The last time we shrank the federal workforce

Summary

Planet Money: The Last Time We Shrank the Federal Workforce – Episode Summary

Release Date: March 12, 2025
Host: Sarah Gonzalez and Amanda Aronczyk
Guest: Elaine Kmark, Federal Workforce Expert at the Brookings Institution

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1. Introduction

In the latest episode of Planet Money, hosts Sarah Gonzalez and Amanda Aronczyk delve into the complexities of shrinking the federal workforce. Drawing parallels between the current Trump administration's efforts and the significant workforce reductions of the 1990s under President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, the episode provides a comprehensive analysis of government efficiency measures and their long-term impacts.

2. Federal Workforce Overview

The episode opens with a brief overview of the federal workforce's size, highlighting that "the actual size of the federal government, like the number of federal employees, hasn't changed much in 50 years. 50 years ago, there were 2.1 million federal employees. Today, there are 2.3 million." (05:20) This stagnation is contextualized against a 68% growth in the U.S. population, emphasizing challenges in maintaining proportional workforce numbers.

3. Historical Context: The 1990s Workforce Reduction

Elaine Kmark, a renowned expert on federal workforce dynamics, provides an insightful retrospective on the 1990s efforts to reduce government bloat. During this period, under Clinton and Gore's administration, the federal workforce peaked at over 3 million employees. Elaine was pivotal in steering the National Performance Review (NPR), also known as "Reinventing Government" (REGO), aimed at making the federal government more efficient and cost-effective.

4. Strategies for Reducing Workforce

a. Modernization and Efficiency

One of REGO's primary objectives was modernization. "Back in 1993, no federal agency had a website. And we started telling agencies to build websites," Elaine explains (08:03). This digital transformation was intended to streamline operations and improve accessibility.

b. Cutting Waste Through Regulation Reform

A significant portion of the effort focused on identifying and eliminating unnecessary regulations. Elaine recounts the infamous tale of the "$400 federal hammer," a symbol of bureaucratic inefficiency. "They added cost to everything from hammers and staplers to airplanes," she notes (09:20). The team meticulously identified and dismantled obsolete statutes and convoluted procurement processes that burdened agencies with excessive red tape.

c. Targeted Job Cuts and Buyouts

After extensive analysis, Elaine and her team determined that job cuts alone would not yield substantial savings. Instead, they focused on eliminating redundant roles and offering buyouts. "A lot of these were buyouts. We had buyout authority from Congress," Elaine clarifies (17:24). Over eight years, approximately 426,000 federal employees were let go, achieving the smallest federal workforce since the mid-20th century and saving taxpayers around $136 billion (17:39).

5. Notable Achievements and Cultural Shifts

REGO's efforts were not just about numbers but also about transforming the bureaucratic culture. "Al Gore was giving out these awards to people and agencies that found the government the most savings," Amanda highlights (12:08). The Hammer Awards became a symbol of efficiency, despite their "tacky" appearance (12:35).

6. Current Efforts Under the Trump Administration

Fast forward to the present, the Trump administration, through a unit referred to as "Doge," is attempting to replicate and even accelerate the federal workforce reduction. Unlike the methodical approach of the 1990s, current efforts are marked by "chaotic" and "mixed messages," including "blanket" firings and abrupt policy changes (02:42, 03:40).

7. Challenges and Pushback

Elaine Kmark expresses skepticism about the current administration's approach:

• "This is the thing about DOGE that's so weird, is that they're ignoring Congress so much," she states (18:14).
• A federal judge ruled against the administration's broad firing powers, emphasizing the necessity of "following established channels" (23:29).

The episode underscores the complexities of workforce reductions, highlighting that:

• "Federal contractors outnumber civil servants," adding another layer of difficulty (21:55).
• Regulatory and procedural hurdles make mass firings impractical and legally challenging.

8. The Role of Federal Contractors

Federal contractors play a significant role in the government's operational capacity. Elaine provides insights into their functions:

• Goods Contractors: Responsible for tangible items like "trucks for the army" or "yellow legal pads for the Justice Department" (22:15).
• Services Contractors: Handle specialized tasks such as cybersecurity, scientific expertise, and janitorial services (22:59).

The administration's discontinuation of some contracts has already led to job losses among these contractors, further complicating workforce reduction efforts.

9. Future Implications and Legislative Interventions

Elaine anticipates a "messy" process moving forward due to the current administration's disregard for legislative protocols. She predicts Congress will intervene to reinstate critical positions, especially in essential agencies like NOAA. This intervention is likely driven by concerns over national safety and effectiveness:

• "If NOAA misses or predicts a hurricane late... What is Congress going to do? It's going to say, holy moly, put those people back," Elaine notes (24:51).

10. Lessons from the Past and Optimism for the Future

Despite the turmoil surrounding current efforts, Elaine maintains a level of optimism based on historical precedents:

• "We passed about 100 laws over the seven years," she remarks about REGO's success (16:07).
• Elaine believes that a structured, bipartisan approach, akin to the 1990s, is essential for meaningful and sustainable workforce reductions.

11. Conclusion

The episode concludes by juxtaposing the ambitious yet orderly approach of the 1990s with the tumultuous current administration's tactics. Elaine Kmark’s experiences serve as both a cautionary tale and a beacon of hope, illustrating that while reducing government size is feasible, it requires meticulous planning, legislative cooperation, and a clear focus on eliminating inefficiencies without undermining essential services.

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Notable Quotes:

• Elaine Kmark on Regulation Costs: "They added cost to everything from hammers and staplers to airplanes." (09:20)
• Elaine on Coronavirus Workforce Changes: "But today, they offered buyouts to every single government employee, but not enough people took the buyouts." (02:42)
• Elaine on Congressional Involvement: "You go to Congress... they gotta reverse them." (16:05)
• Elaine on Federal Contractors: "We have more contractors than we have civil servants." (21:52)

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Production Credits:

This episode was produced and reported by Willa Rubin, edited by Jess Jiang, and engineered by Jimmy Keeley. Fact-checking was assisted by Sierra Juarez, with Alex Goldmark serving as executive producer. Special thanks to Ben Zipper at the Economic Policy Institute for insights on the federal workforce.

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For those interested in understanding the intricate dynamics of federal workforce management and government efficiency measures, this episode offers a wealth of information, historical context, and expert analysis.

Transcript

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[Sarah Gonzalez]

This is Planet Money from npr.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Tell me again how to pronounce your name.

[Atir Cole]

A tear. So think of a teardrop.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Like a teardrop is rolling down. Okay? Yes.

[Atir Cole]

But happy tears.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Are you happy?

[Elaine Kmark]

I'm.

[Atir Cole]

I'm fine. I'm fine.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

A tear. Cole is doing fine for a federal worker right now.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

For the past year and a half, Atir has been working on basically tracking biological things that can kill you.

[Atir Cole]

So, like anthrax, Zika, contaminated food, even like, lead poisoning?

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Yeah. So like, if someone eats some bad lettuce with E. Coli, a doctor would flag it. And then this system that ATIR works on would help everyone try to identify where the E. Coli outbreak is coming from.

[Atir Cole]

This system is where all the puzzle pieces come together, and it's how you move quickly in a moment of emergency.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Ateer worked closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Technically, though, her job was at this government unit called the US Digital Service. But. But on the day of President Trump's inauguration, ATIR found out that was changing.

[Atir Cole]

By the way, there was an executive.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Order where now Doge, Doge, the US Digital Service was now going to be the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk's team.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

So did anything change? Did your email change?

[Atir Cole]

No, Nothing. Nothing.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Was your boss like Elon Musk?

[Atir Cole]

No, my boss was still my boss.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Atir says some Doge people did ask everyone on her team for this interview, like a tell us what you do here interview.

[Atir Cole]

The whole call didn't even last 15 minutes. I think we wrapped up within 10. The questions were softballs, like, what is your greatest achievement here? And what do you think about Doge?

[Amanda Aronczyk]

After your 15 minute, which wasn't even 15 minute interview with Doge, did you have another interaction with anyone who worked on that side of things?

[Atir Cole]

Not a single one for atir.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Doge seemed like a black box, and she was kind of like, I don't know if I want to be on this team. The stated goal of Doge is to cut government, and they're trying to achieve that by gutting agencies, backing out of contracts, cutting jobs.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

And it's been A little, little chaotic.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

A lot of mixed messages.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

A lot of mixed messages. Like, first, they offered buyouts to every single government employee, but not enough people took the buyouts. Then thousands of workers were fired in, like, a blanket way. But then, oh, no, a judge said they actually can't do that. There was that email where government employees were asked to reply with the five things they did that week. The White House told agencies they wanted maximum elimination of functions. But then the White House was like, oh, wait, no, actually, we don't have the authority to tell agencies what to cut. Some people have been rehired after they were fired.

[Richard Reeves]

We don't know exactly how many people have been fired. The Trump administration has said it wants to cut up to 76,000 jobs from the Defense Department, 80,000 jobs from Veterans Affairs.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

The IRS is preparing to cut up to 50,000 jobs. The Education Department just announced it's cutting half of its staff, like, 2,000 jobs.

[Richard Reeves]

The goal seems to be ultimately hundreds.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Of thousands of job cuts.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

That would be a lot of jobs, but we've done it before. We've actually cut more. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Sarah Gonzalez.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

And I'm Amanda Aronczyk. This is not the first time the US has tried to massively shrink the federal workforce in a big, flashy way. It happened in the 1990s under a Democrat, though not quite at this pace.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Today on the show, what we learned the last time, where they found waste, and why jobs just might not be the best place to look if you're trying to save taxpayers money.

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[Amanda Aronczyk]

Okay. The actual size of the federal government, like the number of federal employees, hasn't changed much in 50 years. 50 years ago, there were 2.1 million federal employees. Today, there are 2.3 million. This is not including the military. We are only talking about civilian jobs here. Also, this number doesn't include postal workers.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

So, yeah, the number of federal jobs has stayed about the same Even though the U.S. population has grown by 68%. But, you know, yeah, maybe there's still too many jobs. Okay, surely you think that there is some waste in the government. Right. Or that there are some federal positions maybe that shouldn't even exist.

[Elaine Kmark]

Absolutely. Yep.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

You think that?

[Elaine Kmark]

I do think that. I do think that. You can probably always find 5%, maybe 10% in waste and unnecessary workers.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

And you would know, because you have done this exact thing 30 plus years ago.

[Elaine Kmark]

That's what we did.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Elaine Kmark studies the federal workforce and government operations at the Brookings Institution. And Elaine knows probably better than anyone about bloat in the federal government, because back in the 90s, the number of federal jobs actually peaked at over 3 million. And Elaine's job was to bring that number way, way down. But she did more than just that. Her job was to look at all government waste.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Yeah, at the time, there was this story circling around about government waste and government inefficiency. And it all started with this mythical hammer. The story was, if you bought a hammer, like on the street, your local hardware store, it would cost $6. But if the federal government bought a hammer, it cost $400, the $400 federal hammer. And it cost this much because of all the federal rules and regulations around buying something for the government. The paperwork, the red tape, the people involved in just procuring the hammer.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

When Bill Clinton became president, he and Al Gore in particular, vowed to cut government waste.

[Al Gore]

Our goal is to make the entire federal government both less expensive and more efficient and to change the culture of our national bureaucracy.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Clinton and Gore called their big effort to find government inefficiencies and shrink the federal workforce the National Performance Review. And it was sometimes also called reinventing government, or rego.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

You can kind of say that REGO was the precursor to doge. And they hired Elaine Kmark to steer the ship for their big effort.

[Elaine Kmark]

Al Gore was my boss. Yes, I reported to Al Gore.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

There were three prongs to rigo's mission. They were gonna make the federal government more modern, like get every federal agency on email and actually just on the Internet.

[Elaine Kmark]

Back in 1993, no federal agency had a website. And we started telling agencies to build websites.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

They also wanted to improve customer service in the government. You know, like Reduce wait times if you were to call up, say, the irs.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Yeah. And of course, they wanted to also cut waste. And that is the side of things that we are going to focus on today.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Elaine and a team of government employees started by looking at all of the potential areas to cut.

[Elaine Kmark]

You have to go into the agencies and figure out what they're doing that's important that you don't want to mess up. And what they're doing that, frankly, isn't all that important.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

After six months of looking around, they found that cutting jobs wasn't really going to bring the big, big savings.

[Elaine Kmark]

A lot of times the inefficiencies were not people inefficiencies. A lot of times the inefficiencies were obsolete statutes or obsolete regulations that were requiring the civil service to do things in a sort of backwards, convoluted way that was costing money and costing time.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Elaine actually found that the most cumbersome regulations were around procurements, the way the government, mainly the Defense Department, had to buy things. It's this massive system of rules and checks and balances for even the tiniest purchases.

[Elaine Kmark]

They added cost. They would add cost to everything from hammers and staplers to airplanes.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

The mythical expensive government hammer was real. And Aline says they also found, like the over regulated expensive ashtray and super expensive government floor wax. They collected all their inefficiencies from across the government. And on September 7, 1993, Elaine and Al Gore presented their big report on the White House lawn with a lot of fanfare.

[Al Gore]

If you want to know why government doesn't work, look behind you.

[Richard Reeves]

Behind Al Gore were these giant stacks.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Of paper taller than him.

[Al Gore]

On forklifts, the answer is at least partly on those forklifts.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

It's always show these things, you know. Al Gore also went on David Letterman to brag about all of the inefficiencies that they found.

[Al Gore]

Please welcome the Vice President of the United States, Al Gore.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Al Gore actually showed up with the symbolic, expensive government hammer to smash the symbolic, expensive government ashtray.

[Al Gore]

And I thought we would give it a try here. All right, I'll do it first. Cool. Yeah.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Today, Elon Musk is waving around a chainsaw, like, look at all these jobs we're slashing back then their chainsaw was this hammer.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

It was a hammer. Yeah. And their big report said, we are going to overhaul that massive procurement system. All the regulations around how the federal government can buy things. And also, yeah, a bunch of people were gonna lose their jobs.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Elaine found 252,000 jobs that she said should be cut. So there was a while there where Elaine definitely knew that federal employees did not like her all that much.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Oh.

[Elaine Kmark]

Because, you know, because I heard that they didn't. People would say, oh, God, you're Elaine Kmark. You know, And I think today they think I'm wonderful and wish I was back. Okay.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Elaine honestly can't talk about what she did in the 90s without, like, alluding to what is going on now. But even she will admit things got a little bit weird back then, too.

[Richard Reeves]

Yeah.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Al Gore was giving out these awards to people and agencies that found the government the most savings, not just through job cuts, any savings.

[Elaine Kmark]

We introduced something called the Hammer Awards in the Clinton administration, and here is what it consisted of. A big, tacky picture frame with some blue velvet in the back and a hammer attached to it, and a red, white, and blue ribbon and a note from Al Gore, handwritten, that said, thank you for creating a government that works better and costs less. We gave out more than 1,000.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Now, was it a real hammer? A real hammer in a frame?

[Elaine Kmark]

Yeah, it was a real hammer. Yeah, we put a real hammer in a real picture frame. I mean, it was pretty tacky looking.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Yeah, kind of tacky. But also their effort was pretty comprehensive.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

To be clear, that hammer, only $6.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

They were very proud of their $6 hammer awards. And, you know, they did many, many rounds of reviews and cuts over many, many years. They cut jobs, they cut whole offices, and they got pretty granular.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Like, they found all of these small programs and agencies that were kind of like little snapshots of history, that maybe they made sense at one point in time, but really, really did not anymore.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

You point to a couple. Which is the Tea Tasters Board.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Uh huh.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

What is the Tea Tasters Board?

[Elaine Kmark]

Well, obviously the Tea Tasters Board was left over from the Revolutionary War.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Oh, right. Obviously. This is basically the start of our relationship with tea. Okay, wait, these were tea tasters?

[Elaine Kmark]

Yeah, they were tea tasters.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Like a real little agency with paid government employees under the Food and Drug Administration who met every year in a converted Navy warehouse in Brooklyn to sample the tea that was being imported into.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

The US So refined.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Right. The board was technically a remnant from the 1890s when there were these tea exporters sending the US like their bad scrap tea.

[Elaine Kmark]

I don't know why they were still in the government. Right. I guess to assure the quality of the tea coming into the United States. But it was obviously silly. It was obviously unnecessary, and we closed it.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Her team cut 250 of these programs and agencies. No more tea tasting.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

There were also subsidies that Elaine says were costing taxpayers money that they also got rid of, like the wool and mohair subsidy.

[Elaine Kmark]

Mohair is a fabric. Okay. That goes in sweaters and stuff. All right. It's like wool. Okay.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

A lot of wool and mohair were coming from sheep and goats in places.

[Elaine Kmark]

Like Wyoming before and during the Korean War. We knew that American soldiers were gonna be fighting in very cold territory, and we wanted to make sure there was enough wool and mohair for their uniforms. So, in fact, a subsidy was given to farmers under national defense thinking so that we'd have enough wool and mohair for uniforms.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

It was like, to boost domestic production of wool, basically.

[Elaine Kmark]

Yeah.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Ok. Yeah.

[Elaine Kmark]

Domestic. Of wool and mohair, obviously, since the Korean War, which was in the 1950s. Right. It was no longer a national defense priority to have enough wool and mohair around. And so we got rid of the subsidy.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

It can be quite hard to get rid of a subsidy. Like, it doesn't just go away. Right. Like the Wyoming farmers, I'm sure. Push back.

[Elaine Kmark]

Right.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

This wool and mohair thing is actually really indicative of how difficult it is to undo things in the federal government. Even a really small, not that beneficial anymore subsidy. What was the pushback like?

[Elaine Kmark]

They pushed back on it. And in fact, the subsidy came back, of course, couple years later, it came back in a lesser form, but it did come back to Elaine.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Nothing felt easy to get rid of. Everything took time. Clinton didn't just announce he wanted something and, boom, it happened.

[Elaine Kmark]

Oh, no. You go to Congress.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Oh, you go to Congress.

[Elaine Kmark]

You go to Congress. Yeah. To reverse the stat. They make them. They gotta reverse them. So we went to Congress and we had to go one by one to some of the really old guys and convince them that we needed a new bill.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

When they wanted to overhaul the way the government bought hammers or planes that the military uses to move other planes, they passed a procurement bill through Congress. When they undid the tea tasters and the wool law, Elaine says they needed bipartisan support. Congress voted on those things.

[Elaine Kmark]

It was a process, but we passed a lot of laws. We passed, I think, about 100 laws over the seven years. So, I mean, it's not impossible.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

By the end of Clinton's second term, Elaine and her team had cut the equivalent of 640,000 pages of internal agency rules. They closed nearly 2,000 regional field offices, which they called obsolete because everyone could communicate by email. Now they cut 78,000 managers and many more jobs, too.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

By the end of the eight years. It was like almost 500,000 federal workers. Yes.

[Elaine Kmark]

426,000.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Sorry. Yes. Rounding up.

[Elaine Kmark]

Yeah. So 426,000.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

So, like, you did. You did fire a ton of people.

[Elaine Kmark]

Well, but remember, a lot of these were not firings. Some of them were. A lot of these were buyouts. We had buyout authority from the Congress, which these guys don't, by the way. Um, we had hiring freezes, which these guys are using.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

When they finished their big effort, the Clinton administration had created the smallest federal government since Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, and they ended up saving taxpayers about $136 billion in all over the whole eight year effort. So, you know, not groundbreaking, but, yeah, sizable.

[Elaine Kmark]

It worked. It was not as dramatic as what they're doing now, but we did have backlash. What we did not were lawsuits. Okay. Nobody sued us because we went through the established channels for doing these things.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Yeah. What Elaine and her team did over eight years, the Trump administration says it will do over a year and a half. Doge is supposed to cease to exist by July 2026.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

And also, Trump is just going about it totally differently than Clinton and Elaine, for example, not with Congress.

[Elaine Kmark]

I mean, this is the thing about DOGE that's so weird, is that they're ignoring Congress so much.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

After the break. If we cut every single federal job that Trump wants, how much money would that save?

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Also why Elaine is actually a little optimistic about the future of Trump's job cuts.

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[Sarah Gonzalez]

Time a president really focused on shrinking the size of the government was 32 years ago, with Elaine Kmark leading the effort. So she does have, like, unique insight into what Trump is doing now. Are you just like the most sought after you've ever been in a long time?

[Elaine Kmark]

Well, ironically, I have been talking to my former colleagues, and we think we've gotten more press for the National Performance Review in the last six weeks than we did in the whole seven years the damn thing ran.

[Richard Reeves]

Since leaving the White House, Elaine has focused on government operations. She's published these big studies on things like, is the size of the government too big? Are there too many employees?

[Sarah Gonzalez]

The Trump administration says there are too many. So we asked Elaine, just how much money can you save by cutting jobs? And she says, here's one way to think about it let's say you cut every single federal worker. There were no more federal jobs. None. The US would save $271 billion a year. That's salaries and benefits. $271 billion. That's how much we save. Spend a year on federal employees.

[Elaine Kmark]

On federal employees. Yep. That is everything.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Okay, $271 billion sounds big, and it is big. But for context, it's like 4% of the federal budget. 65% of the federal budget goes to paying for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the other things the US has to pay for mandatory spending. Right. We pay trillions and trillions of dollars out in those benefits every year, which Elon Musk did just say maybe next. But the point is, federal jobs are just not the expensive stuff.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

And also, of course, the US Is not going to fire every single federal employee to get that full $271 billion in savings.

[Elaine Kmark]

It's impossible to cut all 271 billion of this. You wouldn't have a government left. In other words, you're lucky to cut 50 billion.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Okay. But to be fair, if we only look at the official federal jobs, that doesn't really give us the whole picture because there is another kind of like, hidden category of worker doing government ish work that the government also pays for. Federal contractors.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Basically, the government can't do all the work it needs to do with just the official federal employees. So they hire contractors. And there are a lot of them.

[Elaine Kmark]

Oh, yeah, no, we've got more contractors than. We have civil servants.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

We have more contractors than civil servants.

[Elaine Kmark]

Yeah, that's the estimate. Yeah.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

We don't actually know how many federal contractors there are. According to Elaine's estimates, there are 2.7 million individual contract workers. Some say more. And that is on top of the official federal employee numbers. And contract workers have been losing their jobs too, when the Trump administration stopped paying some of its contracts.

[Richard Reeves]

Now, there are two kinds of federal contractors. There's the contract workers that get paid to make goods for the U.S. so.

[Elaine Kmark]

A contract for goods would be anything from trucks for the army to buying floor mats for a federal office building for when it rains. Okay. Or buying yellow legal pads for the Justice Department.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

A lot of the goods we contract out for are for defense. We pay contractors to build aircraft carriers and to make socks for the military. And this kind of contract work, people generally think it makes the government more efficient. Like, we don't need the federal government to make yellow legal pads for judges.

[Elaine Kmark]

Right.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Or to manufacture floor mats for when it rains.

[Elaine Kmark]

Right.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Then there's contract workers. We pay for services.

[Elaine Kmark]

Services are anything from scientific expertise to NIH for cancer to janitorial services in the courthouse.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

It's also things like cybersecurity experts, nuclear physicists, translators.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

So that's who makes up the official and unofficial federal workforce. And Elaine says both are actually difficult to fire.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Elaine can appreciate at least the spirit behind what the Trump administration is trying to accomplish with all these cuts. But she says there's a process, like when the government fires someone. Elaine says there has to be a reason, like performance or, you know, we're getting rid of this whole division because we have email now. You can't just blanket. Everyone who is probationary is fired. Elaine says you have to do it piece by piece. And she says only each individual agency, like the Department of Defense, can fire its own employees, which the Trump administration has not been doing. That's why they've been getting pushback and lawsuits related to the firings. The White House Office of Personnel and Management mass fired probationary workers. And a federal judge recently ruled that it did not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency, direct quote.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Elaine expects more and more people will be hired back, if not because of court orders, and there are many, then because Elaine says Congress will start to step in. Like, let's take noaa. She says the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they track hurricanes and tsunamis and things like that. They give us lots and lots of warning when something bad is going to happen.

[Richard Reeves]

They've cut 1,300 jobs already and are planning to cut another thousand.

[Elaine Kmark]

The first time NOAA misses or predicts a hurricane late or the first time they are three days later in forecasting a hurricane than they should be, and people don't have a chance to get out on time. What is Congress going to do? It's going to say, holy moly, put those people back. Okay? Or put some people back.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

The Trump administration has already tried to hire back a bunch of workers that were fired. Like the people who work on the bird flu that is making egg prices so high right now. The people who work on the nuclear.

[Elaine Kmark]

Weapons programs and musk quickly reinstated some of those employees or tried. Yeah, that's right. Because of the way they did it, where they simply cut them off and they cut off their email instantly and take them out of all systems. They can't find some of them.

[Richard Reeves]

Elaine actually thinks things may not be.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

So messy going forward.

[Richard Reeves]

And there's a big reason why. Because the first rounds of Firings were done before some Cabinet secretaries were even confirmed.

[Elaine Kmark]

Now you have a cabinet secretary sitting there and Doge says, cut this many people. And the Cabinet secretary says, hey, wait a minute, just hold your horses, right? I want to look and see.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Take the Defense Department. It was initially announced that the Defense department would cut 76,000 defense related civilian jobs, but there are laws that the Cabinet secretary, Pete Hegseth, has to follow.

[Elaine Kmark]

He then said, hold on, hold your horses. I. Under statute, the secretary of defense has to justify before he does any firing, he has to study and justify that the firing will not decrease our national defense readiness. So he had to go through that step. Okay, and he's still going to cut people. But I'm thinking that this may happen in a less chaotic and somewhat more sensible way once there are Cabinet secretaries in place.

[Richard Reeves]

And Elaine wonders if the Trump administration might focus more on the area that she found so ripe for savings 32 years ago. Regulations.

[Elaine Kmark]

That was something that I was hoping the DOGE effort would do is cut regulations because, I mean, every couple years you gotta do this because some regulations just get obsolete.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

Deregulation is coming. Trump issued an executive order telling all agencies they had 60 days to identify regulations that could go, and their deadline is late April.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

By the way, Atir Cole, the federal.

[Richard Reeves]

Worker who found herself suddenly on the.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

Doge team, she was not fired.

[Richard Reeves]

She quit.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

She says she is not going to apply to any federal government jobs right.

[Richard Reeves]

Now, but says she will in the future.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

The best way to support Planet Money and the work that we do is to become a member of Planet Money plus or NPR Plus. You get sponsor free listening and bonus episodes and it really means a lot to us.

[Richard Reeves]

It is super helpful.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

You can learn more or sign [e-mail] and thank you to everyone who has already signed up.

[Sarah Gonzalez]

This episode of Planet Money was produced and also reported a little bit by Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jiang and engineered by Jimmy Keeley with fact checking help from Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. We also want to give a special thanks to Ben Zipper at the Economic Policy Institute. He also really helped us understand who the federal workforce is. I'm Sarah Gonzalez.

[Amanda Aronczyk]

And I'm Amanda Oronczyk. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

[NPR]

Are we overlooking the challenges facing men without college degrees? Richard Reeves thinks so.

[Planet Money]

There are a lot of guys out there who are actually poorer than their dads.

[NPR]

Reeves heads the American Institute for Boys and Men.

[Planet Money]

Have we updated our view about the role of men as quickly as we've changed the economy around them. And the answer is no.

[NPR]

That's from a recent Planet Money bonus episode, a look at the economic and cultural struggles of working class men. To hear it and get sponsor free listening, sign up for NPR, just go to plus.NPR.org.