The size of the federal government workforce has dropped three percentage points since the year of Donald Trump’s birth. The problem with the federal government, some analysts say, is that it is too small, not too big. They contend that when the federal government is understaffed, the public is underserved and badly served.
ALGERNON AUSTIN; austin@cepr.net
Austin is the director of the Race and Economic Justice project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Austin told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “Several of the major cabinet-level agencies have seen significant staffing cuts in recent years. But the Trump administration and Elon Musk, who seems to be acting as ‘co-president,’ are working to destroy the federal workforce. They claim that the federal workforce is massive and growing, when in fact it’s been declining and has already declined significantly. When Trump was born, federal workers made up 4.5 percent of the workforce. Today they make up 1.5 percent. That is a massive reduction, especially when you consider that Congress has placed many new additional demands on the federal workforce during that time.
“We have really reached a catastrophic situation. The D.C. plane crash brought that to the forefront, because we know that there were two air traffic controllers doing the work of four [before the collision]. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association said that 40 percent of their members are working six days per week, 10 hours per day. That sort of degree of overwork is not uncommon in the federal government. Consequently, we see a lot of stress, fatigue, burnout, and high attrition in many agencies. It’s a real problem. The federal government serves the American people, so when it’s understaffed, the American people are being underserved and poorly served.”
Austin noted several areas where the shortages are particularly bad. “In the Veterans Health Administration, there is a shortage of doctors and nurses. Veterans are having to wait [for care] and not getting appropriate care. Or we can talk about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which oversees banking. The Great Recession was triggered by a banking crisis; in 2023, there were two bank failures because of a shortage of oversight of those funds. It is really important that we have enough people monitoring the banks. Our immigration system is a mess in so many ways, but one part of that is that there aren’t enough immigration judges. In 2019, the system had a backlog of over a million cases. It’s fair to assume that the backlog has grown significantly since then.
“The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has also seen staffing levels drop 34 percent between 1980 and 2024. The workforce has grown 60 percent in that time, but the government’s ability to monitor the workforce has gotten weaker. It’s much easier for people who are discriminating against protected groups to mistreat those groups.”
Other agencies which are underfunded and which currently face deeper cuts include the National Nuclear Security Administration, the economic statistic agencies that monitor the economy, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That bureau, Austin said, “has saved the American people billions of dollars and prevented fraud and exploitation. Eliminating those workers will mean more Americans are ripped off by financial scams. The staff of the IRS has also declined steadily from 1992 to 2017. This means that if you’re a millionaire or billionaire, it has gotten easier to cheat on your taxes. When the IRS is short staffed, they can’t handle the complicated tax returns that those very rich people and corporations use. That understaffing hurts the country, because we use tax money to pay for air traffic, VA doctors, and so forth. If we can’t collect enough revenue from IRS, then there is pressure to understaff the rest of the government.
“It’s not merely that these various agencies are going to be struggling anymore. Some are going to be completely eliminated––cut to the point that they can’t even be limping along like they’ve been limping along.”