Shed No Tears For Fired Federal Workers
https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/25/shed-no-tears-for-fired-federal-workers/
When the Trump administration announces the next round of government layoffs, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth, the sob stories will be deafening. For what? A bunch of overpaid, underworked bureaucrats?
Estimates about how many jobs have been cut so far differ. The press claims DOGE has eliminated around 100,000 federal jobs. Challenger, Gray & Christmas says 62,530 were let go in January and February. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded a net loss of only 6,700 federal jobs in February.
Whatever the case, Donald Trump wants big numbers. The Department of Education already said it will chop its workforce in half. Veterans Affairs says it is targeting 80,000 workers.
The White House is currently reviewing plans for a second wave of layoffs after getting recommendations from Cabinet officials.
Terrible, right?
Wrong. Consider the context missing from every one of these sky-is-falling stories:
This is just a haircut.
- There are 2.4 million federal workers, which means that eliminating even 200,000 is a tiny 8% trim. (Southwest Airlines recently announced a 15% cut in its workforce.)
- Under President Joe Biden, the non-military federal workforce grew by 140,000. DOGE hasn’t even managed to get the workforce back to where it was before Biden’s spending spree.
Job cuts of this magnitude aren’t unprecedented. Just the overheated coverage is.
- In Bill Clinton’s first term in office, he shed more than 330,000 federal workers. There were no protests and virtually no media coverage.
Federal workers are overpaid and overprotected.
- Nearly a third of federal workers are unionized, compared with less than 7% in the private sector. As a result, managers have found it almost impossible not only to fire workers but to give them anything less than perfect performance ratings. One Government Accountability Office report said that 99.5% of them got a “fully successful” rating or above. More than a third were given the highest rating of “outstanding.”
- The average salary for a federal worker now tops $100,000, and benefits average more than $40,000 a year. The Congressional Budget Office last year found that federal pay and benefits are 5% higher than the private sector.
- And, as anyone who has ever had to deal with a government worker knows, they are not as productive as their private-sector counterparts.
Layoffs are a fact of life.
- In the first two months of this year, private employers laid off nearly 160,000 workers. Last year, the tech industry alone shed 150,000 jobs.
- Several major companies have already announced layoff plans for the year, including Starbucks, Chevron, JPMorgan Chase, Kohl’s, Meta platforms, Southwest Airlines, and CNN.
The federal government has no choice.
- In just the first two months of this year, the federal government ran up $436 billion in deficits, on the way to what’s expected to be $1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2025, and interest payments on the national debt have topped $150 billion.
- No one in their right mind thinks this is sustainable, and no business faced with losses on this massive a scale would not be cutting deeply into its labor costs.
What matters isn’t who gets laid off, but who gets rehired.
- The economy has added a net of 276,000 jobs in the first two months of this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate is unchanged, the average number of weeks unemployed is lower than it was in December.
- As the Office of Personnel Management correctly observed, “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”
The reason all this is such a shock to federal workers is that they assumed that their gravy train would go on forever. They don’t deserve anyone’s sympathy.
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