During the first month of the Trump Administration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has cut or threatened to cut the jobs of thousands of federal workers. I’ve documented how cutting the federal civilian workforce could double local unemployment rates in some small areas, particularly those near military installations or federal correctional facilities. Here, I explore the geographic distribution of federal agency staff in more detail to better understand the ripple effects of reducing the federal workforce.
According to CNN, DOGE had “placed on administrative leave, laid off or issued immediate termination notifications” more than 110,000 federal employees by the end of February. As a result of these cuts and other actions, the DOGE website claimed in early March to have saved the US taxpayer $65 billion through “a combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.” However, some of these savings have been challenged by reporting in The New York Times and Washington Post. True or not, $65 billion represents less than 1 percent of the total federal budget.
In total, the workforce reductions have affected the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (an independent agency) and 12 departments including the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Energy, General Services Administration, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, State, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs. These agencies are home to hundreds of thousands of federal civilian workers and are spread across the country. While published information on the location of fired workers does not yet exist, data showing where the federal civilian workforce is distributed by agency can provide some insight as to the potential effects of workforce reductions around the country.
The Geography of the Federal Civilian Workforce
Using Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data from September 2024, I collected federal workforce counts for 972 Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Area (together, called Core Based Statistical Areas or CBSAs), which are located in every state of the country and vary in population size. The geographic-specific data include redactions for security agencies and sensitive occupations, except for some of those in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, which are included.
The total federal workforce consists of 5.1 million workers, about 2.3 million of whom are civilian workers, 2.1 million are uniformed military personnel, and about 700,000 are “government enterprise workers,” which primarily consists of US Postal Service employees. The data used here redact counts for people working in security and sensitivity areas, which consist of about 270,000 people, leaving a total sample of 1.89 million workers. Further, metropolitan areas are not identified for the nearly 700,000 civilian workers in the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Department of Defense. Overall, I can identify both agency and metro area for a total sample of 1.2 million workers (or about 55 percent of the total civilian workforce).
Number and Size of Federal Agencies
There are 131 federal agencies identified in the data, which vary in size and location. Some agencies have very few employees and one base location, while others are very large and spread across the country. The Northern Border Regional Commission, for example, which is a federal-state partnership that provides economic development support for areas in northern Maine, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont, employs three people in Concord, New Hampshire. The Farm Credit Administration, a financial regulatory agency that provides credit and other financial services to farmers, ranchers, and other eligible borrowers, is home to about 320 employees stretching across and 22 metro areas, from Dallas to Sacramento.
The largest federal government agency is the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which offers health care, benefits, and other support services to members of the US military. The VA currently employs about 490,000 people spread across the country in more than 860 metropolitan areas.
As of September 2024, 10 agencies account for slightly more than half of all federal civilian workers (again, for whom geographic information can be identified). Nearly 40 percent of people who work for those agencies work in the 10 largest offices.
Roughly 100,000 VA employees, about 20 percent of the entire agency, work in the 10 metro areas that house the greatest number of workers. By contrast, about 70 percent of all people who work for the Departments of Treasury and Health and Human Services work in the 10 largest offices.
Naturally, each agency will locate their office to meet the different needs of its workforce and the people they serve. For 9 of the 10 departments, the largest office is located in or near Washington, DC (the largest Social Security Administration office is located in Baltimore, MD). The largest VA office is in New York City, followed closely by offices in Tampa, FL and Chicago, IL. The VA office in Washington, DC is home to about 9,800 people and ranks fifth on the list of largest offices.
If DOGE implements federal civilian workforce reductions, areas across the country will see higher unemployment rates and reductions in services to US service members and American citizens. Federal agencies differ in their size, scope, and geographic distribution, but they are not all located in Washington, DC or only in large cities. While workforce cuts may lead to some financial savings, they will come with tradeoffs. Further understanding the extent of DOGE’s workforce reduction actions will come over time as local data becomes available.
Use the map below to explore the data in detail for these large federal agencies.
