Shrinking the Federal Workforce by 75 Percent

In late January, using federal workforce data from the Office of Personnel Management, I published estimates of the implications of DOGE firing 75% of the federal civilian workforce. That 75% figure was based on comments from Vivek Ramaswamy and while DOGE’s actions over the last two months makes that number likely too high, the unemployment implications of federal worker reductions is still going to have real impacts on local economies. You can explore the original set of estimates in the table below and do a back-of-the-envelope adjustment to bring the 75% number to something else.