President Trump Draining the Swamp, Again, One Year In

We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. While campaigning during the 2024 election, he pledged to take on “the deep state” by firing government employees he called “corrupt bureaucrats”.

He set that process in motion soon after winning the election. Here’s how National Public Radio reported it at the time:

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed once again to “drain the swamp”.

He’s tapped two billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to help him “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies” through a commission Trump is calling the “Department of Government Efficiency”.

In his failed run for president, Ramaswamy, who made his fortune in pharmaceuticals, spoke of cutting the federal workforce by 75%.

Musk, who shrunk Twitter’s workforce by 80% after his purchase, vowed in a statement that the effort “will send shockwaves through the system.”

Even with such big reductions being bandied about, few thought much would come of the effort. The NPR report quotes Donald Kettl, an academic specializing in public management and public policy who recently retired as a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, on what he thought would be the outcome of DOGE’s proposed personnel reductions:

Even with Trump’s unveiling of his “Department of Government Efficiency,” Kettl says it’s unlikely we’ll see federal employees fired en masse. Such a move would undermine Trump’s ability to get anything done, which would be disastrous for his administration….

Instead, Kettl is expecting the new administration to swiftly oust a smaller number of individuals seen as particularly problematic for Trump.

After a year, it is clear that neither Krishnamurthy’s massive bureaucrat firings nor Kettl’s idea of minimal reductions were implemented. Instead, President Trump reduced the number of the federal government’s bureaucrats to 2,084,618, down 228,598 from its 2024 peak. The chart below, from the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management, shows the change in the number of civilian employees of the U.S. government from 2015 to 2026.

President Trump’s substantial reduction of the federal bureaucracy has returned the number of bureaucrats to about the level it was between 2015 and 2017.

Reason‘s Eric Boehm considers the accomplishment:

While the Trump administration has taken many intentional and some unprecedented steps to grow the size and scope of the federal government during its first year back in power, by this one measure the trend has been undeniably moving in a much more promising direction. Cutting nearly 10 percent of the federal workforce in a single year is a noteworthy accomplishment. That Trump and his team have done it despite the best efforts of public sector unions and the entrenched bureaucracy makes it even more remarkable.

Boehm, however, finds a cloud inside the silver lining:

The only sector of the economy where jobs have been growing significantly is health care—which is, of course, largely funded by the government. This is not quite the victory that the Trump administration wants it to be.

It would be tremendous if workers were shifting from federal jobs to more productive work in the private sector. For now, Trump can only claim to have accomplished half of that goal.

But is that really President Trump’s problem?

Just over a year ago, Government Executive reported “federal employees in 2024 on average earned 24.72% less than their counterparts in similar private sector jobs, according to a new report from the Federal Salary Council that is based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data.”

If the federal employees who left the U.S. government during 2025 are really productive enough to earn that kind of pay premium in the private sector, they have the perfect opportunity to prove it. If the Federal Salary Council is right, all these departed bureaucrats can count on being able to cash in now that they’ve left the federal government’s service.

If they’re not, that suggests the federal government’s bureaucrats may not be the productive stars the Federal Salary Council claims them to be. Let’s see if they can meet this claimed potential in the private sector.