While various Democrats have been critical of the Trump administration’s ongoing mass government layoffs, they are seemingly ignoring the fact that the federal workforce has remained largely unscathed by job cuts for the past several years compared to the private sector.
A growing number of American private sector workers have been laid off in recent years while government workers have faced much lower layoff rates. In 2024, the layoff and discharge rate for all U.S. nonfarm payroll jobs ranged from 1% to 1.1%, while the government layoff and discharge rate ranged between 0.3% to 0.4%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data collected by Trading Economics.
U.S. employers reported 761,358 job cuts in 2024 — the highest since 2020 — with only 38,375 of those cuts being government roles, according to a January report from U.S.-based outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
“The biggest thing is that — and I can’t emphasize this enough — the private sector faces a bottom line,” Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They have to bring in enough revenue to pay their employees, to make those payrolls, to hopefully be able to grow the company or at least to keep it afloat. The federal government effectively does not face a bottom line. At the end of the day, they can go to the U.S. taxpayer and either take more money or they can inflate the value of the U.S. dollar.”
In January, U.S. employers announced 49,759 job cuts, with just 288 of those being government jobs, according to a February report from Challenger, Gray and Christmas. Comparatively, in January 2021, U.S. employer’s planned job cuts reached 79,552, with just 19 of those being government jobs, the outplacement firm reported.
“It has been an exceptionally low layoff rate for the federal government,” Greszler told the DCNF. “These last four years have been even lower than normal, and it has been lower compared even to state and local governments. Their layoff rate is about 50% higher than the federal government.”
Employing federal workers is also much more expensive than employing private sector workers. On average, the cost of benefits for workers at all levels of education was 43% higher for federal civilian employees than it was for private sector employees with certain similar characteristics in 2022, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Relatedly, federal workers often get paid significantly higher wages than private sector employees do. As of Feb. 17, the average annual pay for a federal employee in the U.S. was $106,462, while the average pay for a single employee in the private sector was $63,279 annually, according to ZipRecruiter.
Some of the private sector industries that have been the most heavily impacted by layoffs in recent years include media, retail and technology.
“I think it’s always been extremely difficult to fire, dismiss or even just discipline a federal employee,” Greszler explained to the DCNF. “That’s certainly true today, and probably even more so because the Biden administration was particularly sympathetic to unions. But also they have expanded the number of federal employees, so whereas before if you had federal employees who weren’t doing their jobs and might have deserved to be laid off, now you can just hire more workers to do the jobs that aren’t being done by those who were initially hired to do them.”
The Trump administration established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Jan. 20 to cut out fraud and wasteful spending across the federal government. DOGE, which is being spearheaded by Elon Musk, has thus far conducted mass layoffs at several government agencies in an attempt to slash unnecessary costs.
Despite some Democrats and federal workers attempting to push back against DOGE and the Trump administration’s sweeping government layoffs, many Americans are largely on board with the cuts, with a Feb. 11 Trafalgar Group/InsiderAdvantage survey finding that 49% of Americans approve of DOGE’s efforts, while 44% disapprove and 7% were undecided.
Several fired federal workers took to corporate media outlets to bemoan the government layoffs. Chelsea Milburn, who was fired from the Department of Education, told CNN on Feb. 19 that the layoffs were “inhumane.”
Additionally, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Feb. 11 that granted DOGE additional oversight over hiring government employees. DOGE has so far saved American taxpayers an estimated $55 billion, according to its website.
Many Republican lawmakers have backed DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts. Still, some Democrats have attempted to halt DOGE’s push to reduce the government workforce with lawsuits over data access and privacy laws.
“I think there is a lack of accountability [in the federal government],” Greszler told the DCNF. “Whereas most private sector employees can lay off their employees if they are not being profitable or if they have a performance issue, with the federal government, there is no profit. No one is holding them accountable to say ‘are you actually producing the value of goods and services that we as taxpayers are having to pay.’”
During a Feb. 18 appearance on Fox News, Musk said that DOGE must be “doing something right” while discussing the immense pushback that the agency has been facing from Democrats over the sweeping government cuts.
“Why are they reacting like this?” Musk asked. “I guess we must be over the target or doing something right. They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something use
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