The Federal Workforce in 2025:
What the Data Actually Shows

🔥The DOGE Effect

The federal workforce shrank by approximately 217,000 positions between early 2025 and the end of the year. After decades of unchecked growth, this was the first serious attempt to right-size the federal bureaucracy. The reduction came through hiring freezes, early retirement incentives, and Reductions in Force (RIFs).

RIFs went from single digits per month to thousands. For the first time in modern history, the federal government got smaller instead of bigger.

The most dramatic signal is in RIF data (code SH). From FY2020 through mid-2024, monthly RIFs rarely exceeded 15. By late 2025, they spiked into the hundreds. Meanwhile, voluntary resignations and retirements also surged, suggesting many employees chose to leave rather than wait.

⏰The Retirement Cliff

Nearly one in five federal employees is currently eligible to retire. This has been true for years — the government has long been top-heavy with high-tenure, high-salary employees nearing retirement age. The question isn't whether these retirements will happen, but whether agencies actually need to backfill all of these positions, or whether this is a natural opportunity to streamline.

Some agencies face far worse odds. Check the deep dive analysis to see which agencies have 25%+ of their workforce eligible to walk out tomorrow.

A workforce where 1 in 5 employees can retire tomorrow was never sustainable. The question is whether agencies will use this moment to modernize or just reflexively replace every headcount.

🧠The Experience Drain

Federal employees separating in 2025 had significantly longer tenures than in prior years. While critics frame this as a "brain drain," it's worth noting that many of these long-tenure employees were among the highest-paid in government, and "institutional knowledge" can also mean "institutional inertia." Fresh perspectives and modern skills aren't always a bad trade.

For genuinely critical roles — intelligence, defense logistics, nuclear safety — experience matters. But the data doesn't distinguish between irreplaceable expertise and bureaucratic tenure. The real question is which of these roles were essential and which were the product of decades of empire-building. See the experience analysis for agency-by-agency breakdowns.

🔬STEM Brain Drain

The federal government employs hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, IT specialists, and mathematicians. These are arguably the most defensible government roles — the ones even small-government advocates agree the private sector can't easily replace.

STEM employees earn about 44% more than non-STEM feds, but still less than private sector equivalents. This is the one area where workforce reductions need to be surgical, not blunt. Losing a GS-15 program analyst is very different from losing a nuclear physicist or cybersecurity engineer.

Explore the STEM analysis to see which agencies depend most heavily on STEM workers.

👔The Manager Ratio Myth

Is the federal government really overrun with middle managers? The overall ratio is roughly 1:5, which is actually comparable to the private sector. But some agencies tell a very different story.

Some agencies have a manager for every 2-3 employees. In the private sector, that kind of overhead gets you fired. In government, it gets you a bigger budget.

The variation between agencies is enormous. Small policy shops with 1:2 or 1:3 ratios are the textbook definition of bureaucratic bloat. Large service delivery agencies like the VA actually run leaner than many private companies. The data supports targeted cuts, not blanket ones.

See the manager ratio breakdown for the actual numbers by agency.

🌍The Overseas Workforce

The federal government maintains a massive civilian workforce overseas — a legacy of America's post-WWII global footprint that has never been seriously questioned. Do we still need the same overseas staffing levels we had during the Cold War?

Some overseas positions are genuinely essential (embassy security, military support). Others are relics of an era when the U.S. thought it needed to manage the world. The data shows the scale of this commitment — taxpayers should decide if it's still justified. Explore the details in the overseas analysis.

💥Who Got Hit Hardest

Some agencies saw dramatic workforce reductions. The Department of Education lost 79.3% of its workforce — which, depending on your view of federal involvement in education, is either alarming or long overdue. USAID was effectively dismantled. Here's who shrank the most.

📉The Experience Drain: Agency by Agency

When experienced employees leave, they take decades of institutional knowledge with them. Here are the agencies that lost the most cumulative years of federal experience in 2025.

The VA alone lost 542,000 years of combined experience. Whether that experience was being used effectively is a separate question — but the scale is undeniable.

📊Who's Leaving by Tenure

The newest employees (0–4 years) account for the largest share of departures, driven overwhelmingly by quits. But the 20+ year veterans are leaving in huge numbers too — mostly through retirement programs.