GAO report offers new details on the workers agencies lost last year

Newly released data from the Government Accountability Office offers some of the most granular glimpses yet of how the Trump administration’s sprint to remake the federal workforce in the president’s image impacted agency headcounts.

The report, published Tuesday, responds to a request by congressional Democrats to catalog data related to a variety of workforce changes undertaken shortly after President Trump returned to office last January, including reductions in force, the purge of recently hired or promoted employees with fewer civil service protections and the deferred resignation program.

GAO said it relied upon data from the Office of Personnel Management and individual agencies in compiling its report. OPM has previously said that around 317,000 federal workers left government in 2025. The watchdog agency’s report captures the first six months of Trump’s second term, capturing a fraction of that throughput.

“Of the 134,122 employees who separated from the 23 CFO Act agencies during the period from January to June 2025, a substantial majority (around 77%) retired or resigned,” GAO found. “Another roughly 19% were terminated or removed from their positions. Of these, agencies reported that nearly 4,500 employees (or about 3%) were terminated during a probationary or trial period.”

The Veterans Affairs and Defense departments saw the largest downward swing in headcount of any agency in terms of sheer number of workers during that time span, losing a net of 19,103 and 15,029 employees, respectively. But relative to an agency’s total workforce, the embattled Education Department, which the administration aims to abolish, saw the most job losses, with its workforce cratering by more than 20%.

Other notable trends during the first half of 2025 include the Social Security Administration, which saw its workforce fall by more than 5,500 employees, well over half of the 7,000 in headcount reductions its new leadership aspired to last spring and ultimately eclipsed by more than 400 workers. The agency has since reassigned hundreds of staffers to handle customer service duties on its 1-800 number as it struggles to keep up with taxpayer demand.

GAO’s data also reveals a better sense of the scope of the controversial deferred resignation program, an offer devised by Elon Musk to pay federal workers to sit on extended administrative leave until the end of fiscal 2025, at which point they would retire or resign. In the first half of 2025, nearly 144,000 employees were accepted into the program, the vast majority of whom stayed on the federal payroll until last fall or winter.

Among the top agencies in terms of deployment of deferred resignations were the Defense Department with 48,002 employees, Treasury with 17,640 and the Agriculture Department, where 16,414 applied for and received deferred resignation. The U.S. Agency for International Development saw relatively few DRP participants at just 251, though more than 2,000—nearly half—were already on extended administrative leave as the Trump administration pushed to shutter the agency.