This week marks 100 days of the second President Donald Trump administration, and the federal government now has roughly 280,000 fewer employees because of buyouts, retirements and terminations, according to data provided by The Associated Press.
That means the government is roughly 10% smaller than it was on Inauguration Day.
David Karol, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, studies trends in the federal government and said he believes Trump and White House adviser Elon Musk, who runs the Department of Government Efficiency, have made relatively easy cuts targeting new, probationary employees, and getting tens of thousands of workers to take an early retirement.
But what comes next could be more difficult, because it involves making a fundamental change in a U.S. law dating back to 1883. It’s called the Pendleton Act, which created the same civil service system that remains in place today.
“His administration is going to try to have more Trump loyalists in what have been civil service positions,” Karol said. “A lot of the people who are easy to fire have already been fired, but it’s a dramatic change.”
Karol said he’s worried the cuts to the government will have a long-lasting effect, as specialists in a wide variety of areas have already left the government, or may leave if they realize there are opportunities in the private sector.
“Are young, promising people going to want to go to work for the federal government when they see that this kind of thing can happen?” Karol said.
A number of employee unions and other public interest groups have, in some cases, filed successful challenges to some of the job cuts, and thousands of employees have been ordered reinstated.
“He’s done a lot of things that are legally questionable and that Republican-appointed judges, including sometimes judges he appointed his first term at the lower court level, have challenged,” he said.
Karol said he anticipates that trend will continue as those groups and unions seek to tie up the Trump administration in court for as long as possible.
With less than 3 million federal employees, the Brookings Institution said the government is the same size it was 60 years ago, but those employees are working for a population that has grown by 140 million people since the early 1970s.
Karol also said it’s difficult to measure Trump’s first 100 days compared to other presidents, because this White House has relied heavily on executive orders rather than passing legislation through Congress.
“The original ‘100 days’ was Franklin Roosevelt,” he said. “Almost all of it has been unilateral action on the part of the president, rather than through legislation.”
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