#federal-workforce

#federal-workforce

The purge began late Friday night, four days after Donald Trump returned to the White House. Seventeen inspectors general-internal watchdogs embedded throughout the federal government-received emails notifying them of their termination. Three weeks later came the Valentine's Day Massacre: the ousting of tens of thousands of federal employees with little discernible pattern, across agencies and across the country. By April, entire departments-the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau-had been gutted.

Earlier this month, billionaire Elon Musk, the one-time DOGE leader and Trump adviser, sat down with Katie Miller on her podcast to reflect on his time with the administration. He called DOGE's work "a little bit successful" but said he wouldn't do it again if given the chance. "We were somewhat successful, Musk said. "I mean we stopped a lot of funding that really just made no sense, that was just entirely wasteful."

Federal data belatedly released Tuesday shows that the US unemployment rate rose to the highest level in four years last month as President Donald Trump's administration continues its assault on the government's workforce and American corporations lay off workers at a level not seen in decades.

Forcing a large swath of the federal workforce not to work for going on a full month is having significant and lasting impacts on the economy, according to a non-partisan legislative branch review, causing a loss of at least $7 billion dollars from the gross domestic product. That figure would grow to $11 billion if the shutdown lasts another two weeks or $14 billion if it were to last until Nov. 26, the Congressional Budget Office found in a report on Wednesday.

As the Trump administration shrinks the federal workforce, the private sector is developing artificial intelligence that could fill in gaps - specifically, agentic AI, technology that can take action without precise instructions. The "agentic enterprise," where humans work alongside AI agents, was the theme of Salesforce's annual conference last week. Currently, it's largely a hypothetical in the federal context. Agencies don't have Salesforce-powered agents in production, and what exactly counts as an AI agent is debatable, as the term is used to describe systems with varying degrees of autonomy.

ARLINGTON, Va. Only two states, Virginia and New Jersey, hold their elections for governor the year after the presidential election and the year before the midterms. The races are often seen as a test of voter sentiment, but just weeks out from the election, two late-emerging issues in Virginia may be reshaping that state's contest. Abigail Spanberger, a former member of Congress, is the Democratic candidate, and Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate, is the commonwealth's current lieutenant governor.

The "reductions in force," or RIFs, is the latest blow to the federal workforce, which is already down 200,000 employees this year. Vought announced the layoffs on X, saying, "The RIFs have begun." What they're saying: "We'll be cutting very popular democrat programs that aren't popular with republicans," President Trump said Thursday at the White House. A spokesperson for the OMB confirmed the RIFs have begun and are "substantial." They did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment specifying which departments were impacted.

On the first day of the federal government shutdown, FBI Director Kash Patel dismissed a trainee agent after learning that the person had displayed a rainbow Pride flag at their desk during a prior assignment in Los Angeles during the Biden administration. The move, first reported by MSNBC's Carol Leonnig, a multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with deep law enforcement sourcing,

In August, months after Elon Musk left the federal government, the director of the Office of Personnel Management offered the first hard estimate of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency's impact on the civil service. The government would likely end 2025 with about 300,000 fewer employees than it had at the start of the year, he told reporters. Most resignations were attributable to the incentives DOGE had offered the federal workforce to resign their positions. The total figure amounted to one in eight workers.

President Donald Trump won a second term with a promise to support the working-class voters who backed him. But many workers now feel less secure and find their jobs harder to do - squeezed by immigration crackdowns, federal layoffs and funding cuts, and weakened labor protections. The uncertainty fueled by these policies, combined with Trump's trade wars, is beginning to surface in economic data, economists say.

"AI is the number one thing that is going to help people mitigate the staffing shortages," said Gregory Barbaccia, the chief information officer for the U.S. government, highlighting the administration's reliance on technology to counteract employee loss.

Kupor emphasized that "OPM is its own agency" and will make decisions in the best interests of its operations, despite seeking to collaborate with the Department of Government Efficiency.

I don't think the commissioner of Social Security is like a globally known title. It is to you, right? But, like, it wasn't to me, he said.

"Gerry lived his life to give back to others and make our community better. He looked out for the disadvantaged and voiceless."

Vought has worked closely with Musk to ideologically reshape the federal workforce, aiming to instill a sense of fear among civil servants and cut funding drastically.