The Social Security Administration lost 8,000 employees this year. Call volume went up 65 percent. And wait times went down.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
Martin O'Malley, the Biden-era head of SSA, predicted the agency would "collapse" within 30 to 90 days of the cuts. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, warned of "vast, unintended consequences." The Brookings Institution published a hand-wringing analysis asking, "How many people can the federal government lose before it crashes?"
The answer, according to a detailed new report, is at least 270,000 — a 12 percent decline from the modern peak of 2.3 million federal employees. The fastest drop in federal employment since World War II.
It started eight days into the Trump administration, when the Office of Personnel Management sent the now-famous "Fork in the Road" email offering federal workers a Deferred Resignation Program — take the buyout and go quietly, with benefits through September 30, 2025. Roughly 140,000 took the deal. Another 90,000 departed through early or voluntary retirements. About 10,000 were removed through reductions in force.
The numbers by agency tell the real story. The Department of Defense shed 85,000 positions — more than 10 percent of its civilian workforce. The IRS lost 27,000 employees, over one-fourth of its headcount. The Department of Veterans Affairs cut 27,000. USAID experienced the largest proportional reduction: over 90 percent of its workforce, gone.
And then there's what got cut beyond headcount. Professional, administrative, and management contracts dropped from $112 billion in Biden's final year to $100 billion. Project grants and cooperative agreements fell from $237 billion to $226 billion. Global health aid went from $13 billion to $9 billion. Foreign aid overall dropped from $18 billion to approximately $9 billion — back to 2019 levels.
The bureaucratic class insisted none of this could work without catastrophic consequences. One Biden official compared the effort to being "on the Titanic and throwing gold bars off the edge." The framing was always the same: Elon Musk and his team of efficiency crusaders were reckless amateurs who didn't understand how government worked.
What the critics never addressed was the possibility that government worked badly on purpose. That 43,000 "general administration" and "program analysis" positions existed not because the public needed them, but because the bureaucracy needed them. That 27,000 HR officials and 17,000 IT positions and 7,000 contracting jobs had accumulated over decades not to serve taxpayers, but to serve the machine that served itself.
Russ Vought, the OMB director, paired the workforce reductions with a five-day-per-week office requirement and the elimination of remote work — a move that functioned as a second filter. The people who stayed had to actually show up.
Frank Bisignano, the fintech CEO now running both the IRS and SSA, inherited the agencies critics said would implode. The IRS saw tax audit recommendations decline by $2 billion to $27 billion in fiscal year 2025. At SSA, the 65-percent spike in call volume met with shorter wait times — the opposite of what every Beltway expert predicted.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the blueprint in a November 2024 Wall Street Journal op-ed describing a "lean team of small-government crusaders." Ramaswamy later departed, but the architecture held. The Deferred Resignation Program, the hiring freeze, the contract reviews, the voluntary retirement expansion — each lever pulled in sequence, each one met with apocalyptic predictions that didn't materialize.
The federal government lost 270,000 employees, cut over $30 billion in contracts and grants, and the phones still got answered. Faster, actually.