The NPR Politics Podcast - How Trump Has Reshaped The Federal Workforce

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to "drain the swamp." Now that he's in his second term, how have his efforts to shrink the federal workforce played out? This podcast: White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram, labor and workplace correspondent Andrea Hsu, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, my name is Jack. I'm sitting on a boat in Gainesville, Florida on Lake Noonan watching the sunset and reading a book. There's probably, by my count, 10 or so gators in the water around me with their heads up and the dragonflies are landing on them like it's no problem. This podcast was recorded at 1238 PM on Thursday, May 29th, 2025. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be watching the sunset and there'll probably be more gators. Enjoy. That might be my favorite timestamp.

I hope they've changed for the better. Whatever Jack's vibes are, I want them. That was immaculate. I would be so anxious sitting on that boat. For a kid from Queens, I have to tell you, being surrounded by a bunch of gators in the swamp feels like my worst nightmare. I think they're kind of cute. I'm a fan.

Yeah, okay, until you get close to them. But you're also talking to somebody who saw a possum and thought it was a rat. All right. Demenigo, we need to get you out into the wild. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Deepa Sivaram. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And NPR's labor correspondent, Andrea Shue is here with us today. Hey, Andrea. Hey. All right. So today on the show, we want to talk about President Trump's efforts to change the way the federal government works. In just four months, the Trump administration has offered employees buyouts and early retirement,

exerted control over some agencies that have long been considered independent and other agencies that aren't even part of the executive branch. So with all of that, Andrea, has the government actually been reshaped? Well, it certainly isn't what it looked like on January 20th when President Trump took office. But, you know, it hasn't really taken a new shape yet. It is still a work in progress with lots of lawsuits getting in the way of what the president wants to do. With the changes that have come, you know, what have they looked like? Like what has been reshaped so far?

Yeah, well, in some cases, you have entire agencies that have been dismantled. USAID is pretty much dismantled. There are others that Trump has tried to shudder, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where because of lawsuits, people are still on the payroll, but it's not clear that people are actually getting anything done.

Now you have thousands of people who are on the payroll, but it's not clear that people are actually getting anything done. Now you have, you know, thousands of people who are on administrative leave, meaning they're not going to work. They don't even have their equipment in many cases, but they're still being paid. And then in other places, you have people who are going to work and, you know, may even be in meetings, but I'm hearing from them that they're not really doing a whole lot of work or they haven't been given new assignments because there is this expectation that they could be laid off. There are some people who have been fired, you know, back in February, agencies fired around 25,000 or so probationary employees. These were typically newer employees, but then they were reinstated under court order and then

that court order was lifted and a smaller number of them had been fired again. So you do have some people that were fired. And then there's a bunch of people who have gotten, I mean, thousands, more than 10,000 people who have gotten layoff notices, but that's now on hold because of a court order. The largest group of people who have actually left the government who aren't working anymore are the people who took the deferred resignation offer. That was this offer to quit their jobs now and still get paid through September. So we also don't have good numbers for that. We know in the first round, the government said about 75,000 people took it. In the second round, a bunch of agencies offered it a second time and a whole lot more people took it. At the

US Department of Agriculture, for example, more than 15,000 people, around 15% of the workforce have taken this resignation offer and about a quarter of those took it in the first round and three quarters took it in the second round. So that's kind of the big picture. It's a lot of stuff in flux. It's a lot of limbo for federal workers and still a lot to come in terms of the president's efforts to make it a lot smaller than it has been for years. SONIA DARAGOS And you're saying the lawsuits are complicating some of this. Can you talk to me about why that's an added complication?

KATE BAKER There's so many different lawsuits happening. And I mean, I'll start with one of the big ones, which was called the omnibus lawsuit because it covers so many different agencies. Some labor unions and some nonprofits and some local governments sued basically saying President Trump doesn't have the authority to carry out this huge reorganization and these mass layoffs in the federal government without the cooperation of Congress. So a federal judge has paused those reorganization plans at about 20 some agencies. The government has challenged that. They've asked the Supreme Court to step in.

So a lot of that is on pause right now. But what that means is that a lot of people are in limbo. They don't really know what the future is going to look like. Agencies had already issued layoff notices or reduction in force notices to some people like at Health and Human Services. We're talking CDC and the FDA and the National Institutes of Health, you know, around 10,000 people had received these layoff notices back at the end of March, beginning of April. They were supposed to be formally separated at

the beginning of June, but that's now on hold. So, Domenico, at the same time that all of this is going on, these lawsuits are complicating everything, I want to point out this is an administration that hasn't exactly been very deferential to the courts thus far. So even if the courts are saying, you know, hey, you know, you've tried to reduce this XYZ agency, but you have to put a pause on it, does that actually hold any weight? Well, I mean, this is a president that wants to test the limits, right? He wants to be able to try to consolidate power as much as possible within the executive

branch and he wants to be able to push as much as he possibly can to the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative supermajority. And Trump wants to see just how much he can possibly push. What are the guardrails? The Supreme Court will certainly lay that out. If you get to a place where the Supreme Court outright says, no, you have to put these people back in their jobs and they don't do it, then we are really at a place of constitutional crisis. SONIA DARA-MURPHY And I will point out too, like, I don't know

if we've underscored this point enough, the president and the Trump administration taking the control of reshaping the government, I mean, they are essentially taking what is Congress's authority in that process. RICK VISCOMI Well, there's a lot of what Congress has clearly authorized, you know, funding for different agencies, funding for different programs. Remember, Congress is supposed to control the purse strings and the president's supposed to control the sword. So Congress and the president are supposed to work together on these things, but there's

been a lot that Trump has tried to go around Congress on, and that's what's really being tested in the courts to see whether or not he has the authority or doesn't have the authority as it relates to Congress. All right. Time for a quick break and more in a moment. And we're back. Domenico, I want to kick things off here with a very basic question. When President Trump said he was going to reshape the federal government, do all of these cuts what what was his goal? Well, I mean if you remember even back to his 2016 campaign

He talked about the swamp and how there is a deep state that was out to get Conservatives and he certainly you had enough things that he could point to you know over the last ten years Where he tried to say this is an example of it whether or not it was Legitimate or not. He would say that these things show weaponization of government or show People trying to stand in the way of getting things done for the MAGA movement So part of this is just quote-unquote dismantling the deep state and part of how they felt they could do that is dismantling the deep state. And part of how they felt they could do that is through this idea that you create enough chaos, you create enough trauma for people that they don't want to go work for the federal government, that they don't wind up, you know, being people

who are standing in the way of what Trump wants to do. So they're really trying to root out people they feel would slow them down. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of the people I have spoken to who took the you know the voluntary deferred resignation program they say that they didn't want to leave that they really kind of felt forced out by these threats like you know this is a pretty good offer if you don't take this you could be laid off anyway and so I think that it's part of the president's vision of

smaller government. But all this talk about, you know, rooting out waste and fraud and, you know, inefficiency and laziness. I mean, this really struck a lot of employees as, you know, do I actually really want to work for a government that wants to put me in trauma? It kind of reminds me of like traveling somewhere and they're like, hey, it'd be a really good deal on a timeshare. But if you don't act now, you know, that thing is going to be gone. Yeah. And people had so little information that, you know, they really were left trying to

think about, okay, what's going to do the least harm to me? And oftentimes they said they made these life-changing decisions based on rumors. Based on rumors, right. Not enough information. And also this was happening like so early in the administration, right? Yes. And the end of January is when they were first offered this deferred resignation deal. And then a lot of them were offered it again in April. But it's only been four months since Trump came back to Washington.

In your conversations that you've had with federal workers, people who have taken these buyouts and those who have maybe stayed, what is your sense of some of the long-term implications for federal workers, I think, but also just for the general public and their perception of federal workers and the federal workforce? Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to know because things are so in flux as we've been talking about. But, you know, the layoff plans that have, you know, sort of surfaced are really quite

traumatic. I mean, you have departments like, you know, the Housing and Urban Development and the National Science Foundation, where leaders have forecasted cuts of 50% or more of employees. The IRS, the Small Business Administration, cuts of 40%. And I, you know, I've talked to a bunch of people at USDA who worked for this Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. These are the people who protect U.S. agriculture from disease and pests. They had about 1,300 out of 8,000 people leave through the Deferred Resignation Program. And, you know, while the USDA says that the Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, is not going to compromise the critical work of the department, I have,

you know, longtime veterans of USDA worry that U worry that US farmers could be impacted if, you know, there aren't as many people looking out for diseases and pests and, you know, responding to those things quickly. And the impact on these farmers will trickle down to the public through higher food prices. You think about what happened with avian flu. You know, tens of millions of chickens have had to be killed off every year and that sent egg prices soaring. So beyond avian flu, they're worried about all these other, you know, very scary foreign animal diseases that could spread through herds of livestock. It's been really something to see a lot of senators and congresspeople who were in favor of a lot of these cuts saying,

government's just too big, we've got to reduce the size of government. And then when things like tornadoes happen in their states and they see that there were entire offices of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for those little places to be shut down and suddenly you can't tell the weather. They're like, oh, not in my backyard. This isn't what we wanted here. So there's a lot of ways that the federal government touches everybody's daily lives without people really realizing.

And it's really easy to say in an amorphous way that the government's just too big and that it should be reduced. Right. And it's one of those things where we probably on a regular day to day level don't realize how many government agencies, government workers are touching, you know, every aspect of our lives. We should know also the person who was the, you know, figurehead, spearheading a lot of these efforts was Elon Musk, right? And Musk said he was leaving his government service this week. President Trump said that Musk would be the government's

cost cutter. He would save the country trillions of dollars. This was something he said over and over again. You know, Musk was even in the Oval Office multiple times with Donald Trump. I wonder, Domenico, if you could speak to as this era of Elon Musk in the Trump administration comes to an end, you know, what was his role in all of this and how will his legacy here be remembered maybe? Domenico Polignano Well, it's really interesting because you've got Elon Musk, the world's wealthiest person coming into this administration, promising big cuts, $2 trillion in savings. Then it was $1 trillion in savings.

Then it was $150 billion in savings, which according to the federal government's budget is basically a rounding error. And he didn't even really arguably achieve that. So it's been really interesting to see what the legacy of Doge actually is, what it actually accomplished beyond kind of creating chaos and this trauma that we've been talking about. Maybe some of that has been the actual point of it all. And it's certainly Trump was able to use Musk as somebody who could do the unpopular

things, you know, break some china and see where the chips sort of fall. And you know, sometimes that meant breaking stuff that they need. So they're like, oh, let's glue this back together and see if we can get that person to come back to work. And then sometimes it's just disintegrated. And there's people who don't want to go back to work because they feel like this is not the secure job that I thought that I'd be getting. And that may have been the point all along. I would say that, you know, even with him gone, he has installed these DOJ representatives in most agencies who are still there, you know, ordering people to come up with plans

to make these deep cuts. I will say they'll be beyond just the personnel changes that DOJ is doing. They have sucked a lot of data out of the federal government. We don't know exactly where or what they're going to do with it, but we do know that a lot of data has been captured and we just don't know what they're going to do with that. And I think that's a really big question for the future. Interesting. All right, Andrea, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. That's all for today. I'm Deepa Sivaram. I cover the White House.

D. Montanaro I'm Domenico Montanaro, Senior Political Editor and correspondent. D. Montanaro And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.