the cuts.

“The singular focus on headcount reduction as a blunt instrument reveals that DOGE was never about efficiency,” Shriver, a former acting director of OPM during the Biden administration, said in commentary on Tuesday. “It was about retribution and stifling dissent by intimidating federal workers into leaving their jobs or, if they decided to stay, intimidating them into not questioning their political leaders.”

At the same time, information on the federal workforce’s perspective over the course of 2025 will likely be limited. After months of postponing, OPM last year opted to cancel the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. In an attempt to fill the data gap, the Partnership conducted its own federal workforce survey.

The results of the Partnership’s survey are expected to be released in March. But Partnership officials have said it will still be difficult as an external organization to replicate the depth of data OPM can attain through FEVS.

Going forward, the Trump administration is looking to make further changes for the federal workforce, including overhauls to the probationary period and federal hiring processes, as well as performance management and senior executive development.

OPM’s Kupor said the upcoming changes will make government “leaner,” while making federal employees more results-oriented, accountable and efficient.

But some painted a darker picture for federal employees throughout 2026.

“The harms caused by these cuts have already begun to play out, and we’ll see more and more of that in 2026, when the impacts of the thoughtless workforce cuts are felt more deeply around the country,” Shriver said.

The Trump administration is also expected to soon issue a final rule to implement “Schedule Policy/Career.” The forthcoming regulations will let agencies reclassify career federal employees in “policy-influencing” positions, in effect removing their civil service protections and making them easier to fire at-will.

“The change of our federal government into one that is a loyalist workforce, as opposed to a professional one, is a process that we anticipate moving forward in 2026,” Stier said. “As challenging as 2025 was, I think we can expect even harder days ahead in 2026.”

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The Pentagon doesn’t know exactly how many civilian employees telework or work remotely across the Department of Defense, according to the Government Accountability Office.

While DoD has good data on which positions are eligible for telework or remote work, it does not consistently track whether civilian employees are actually using those programs. As a result, official figures have at times overstated remote work usage by counting eligible positions instead of the number of employees approved to telework or work remotely, a new watchdog report shows.

In May 2024, for instance — a period within the December 2021 to February 2025 span reviewed in the new GAO report — the Pentagon publicly reported it had 61,549 remote employees. One month later, however, the Defense Department told GAO it had 35,558 remote workers.

“The reason that happened is because they were reporting position eligibility. They were not reporting the individual employees. That’s exactly what we found — they had good data on the positions eligible but didn’t have such good data on who was actually using those programs,” Alissa Czyz, director of defense capabilities and management at GAO, told Federal News Network.

“We found that two-thirds of the positions in 2024 were eligible for telework, but the data were not very good when you got to the individual employee level,” she added.

Czyz said her team found that most DoD civilians were already working in person even before the current return-to-office policy, and that fully remote workers made up only a tiny fraction of the workforce.

“According to our data, the vast majority of civilians — about 81% — were in person. About 1% were doing remote work. That perception that large amounts of federal employees were teleworking, at least at the Department of Defense, did not bore out in our analysis,” Czyz said. 

Since President Donald Trump terminated remote work for federal employees, about 8% of the DoD civilian workforce — roughly 62,000 employees — had not returned to in-person work. About 6%, or 45,000 workers, did not return to office after accepting offers for deferred resignation. The government used the deferred resignation program last year to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Another 2%, or about 17,000 people, did not return due to reasonable accommodations.

No formal review of telework, remote work

Office of Personnel Management guidance requires agencies to evaluate how telework and remote-work programs affect their mission, employee recruitment and retention, and operating costs. However, GAO found that the Defense Department has not evaluated the impact of those programs on the department’s broader goals.

While there were scattered efforts across the department to assess some aspects of telework and remote work, there was no comprehensive, departmentwide evaluation of both benefits and drawbacks of those programs. One data source — the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey — previously included telework-related questions, but OPM canceled the survey this year. 

Czyz said her team was able to gather some anecdotal feedback on telework and remote work, with DoD officials citing benefits such as improved communication, recruitment advantages for hard-to-fill positions and potential cost reductions. Some disadvantages included reduced in-person collaboration and decreased morale among employees who were not eligible for telework. But ultimately officials were not able to provide concrete data demonstrating cost savings or other outcomes.

“I mean, the bottom line was they were not conducting formal evaluations of telework or remote work,” Czyz said. “There was maybe some anecdotal cost savings with reduction in office space and that sort of thing, but there had been no formal evaluation of cost savings in the department.”

DoD also hasn’t assessed whether increased in-person requirements have created new costs, but GAO is examining those potential increases as part of a separate review of the department’s use of office space. That review comes as DoD seeks to reduce its office footprint while simultaneously bringing employees back to the office. GAO expects to release that report in early spring.

The Pentagon updated its telework policy in 2024 for the first time since 2012, instructing DoD components to “actively promote” telework and remote work and to eliminate barriers to program execution through education and training. The department has since rolled back the policy.

If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email anastasia.obis@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at (301) 830-2747.

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