Trump’s federal workforce changes cost the economy more than $165.6B, analysis finds

The Trump administration’s reforms to the federal government cost the U.S. economy more than $165.6 billion, according to a new estimate from the Partnership for Public Service.

“This is an administration that has claimed that it is trying to reduce waste, and yet the choices that it has made have created phenomenally larger waste,” said Max Stier — the president and CEO of the good government group, which has been critical of the president’s overhauls to the government workforce — during a press call on April 9. 

One of the largest individual sources of the costs is nearly $53.2 billion tied to disengaged civil servants. Researchers relied on a Gallup finding that disengaged employees cost their organizations about 34% of their salaries, along with the percentage of disengaged federal employees in a 2025 Partnership survey. 

The Partnership conducted its poll after the Office of Personnel Management nixed the 2025 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which annually measures civil servants’ engagement and morale, in order to make changes in compliance with the president’s anti-diversity executive orders. Officials, however, acknowledged that their survey findings are not directly comparable to past FEVS data, as the sample size of the Partnership's poll was more than 10,000 while OPM’s survey covers the entire federal workforce. 

Other cost estimates in the analysis include:

• More than $4.5 billion to pay individuals who left government under the deferred resignation program, through which participants generally received pay and benefits for several months while on leave.
• Nearly $764 million to provide severance pay for more than 10,000 agency employees who were laid off due to a reduction in force. 
• Nearly $444 million to cover administrative leave for more than 20,000 newly hired and promoted civil servants who were still in their one- or two-year probationary periods when they were fired. While the removals of many of these individuals were temporarily blocked after court challenges, which is why they received administrative pay, those orders were ultimately overruled. 

The Partnership also reported that cuts to grants from science agencies, such as the EPA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health, have cost the economy approximately $94.6 billion. Researchers determined that number based on a 2024 study that found every dollar invested in NIH yielded $2.56 in economic activity, which they then multiplied by the amount of unspent funding from terminated grants issued by various agencies. 

Brandon Lardy, the Partnership’s data director, said during the April 9 press briefing that researchers relied on data from government agencies and congressional committees to develop their estimates but also stressed that there are challenges to measuring the consequences of government management changes. 

“We do really try to emphasize that this is a conservative estimate,” he said. “There are lots of additional costs that just simply aren't quantifiable. We really tried to follow where there was actually data available to quantify the costs.”  

The White House did not respond to a request for comment; however, administration officials have argued that downsizing the civil service and cutting government spending are necessary to reduce federal spending.