When it comes to the federal payroll, two seemingly contradictory things are true.
One, the Biden administration went on a hiring spree that expanded the government work force at the fastest pace since the 1980s. And two, it remains near a record low as a share of overall employment.
In the four years separating President-elect Donald J. Trump’s two terms, the federal civilian head count has risen by about 4.4 percent, according to the Labor Department, to just over three million, including the Postal Service.
But that’s a much slower pace than private payrolls have grown over the past four years. And it leaves the federal government at 1.9 percent of total employment, down from more than 3 percent in the 1980s.
The incoming administration promises to erase whole sections of the federal bureaucracy: Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chair of what Mr. Trump is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, has said 75 percent of the work force could go, in pursuit of $2 trillion in cuts. But it will be a challenge to find cuts without depleting services.
“When we’re looking at the numbers of the federal work force, it’s still about the same size as it was in the 1960s,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a think tank. “The narrative out there is the federal government work force is growing topsy-turvy, and the reality is that it’s actually shrinking.”
Staffing expanded during Mr. Trump’s first term as well, by about 2.9 percent. But some agencies contracted significantly, and had bounced back as of March 2024, the latest data published by the Office of Personnel Management show.
The State Department, which had shrunk through attrition and a hiring freeze imposed by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, gained nearly 20 percent from 2020 to early 2024, or about 2,300 workers, not including the Foreign Service. (Some of the gain reflected passport processors, whose numbers had fallen when few people traveled overseas during the pandemic.) The U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers public health and humanitarian grants overseas, grew by 23 percent, to 4,675. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, rebounded to 22,500, the highest level in its history, after a hiring freeze and funding shortfalls.
Other agencies with rising head counts were driven by some of President Biden’s legislative initiatives — especially the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Recruiters streamlined hiring procedures to bring on more than 9,000 people, distributed across the agencies handling parts of the laws.
The Treasury Department also expanded as the Internal Revenue Service received an $80 billion infusion — later cut to $40 billion — that allowed it to top 100,000 employees, the highest level since 1997.
But the biggest increase came at the largest agency: the Department of Veterans Affairs, which stands at more than 486,000 employees, up nearly 16 percent since 2020. The growth was driven by the PACT Act, a law passed in 2022 that authorized $797 billion to cover more veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service.
Veterans Affairs, together with civilian employees of the Pentagon and the military branches, accounts for 1.25 million federal workers. That’s 55 percent of the total, not counting intelligence agencies or the Postal Service. The active-duty military adds nearly 1.4 million, a tick down from 2020.
“You can’t get to $2 trillion in cuts and 75 percent of the federal work force if you’re not going to cut D.O.D.,” said Randy Erwin, national president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, referring to the Department of Defense. “It’s too big — it’s impossible to get to those numbers.”
Hiring at veterans’ hospitals and at field offices to support infrastructure projects has meant that all of the federal staffing growth has happened outside the Beltway. The number of federal workers in the Washington metropolitan area has been flat since 2020, and stands at about 12 percent of the total.
Some of that arises from the trend toward remote work, which allowed agencies to hire specialized talent elsewhere in the country. Although pay varies by locality, for each occupation federal workers make nearly 25 percent less than their private-sector counterparts, according to the Federal Salary Council.
“We are told by hiring managers in the District that particularly for tech occupations, they have a real hard time attracting workers,” said Terry Clower, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, in Northern Virginia. “It’s because a lot of folks are not really keen to move to our area, with its cost of living, for a federal wage.”
Of course, the size of the federal government is measured by more than its payroll. As policymakers have tried to keep the head count low, the number of people doing federal work as employees of federal contractors has ballooned. No one knows how many, but a Brookings Institution scholar estimated the contracted work force at five million in 2020.