After a year of upheaval for federal employees, the Trump administration appears to be only getting started on its plans for overhauling the career civil service.

Further federal workforce changes are expected to continue into 2026 and beyond, according to the goals the administration recently laid out in its President’s Management Agenda.

Many of the priorities, as the Office of Management and Budget outlined, either already have — or soon will — significantly impact federal employees.

Here are three workforce changes from the Trump administration that federal employees should look for in the new year:

Future federal staffing plans

The sheer size of the federal workforce changed considerably over the past year, with executive branch agencies losing a cumulative total of more than 300,000 federal employees, according to numbers from the Office of Personnel Management.

With those staffing cuts in place, agencies are beginning to assemble future-looking plans to further reshape their workforces over the next few years.

As a months-long hiring freeze starts to thaw, the Trump administration has required all agencies to submit annual staffing plans for the coming year, subject to review and approval by OMB and OPM officials. The administration also directed agencies to form strategic hiring committees, composed mainly of political appointees, to oversee all recruitment efforts.

Agencies’ staffing plans must “consider efficiencies” of organizational restructuring and consolidation, removal of “unnecessary management layers,” the elimination of “unnecessary” jobs and contractor positions, managing the performance of underachieving employees — and much more, Trump administration officials explained in November guidance.

Until OMB and OPM approve the staffing plans, agencies will have to stick to a four-to-one ratio of removing to hiring employees, according to the guidance.

An OMB senior official speaking on background recently told Federal News Network that the administration will measure agencies’ progress toward fulfilling the first PMA priority by seeing how they adhere to Trump’s latest executive order on federal hiring. The goal over the next few years is to ensure that while hiring does take place, it’s in a way that maintains the smaller size of the current federal workforce.

“A key part of that will be making sure agencies are putting in place those hiring committees,” the official said. “They’re making very strategic decisions around who they’re hiring and what positions they’re hiring for, so we don’t just inflate the federal government again and overwhelm all the success we’ve had in reductions to date.”

In past administrations, there have been efforts to dramatically downsize the federal workforce — most recently during the Clinton administration in the 1990s. But a recent report from the Federation of American Scientists said those prior efforts had “decidedly mixed results,” and cautioned the Trump administration not to make the same mistakes.

“The cuts came before changes to agency to-do lists that never materialized,” FAS wrote. “It will be important for this administration to learn lessons from the past to avoid some of the long-term damage wrought by the Clinton years, for which agencies are still paying.”

Many experts have also raised concerns of the loss of federal workforce expertise, due to the reductions that have already taken effect. Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, warned that the loss of institutional knowledge will worsen over time.

“The forced exodus of over 212,000 civil servants has created dangerous gaps in food safety inspection, Social Security processing, veterans’ healthcare and disaster response,” Stier told Federal News Network. “This loss of expertise directly harms Americans’ access to critical services and will take decades to repair.”

Going forward, Robert Shea, a former OMB official in the George W. Bush administration, said doing more work with significantly fewer employees is both a challenge, and a possible opportunity.

“Agencies that rely on existing processes will fail. Agencies that rethink how work gets done may actually improve,” Shea told Federal News Network. “The upside of AI and automation only materializes if feds are given the authority, training and political cover to use these tools.”

“Accountability” of federal employees

A focus on “accountability” has been another common theme for the Trump administration’s federal workforce changes — it’s an area of emphasis in the PMA, and likely to strengthen and expand in 2026 and beyond.

Already, “accountability” has appeared as a priority in the administration’s efforts to remove protections for career federal employees in “policy-influencing” positions, make reforms to the Senior Executive Service, and create a new governmentwide recruitment plan.

Heading into 2026, OPM has also estimated that around 50,000 career federal employees will be reclassified as “Schedule Policy/Career,” a move that would make the impacted workers at-will and easier to fire.

The Trump administration touted Schedule Policy/Career as a way to drive “accountability” in the federal workforce, while offering agencies more flexibility. But critics of the policy, formerly known as “Schedule F,” have warned that it will politicize the non-partisan career civil service.

“Ultimately, this ‘trauma’ leads to the federal government’s loss of talent and institutional knowledge, which damages our national security and makes us more vulnerable to bad actors; reduces government accountability to its citizens; and generates even more loss of trust in government,” said Raymond Limon, a former member of the Merit Systems Protection Board and career-long federal executive in human capital.

Going forward, the Trump administration’s efforts on expanding these plans are “on track to get more severe,” according to the Partnership’s Stier.

“The expansion of Schedule Policy/Career authority threatens career protections, creates a climate of fear that drives talented professionals to leave government and further diminishes the services received by the public,” Stier told Federal News Network.

All told, the administration’s overhauls will lead to a “collapse of long-standing assumptions about civil service protections,” according to Shea.

“Constraints on removing career employees that were once treated as untouchable have been challenged directly,” Shea said. “Regardless of how courts ultimately rule, the impact will be long lasting.”

In 2026, federal employees are also facing significant changes in the way agencies measure performance, another way that OPM has said it is looking to increase “accountability” of employees.

OPM is looking to change performance management standards for federal employees. OPM Director Scott Kupor argues that “performance culture” in government is broken, and far too many federal employees are rated as high performers at their agencies.

“We have rampant ratings inflation and a lack of accountability for poor performers that fails to meaningfully differentiate between excellence, successful achievement of one’s objectives and poor performance,” Kupor wrote in a Dec. 5 blog post.

In June, OPM outlined plans to end “inflation” in performance ratings, and more strictly delineate between different levels of performance for employees. The changes also call on agencies to swiftly remove poor performers — and not substitute a suspension, for instance, when a full removal is more appropriate.

Forthcoming final regulations are expected to cement the emphasis of “accountability” in the administration’s changes to employee performance evaluations.

The idea of “accountability” also appears in the President’s Management Agenda, as part of a goal of fostering a “merit-based federal workforce.”

“The president’s executive orders and the PMA, together, call for revolutionary change, and together with OPM, we’re delivering,” OMB Deputy Director for Management Eric Ueland said in a Dec. 9 CHCO Council meeting. “The president directed agencies to reform the workforce, to maximize efficiency and productivity … Federal agencies have created meaningful efficiencies, allowing them to laser focus on their statutory duties.”

“Merit-based” workforce reforms

Finally, the Trump administration is calling for a focus on “merit-based” hiring across the federal workforce. It’s a top priority of the administration’s President’s Management Agenda, but also something that has appeared across multiple efforts from OPM.

In May, OPM first issued the administration’s new “merit hiring plan,” setting goals for reducing the government’s time-to-hire, as well as focusing on skills-based recruitment and a streamlined process.

The hiring guidance also required all agencies to assess candidates on USAJobs on how they plan to support the administration’s priorities when applying for open positions.

But in 2026, the goals of the “merit hiring plan,” in combination with the Trump administration’s PMA priority, are expected to take further effect, as agencies move forward with their new annual staffing plans.

“Moving forward, hiring will be based on merit and focused on practical skill, competence and dedication to the Constitution,” OMB’s Ueland said.

Combined, the merit hiring plan, performance changes, and newly required annual staffing plans will significantly reshape the federal workforce going forward.

“For those of you who have been in the private sector, much of this will seem like motherhood and apple pie,” Kupor wrote in a Nov. 21 blog post. “We are now inviting the federal government to join the planning party.”

OPM’s new “Tech Force” recruitment initiative, as an example, will embed the “merit hiring” principles as agencies look to onboard private-sector technologists and early-career talent through the new program.

But some of the hiring changes are common across recent presidential administrations. Recruitment strategies such as skills-based hiring and the use of shared certificates appeared in the Trump administration’s hiring guidance, similar to prior efforts from the Biden administration.

The FAS report noted, “the perennial need to hire federal employees more quickly and efficiently … have appeared in every PMA to date.”

The post 3 efforts federal employees should track from Trump’s management agenda first appeared on Federal News Network.

As a tumultuous year for the federal workforce comes to a close, many employees are in a much different position now than they were at the start of 2025.

The Trump administration’s efforts to reduce staffing across agencies resulted in the loss of more than 317,000 federal employees governmentwide. It’s a 13.7% decrease compared with September 2024 workforce numbers, Office of Personnel Management data shows.

At the same time, 68,000 new federal employees joined the civil service during 2025, according to OPM Director Scott Kupor. Combining both attrition and hiring data, the administration’s changes over the course of 2025 amounted to a net staffing decrease of about 10.8%.

Kupor touted the results as exceeding the administration’s goals, saying relatively few losses were due to reductions in force (RIFs) and firings of probationary employees. Out of all employees who left their jobs in the last year, “over 92% did so voluntarily,” he said, mainly via the deferred resignation program (DRP).

“None of this is to minimize the impact of anyone losing a job, but the ‘mass firing’ headlines do not in fact tell the full story,” Kupor wrote in a Dec. 10 post on X.

But some federal workforce experts argue that the administration’s reductions in 2025 amounted to a “forced exodus.” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, pointed to what he said have become “dangerous gaps” in key federal services, like food safety inspection, Social Security processing, veterans’ healthcare and disaster response.

“This loss of expertise directly harms Americans’ access to critical services and will take decades to repair,” Stier told Federal News Network.

Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) also pushed back against the idea of the administration’s DRP being “voluntary.” He said many feds who left government felt they had no choice — they felt threatened they would be fired anyway, if they did not leave through the DRP.

“Federal workers were hit with DOGE, watched agencies shutter, were threatened with imminent reductions in force, demagogued and bombarded with those mindless ‘5 things’ emails,” Walkinshaw said Dec. 11. “Nothing about that was voluntary — the ‘fork in the road’ was coercion.”

Still, the workforce cuts so far align with the Trump administration’s overall goal to “downsize the federal workforce,” as the Office of Management and Budget recently laid out in the new President’s Management Agenda. Specifically, the administration said it is targeting cuts of “unnecessary positions” and “poor performers,” while emphasizing more efficiency.

“We’ve seen significant success in right-sizing the federal workforce and addressing performance issues,” Eric Ueland, OMB’s deputy director for management, said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting.

The workforce reductions hit some agencies harder than others. The top three agencies facing staffing reductions are the departments of Defense, Agriculture and Treasury — with Treasury’s reductions mostly concentrated within the IRS, according to research from the Partnership for Public Service.

By scale, DoD has seen the largest staffing reduction across government. The department lost over 61,600 employees during 2025 — a total of about 8% of its total workforce.

Following just behind DoD, the Treasury Department lost more than 31,600 employees, yielding a staffing reduction of nearly 28%.

And at USDA, the loss of more than 21,600 employees over the last year amounted to a roughly 22% staffing decrease overall.

But other agencies, such as USAID and the Education Department, saw even deeper cuts to their workforces, despite being smaller agencies by volume.

Governmentwide, the loss of more than 300,000 federal employees has shown up in a multitude of ways. At the IRS, for instance, an agency watchdog warned there will likely be issues with the 2026 tax filing season, as a direct result of the 25% cut to the IRS workforce. And at USDA, the staffing reductions are affecting the work of some of the department’s underlying agencies.

The Partnership for Public Service said the cuts are harming communities as well. An analysis of more than 530 stories on the federal government throughout 2025 shows the impacts of the federal workforce reductions across the country.

“Notably, more than 45% of these stories involve harms to science-related sectors, including agricultural research, healthcare and public land management,” the Partnership said. “Together, they show the direct, tangible consequences these changes are having on individuals, organizations and communities.”

Over the course of 2025, the impacts also continued to spread. In a survey the Partnership conducted in September, 46% of respondents said they or someone they know had been impacted by the government cuts. That’s up from 29% of respondents who said the same in March.

Still, there are many who view the Trump administration’s changes positively. About 80% of those who are supportive of the federal workforce overhauls said they believe the changes will make their communities and lives better, the Partnership’s September survey found. But even among those who were supportive of the changes, 41% still expressed concerns about a loss of experience and knowledge in the federal workforce in the short term.

The changes are impacting many who have stayed in their jobs as well. Federal employees are experiencing disruptions in the workplace at a rate far higher than the national average, according to a recent Gallup survey.

Close to one-third — about 29% — of federal employees say their workplace has been disrupted “to a very large extent.” That’s nearly triple the 10% of U.S. employees who say the same, Gallup found. Across the federal workforce, it’s leading to increases in stress and loneliness, as well as a decline in employee engagement.

Robert Shea, a federal workforce policy expert and former OMB official from the George W. Bush administration, said the workforce changes have had a “chilling effect” on leaders across the career civil service — something he believes will continue into 2026 and beyond.

“Many career officials are now more cautious about how, when and whether they offer professional advice,” Shea told Federal News Network. “That’s particularly when that advice could be perceived as resistance rather than implementation.”

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