President Trump and Elon Musk's plans for a wholesale reduction of the federal workforce have brought turmoil to a sector long seen as a bastion of stability. The Trump administration says more cuts are coming, even as some government agencies rush to reverse what they say were mistaken layoffs. Workers are also challenging their terminations, finding notable success.
The effort raises speculation about the administration's goals, along with warnings against politicizing the U.S. civil service. Critical questions can inform that debate, such as: How does the U.S. federal workforce compare with those of other countries?
Is the U.S. government "bloated"?
Many calls for shrinking the U.S. government cite "bloat" and excessive spending. But experts say that while governments can always work to be more efficient, the size of the United States' federal workforce is well in line with those of its peers.
"The federal government is smaller proportionately than you would see in other countries" such as Great Britain, Canada or Australia, says Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on improving government.
That's partly because the size of the U.S. federal workforce hasn't kept pace with decades of population growth.
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"The head count today of the [U.S.] federal workforce is essentially the same as it was in 1969," Stier says. "And that's in absolute terms. In relative terms regarding the size of the population, it's shrunk a lot — and the responsibilities of our government have increased."
In the late 1960s, the number of federal workers hovered above 2 million (excluding Postal Service workers), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In January 2025, the number stood at 2.4 million.
But there are many more Americans to serve. In October 1969, the U.S. population was about 202.5 million, according to the Census Bureau. At the start of 2025, it was estimated at 341.1 million, the bureau said.
Federal workers accounted for 1.87% of the civilian workforce as of last November, according to the Pew Research Center — and that figure includes more than 600,000 postal workers.
In terms of cost, workers' pay and benefits account for around 6% of federal spending, Elizabeth Linos, an associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and director of The People Lab, told NPR's Fresh Air.
Federal governments can be fairly small if states have relative autonomy in providing some government services, as in the U.S. and Australia. This is one of many variables that can make it difficult to directly compare federal governments.
"The U.S. is a strongly federal system," says Filipe Campante, a professor of political economy and governance at Johns Hopkins University. "So there's a lot more that falls under the responsibility of lower levels of government compared to more centralized countries, like France or the U.K."
When looking at the U.S. public sector overall — including local, state and federal governments — those workers account for just under 15% of total employment, according to the 38-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). That's below the 18% average for the countries in the organization.
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Another difference lies in what motivates U.S. federal workers. More than 90% of U.S. civil servants say it's important that their work contributes to the common good, according to a 2023 OECD report. The figure was notably higher than those of their counterparts in Great Britain and other countries.
1990s cuts brought an "explosion" of contractors
So, how does the federal government provide more services without adding employees? It pays private contractors for services and products.
"In any given year, about $270 billion are spent on federal workers' salaries and benefits," Linos says. "Just to put that in perspective, there are specific departments whose contracting budget is larger than that budget."
In the 2023 fiscal year, the federal government "committed about $759 billion on contracts," the Government Accountability Office reported. Most of that figure — $478 billion — went toward buying "professional support services" for defense and civilian agencies, and $281 billion was for products, from drugs to airplanes.
Federal contractors became prevalent after the last large-scale effort to shed government jobs — the Clinton administration's Reinventing Government initiative of the 1990s.
That overhaul took place over seven years. Linos says that around "400,000 federal positions were cut through a combination of departures and attrition, and some layoffs."
The end result wasn't exactly the lean federal government some had hoped for. The cuts brought an "explosion" in contract workers, Linos says, adding, "Today, we have something like three times as many [contractors] delivering the work of government" than federal workers.
Other countries, like Australia, are in somewhat similar patterns, often contracting or privatizing services such as utilities, medical care and child care.
"We do a lot of that as you generally do in the U.S.," says Andrew Podger, a professor at the Australian National University who is also a fellow in the National Academy of Public Administration.
Political appointees are already a hallmark of the U.S.
Trump is looking to reclassify thousands of influential federal jobs as political appointments — an idea he frequently mentioned during the campaign season.
Such a move would add to a glaring divide: The U.S. already uses political appointments to fill more jobs than many countries with similar governments.
"We have an outsized number of political appointments," Stier says, citing around 4,000 political appointees.
Among the United States' peer democracies, "they typically count their political appointees in tens, not in thousands," he says. "So we really already have a vestige of the old spoils system."
The U.S. has repeatedly worked to standardize civil service, from the Pendleton Act in 1883 to the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.
"In the 19th century, the idea was you could get a job in government just by displaying loyalty to the new political administration," Linos says. "And what that led to was lower levels of performance, less merit in government and, ultimately, worse outcomes for residents."
But the gap persists. As proof, Campante of Johns Hopkins University suggests looking at how governmental transitions take place in the U.K. versus the United States.
"When they have an election, literally, pretty much like the day after, there is a transition in government" in the U.K., Campante says. "Basically the civil service remains in place."
Both Stier and Campante see Trump's push for more appointments as a worrying sign, because it would give the executive branch tighter control over career civil servants.
"We have too many already," Stier says of political appointees. "The challenge there is that you wind up with people who frankly are not chosen on the basis of merit" but because of politics. That leads to leaders not understanding the systems they oversee, which results in worse government, he says.
Then there's the accountability issue
"I think that the politicization of the civil service is one of the key dramatic changes that are happening right now," Campante says. "And that's by [the Trump administration's] own admission, right? It's not even like a secret. They're really kind of making the point that they think that that should be the case."
Trump's plan to replace tens of thousands of career civil servants has been percolating since the final months of his first term, when he signed an executive order saying he needed more flexibility and control in choosing workers he would rely on to enact his policies. On Jan. 20, 2025, he reinstated the policy, known as "Schedule F," saying it would "restore accountability to the career civil service."
And in Trump's Feb. 11 executive order about reshaping the workforce through the Department of Government Efficiency, he set a goal of eliminating not only waste but also "insularity."
In Campante's view, the president's goal is "really to kind of reduce that independence and that insulation of the civil service from political control."
He notes that in Brazil, former President Jair Bolsonaro now faces formal charges of attempting a coup to remain in power after his 2022 election defeat. It's a contrast, Campante says, to how the U.S. handled Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
After taking office this year, Trump issued pardons for hundreds of violent rioters. His administration also dismissed more than two dozen prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases, and it launched an inquiry into FBI staff members involved in Jan. 6 investigations.
To be able to hold leaders accountable, Campante says, civil servants need protections from being fired and politically targeted.
"That role of accountability is, I think, an important aspect that is being seriously degraded right now," he says.
Stier says he has seen the same pattern when countries move away from democracy and toward authoritarianism.
"One of the first moves is to change the civil service, the government workforce, to a loyalist workforce as opposed to a merit-driven workforce," he says.
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