WASHINGTON — About 426,000 full-time federal employees left the U.S. government in the first 18 months of President Donald Trump's second term — nearly 1 in 5 of the roughly 2.2 million-person workforce he inherited — according to a Washington Post analysis of Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data published on October 29.
Source: Washington Post analysis of OPM data, via Workers Rights News summary
The Post found that turnover ran far above normal in historical terms: about 1 in 7 federal workers left during President Joe Biden's term, and about 1 in 8 during Trump's first term. Political Wire, summarising the Post's reporting on October 29, described the pace as “a faster and deeper overhaul than under any recent predecessor.”
Source: Political Wire, Oct. 29, 2026
The biggest single wave came in September 2025, when about 121,000 people left as the administration's deferred-resignation and early-retirement offers took effect, the Post found.
The government's own counters point the same way
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counts 2,682,000 federal jobs in September 2026, down from 3,010,000 in January 2025 — 328,000 fewer jobs, a drop of 10.9%. The BLS total runs higher than the Post's workforce figure because it includes the U.S. Postal Service. OPM's own workforce site puts the net loss at 264,029 employees since January 20, 2025, as of August 2026 — close to the Post's estimate of a 255,000-worker net decline after new hires are counted.
The numbers measure different things. The 426,000 figure is gross departures — everyone who left. The roughly 255,000–264,000 figures are the net decline after hiring. The BLS count is higher still because it includes Postal Service jobs. All three sources — the Post's analysis, OPM and the BLS — show the same direction: a federal workforce that shrank by roughly a tenth or more.
Who was hit hardest, in survey estimates
Black employees have historically held a larger share of federal jobs — about 428,000 people, or 19% of the federal workforce as of September 2024, compared with about 12% of the U.S. population, according to the Post. That was the last time the government published those figures: OPM no longer releases federal workforce data by race, sex or disability, the Partnership for Public Service has reported.
Without official breakdowns, the Post turned to the monthly household survey the Census Bureau runs for the BLS. By its estimate, Black federal employment fell about 30% from late 2024 to late 2025, while other groups fell about 4%. Comparing January through September 2026 with the same months of 2024, Black federal employment was down about 20%, while white employment fell about 4% and Hispanic employment rose about 6%. The Post and its summariser both caution that survey estimates for a group of this size carry wide margins of error — but the gap between groups is large.
The wider labour-market figures move in the same direction: the Black unemployment rate was 7.0% in September 2026, up from 6.2% in January 2025 and nearly double the 3.6% rate for white workers, according to the BLS figures cited in the reporting.
How the departures were produced
Much of the outflow was organised rather than spontaneous. A separate Government Accountability Office (GAO) report covered in September found that federal employees were paid $9.5 billion in administrative leave during 2025 — a 435% increase over 2023 — with about $6.7 billion of it tied to the deferred-resignation programme, under which workers who agreed to resign were kept on paid leave through the end of the fiscal year. About 140,000 workers took that offer, according to the GAO reporting; the Partnership for Public Service calculates that about 20,000 of the positions left vacant under the programme have since been replaced or rehired.
Source: Reason, reporting the GAO report, Sept. 18, 2026
For Punjabi and other immigrant families in the United States, federal employment has long been one of the most stable routes into the middle class — with benefits, predictable hours and protection from the swings of the private job market. A contraction of this size therefore reaches well beyond Washington: it lands in post offices, veterans' hospitals, tax and benefits offices and federal facilities in every state, where readers encounter the federal government directly.
What happens next
The Post's analysis is a snapshot, not an endpoint: OPM and the BLS continue to publish monthly workforce counts, and the next releases will show whether the pace of departures has slowed now that the deferred-resignation wave has passed, and how much of the loss agencies offset by rehiring — about 20,000 positions so far, on the Partnership for Public Service's count. What is already settled in the data is the scale: on every official counter, the federal workforce of October 2026 is far smaller than the one the administration inherited in January 2025.