Swamp Update: 2025 Federal Payroll Down $1.9 Billion, Civilian Headcount Down More than 50,000

New data obtained by Open the Books gives a fresh look at the state of the federal workforce.

We found that headcount, not including the U.S. Postal Service or Department of War, was reduced by a bit more than 50,000 from 2024 to 2025. That came with nearly $2 billion in savings on total salaries.

The data serves as an update to Open the Books’ annual “Mapping the Swamp” reports, outlining the size, scope, cost and perks of the federal civilian workforce employed by taxpayers.

It also offers new insights into the Department of Government Efficiency’s work, including promises of major cuts to the federal workforce.

The Numbers

The final year of the Biden administration, 2024, saw 13,171 employees more than the prior year. For 2025, total headcount shrank by 53,712 (from 1,506,603 to 1,452,891).

Total federal employees, not including Department of War or US Post Office.

The decrease was extended to total salaries, which were reduced by $1.9 billion from 2024 to 2025. Unfortunately, that was only a partial bite out of the $10.1 billion that was added to total salary in 2024.

Gains and Cuts by Agency

21 agencies still added employees in 2025. Homeland Security topped the list, adding 8,043 employees. That is in keeping with the Trump administration’s effort to drastically ramp up recruitment of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

The Department of Interior was next, with 3,034 gained. The Department of Transportation was the third largest gainer with 954 additions. In keeping with the broader effort to shrink government employee ranks, no other agency added more than 100 employees in 2025.

Here are the rest of the top ten agencies by employee gains:

11 agencies had no change in the number of employees. These agencies typically had very few employees to begin with.

Ninety-four agencies lost employees. Topping that list was the Department of Veterans Affairs, which shrank by 21,428, followed by Health and Human Services, which shrank by 13,580.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) was among the top ten, shrinking by 3,554 employees. As a percentage though, that is nearly 77 percent of its workforce. USAID famously made headlines for a series of silly sounding grant awards highlighted by DOGE then-DOGE leader Elon Musk, including a “trans opera” in Peru.

Here are the top ten agencies by employee cuts:

Only one agency was fully eliminated, the World War I Centennial Commission, which was already set to shutter with the completion of the WWI Memorial in downtown Washington, D.C.

Eight other agencies were close to being wiped out though, losing between 49% and 99% of their employees in 2025:

The Department of Education, which the Trump administration has taken a particular interest in dismantling, lost 36% of its workforce, around 1,518 people.

NOTE: We dove deeper into Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and return its functions to the states or other federal agencies better suited to handle the tasks. Click here to read our Progress Report.

Redactions Galore

Despite the cuts to headcount, redactions to the payroll have consistently grown over the past decade.

Back in 2016, at the end of the Obama administration, a mere 2,300 names were redacted. By the time Open the Books requested the FY 2022 federal payroll, the Biden administration had redacted the names of 350,860 rank-and-file employees.

Those redactions kept growing, reaching a new high in 2025 with 389,646 names. This is likely due in part to the large increase in the number of Department of Homeland Security staffers in 2025 (up 8,043 from 2024), who are routinely redacted to protect their identities.

Other redactions include investigative and law enforcement roles in agencies including Departments of Justice, Treasury and Veterans’ Affairs. But still, dozens of additional agencies redacted names, including Departments of Labor, Agriculture, Transportation and Health and Human Services. At Department of Interior, 2,269 identities were redacted. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hid 277 names.

The payroll report still contains no information about staff in the Office of the Vice President. That’s because the Office of the Vice President claims not to be subject to FOIA and is not listed on the FOIA website.

Open the Books has tried unsuccessfully in the past to obtain the salaries through open records requests, and has accessed limited payroll information in the semi-annual Report of the Secretary of the Senate.

In September 2025, Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) sent a letter to Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor asking for greater transparency about the federal workforce. She cited our finding and asked: why the Biden administration had redacted so much information, if OPM’s systems were good enough to crosscheck data from multiple agencies, and whether they could begin publishing all the info (name, title, location, agency, etc) in searchable format:

While some government managers do not know, or even care, where their employees are, I tried tracking down the exact locations of the federal workforce with the help of the non-profit transparency group Open the Books. The quest turned into a game of bureaucrat hide-and-seek with the Biden administration redacting the names of 350,861 rank-and-file employees and the worksites of over 281,000 bureaucrats.

… Because OPM oversees policies related to hiring and managing the federal workforce, your agency is best situated to provide the leadership necessary to increase transparency and stop the timecard fraud by double-billing bureaucrats. As Chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus and a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, I’m interested in learning how we can work together to improve accountability and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse.

Ernst is attempting to eliminate timecard fraud with the Dismantling Double Dippers Act. There are some known egregious examples, but we need the full payroll to find out how widespread the problem is.

Did More People Than Usual Leave Federal Service in 2025?

The new data from OPM comes on the heels of the official end of DOGE on July 4, 2026, although the project really came to an end and moved to individual agencies long ago. Much of its effort to shrink costs relied on reducing the size of the government workforce, a controversial approach that drew critics of all ideological persuasion. Some of the changes were held up in court proceedings, while an agreement to end a government shutdown also included a temporary freeze on the cuts.

By December 2025, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor posted on X that 317,000 people had left government employment and 68,000 had been added for a net reduction of 249,000. He said 17,000 of those were “RIF” or reductions in force, meaning strict firings.

Per Bloomberg:

In the most detailed official accounting to date, OPM Director Scott Kupor said Wednesday in a post on X that the overwhelming majority of those departures were voluntary. Approximately 24,000 separations this year were involuntary, including 17,000 reductions-in-force. Another 21,000 employees took early retirement or buyouts, and 129,000 left through what OPM characterized as routine attrition.

Of the roughly 24,000 employees who were forced out, 17,000 came through downsizing actions known as a reduction in force, or RIF, in addition to 7,000 probationary employees who by law could be fired at will. Some staff who were forced out are part of ongoing lawsuits to get their positions back.

Kupor said the overall numbers show that the headcount changes following President Donald Trump’s return to office in January are much less draconian than critics suggest.

“’None of this is to minimize the impact of anyone losing a job, but the ‘mass firing’ headlines do not in fact tell the full story,” Kupor said in his social media post.

So, what do the newly obtained records add to the conversation? For starters, 2025 did see significantly more departures compared to the prior year-over-year comparison at the end of the Biden administration.

By eliminating redacted and duplicated names within each agency, we can arrive at a rough estimate of attrition for each year between 2023 and 2025.

Attrition between 2023-2024: 120,193

Attrition between 2024-2025: 188,084

Compared to 2023-2024, nearly 68,000 more employees left federal service in 2024-2025, or about 50 percent more.

Those are gross departure counts, which differ from the net calculations. Because 188,000 employees left government between 2024 and 2025, and 2025 included only about 53,000 fewer total staffers, that means roughly 130,000 new employees were hired in the same period.

These numbers, of course, do not strictly cohere with Kupor’s public counts. One likely source of statistical noise is the Department of War, which redacts the name of every single employee, including civilian staffers. That makes it impossible to count their comings and goings. Ditto the USPS which OPM does not include in its payroll disclosures.

Data Delays

Open the Books is the largest private database of federal, state, and local government employee, salary, and checkbook data. Every year in January we receive the new tranche of federal workforce data from the Office of Personnel Management via a Freedom of Information Act request.

This year, however, we did not receive any data in January, February, or March of 2026. After following up with the agency several times, we turned to our friends at Judicial Watch, who filed a legal complaint on our behalf. About a week later, OPM sent us the data. No court appearance necessary. A win for transparency!

One column was conspicuously missing, though: “bonuses.” Bonuses are a part of federal compensation and have traditionally been included in OPM data alongside salaries.

This figure is a key piece of the puzzle because it tells us how many workers did an excellent job, according to the feds, and were worthy of even more taxpayer compensation. We can then compare that to the results delivered.

In 2023 nearly $660 million was reported in federal employee bonuses, a number that was dramatically reduced to $187 million the following year (a net savings of $471.8 million).

It is yet unknown how much taxpayer cheddar was paid out as bonuses in 2025, but we intend to litigate to receive this important data if necessary.

LEGAL OFFENSE FUND: You’ve heard of a legal defense fund before. Well, what about a legal offense fund? We only had to indicate we would sue for the federal payroll and we received it in short order, because public officials understand our winning track record. We file tens of thousands of public records requests on your behalf each year, but we need your support to sue when we get the silent treatment from a government entity.

Will you consider donating to help us continue the fight for transparency, in and out of court?