What to know about the federal workforce under Trump – The Associated Press
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Carrie Muniak joins a rally in front of the Office of Personnel Management, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington. President Donald Trump is relying on a relatively obscure federal agency to reshape government. The Office of Personnel Management was created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter and is the equivalent of the government’s human resources department. It helps manage the civil service, including pay schedules, health insurance and pension programs. The agency has offered millions of federal workers eight months of salary if they voluntarily choose to leave their jobs by Feb. 6. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
President Donald Trump arrives to speak at the 2025 House Republican Members Conference Dinner at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla., Jan. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
Cindy Nell, of Cheverly, Md., holds a banner during a rally in front of the Office of Personnel Management, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington. President Donald Trump is relying on a relatively obscure federal agency to reshape government. The Office of Personnel Management was created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter and is the equivalent of the government’s human resources department. It helps manage the civil service, including pay schedules, health insurance and pension programs. The agency has offered millions of federal workers eight months of salary if they voluntarily choose to leave their jobs by Feb. 6. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Protesters hold banners during a rally in front of the Office of Personnel Management, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Since President Donald Trump began his second term last month, he has focused on dramatically reducing the federal workforce at a breakneck pace.
From dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development to offering a mass deferred resignation plan, Trump’s Republican administration has released executive orders and memos aimed at substantially reshaping the size of government and where its employees work.
Many of Trump’s orders have been met with legal hurdles, leaving some workers confused about their future and the deferred resignation offer, commonly described as a buyout.
Here’s what to know about the federal workforce, its job protections and the process of cutting back on its ranks.
The civilian federal workforce, not including military personnel and postal workers, comprises about 2.4 million people.
While a chunk of federal workers, about 20%, are in Washington, D.C., and the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia, more than 80% are distributed outside the region.
Civil servants are the vast majority of federal workers. They’re generally hired through an application process and have strong protections once in their positions.
Political appointees, who number roughly 4,000, serve at the discretion of the president and can be dismissed at will by the chief executive.
“Civil servants tend to be in their jobs as careers, some of them for decades,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in President Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration when about 426,000 federal jobs were cut over more than eight years in a deliberative effort aimed at reinventing government.
It’s not easy to fire the vast majority of federal workers — they have considerable job security with a long legal history.
Federal employees who are not political appointees have strong protections designed to prevent political whims from clearing out the workforce. The protections have grown over time, under leadership of both major political parties.
“The president definitely has his work cut out for him,” said Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.
Federal workers are entitled to due process, which means they can challenge disciplinary actions through a formal process. They have to be notified of the allegations against them and allowed to respond and present their side.
“You have to build a record to fire somebody, and that doesn’t often happen,” Kamarck said.
Federal employee protections started as a reform to the chaos caused by the 19th-century spoils system, in which federal jobs were awarded to a president’s loyalists. It led to incompetence and corruption as well as massive turnover with new administrations that proved disruptive and prevented continuity of expertise.
In 1881, President James Garfield was shot and killed by a man who believed Garfield owed him a job after campaigning for him. That led to the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, which created a merit-based system for hiring federal employees.
In 1978, Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act, to shield the merit system with enforceable rights so that most federal workers can be fired only for a legitimate reason.
“The idea is that we’re not going to get the best people if their jobs are completel
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