Trump Layoffs: Shutdown RIFs, Court Rulings, and Reversals

The Trump federal layoffs of 2025 shrank the civilian workforce by roughly 10% in a single year, the largest reduction in modern U.S. history. More than 300,000 employees left through a mix of buyouts, early retirements, firings, and attrition under a near-total hiring freeze, while courts blocked some of the most aggressive terminations and allowed others to stand.¹²

The civilian workforce fell from about 2,312,000 employees in December 2024 to roughly 2,075,000 by December 2025, a net loss of around 238,000. Roughly 348,000 people left federal service during the year, an 81% jump over 2024, while new hiring collapsed to about 117,000, a 56% drop.¹ By January 2026, the Partnership for Public Service calculated that the workforce had fallen to about 2,035,000, its smallest size in at least 15 years.³

OPM Director Scott Kupor said more than 92% of departures were voluntary, driven by buyouts and early-retirement offers. Many former employees disputed that framing, pointing to short acceptance deadlines, threats of future layoffs, and pressure campaigns.²⁴

Which Agencies Were Hit Hardest

The cuts fell unevenly. The U.S. Agency for International Development was effectively dismantled, falling from nearly 4,900 employees to just 370, a 92% reduction. Several other agencies lost between a fifth and nearly half of their staff:

AmeriCorps, down 44%
Education Department, down 43%, from about 4,300 to 2,450
Small Business Administration, down 33%
Housing and Urban Development, down 29%
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, down 29%
Peace Corps, down 28%
Treasury, down 23%, losing more than 27,000 positions concentrated at the IRS
Agriculture, down 21%, losing more than 19,000 employees
Health and Human Services, down 19%, including a single April 2025 layoff of 10,000 workers

The Department of Defense, the government’s largest employer, lost more than 61,600 civilian employees, roughly 8% of its workforce.² Two agencies grew. Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded by 36%, adding about 7,500 workers, and Customs and Border Protection also grew modestly.¹

White-collar roles were cut more sharply than blue-collar ones, 10.6% versus 6.7%. IT managers, attorneys, tax examiners, and medical workers absorbed the heaviest occupational losses.¹

How the Cuts Were Carried Out

The administration used three overlapping mechanisms: a mass paid-resignation program, agency-level purges driven by the Department of Government Efficiency, and shutdown-era reductions in force.

The Deferred Resignation Program

On January 28, 2025, OPM sent an email titled “Fork in the Road” offering employees pay and benefits through a later separation date if they resigned. About 75,000 workers accepted during the February round, and roughly 140,000 total participated across subsequent rounds extending into 2026.⁵ Public Citizen estimated the program cost between $11.1 billion and $15.1 billion in salary and benefits through March 2026.⁶

DOGE

The Department of Government Efficiency, initially led by Elon Musk, directed agency-wide eliminations of jobs, contracts, and grants. In one March 2025 episode, DOGE staffers entered the United States Institute of Peace and initiated the termination of its board, acting president, and most of its 300-plus employees.⁷⁸⁹ DOGE’s own website claimed about $215 billion in savings, a figure neither the Government Accountability Office nor independent analysts verified. The Brookings Institution placed potential savings between $100 billion and $200 billion, and a Cato Institute analyst found “basic mistakes” in DOGE’s tracking.

The Shutdown Layoffs

When Congress failed to pass a spending bill and the government shut down on October 1, 2025, the administration treated the funding lapse as an opportunity to eliminate positions permanently rather than furlough employees temporarily. OMB Director Russ Vought directed agencies to prepare reduction-in-force plans for programs inconsistent with presidential priorities.¹⁰

On October 10, Vought posted on social media that “the RIFs have begun.” A Justice Department filing disclosed that roughly 4,200 employees across seven agencies received layoff notices that day, including 1,446 at Treasury, over 1,100 at HHS, 466 at Education, and 442 at HUD. Vought said the administration intended to pursue layoffs “north of 10,000.”¹¹ The rollout was chaotic. Agencies rescinded hundreds of notices for errors, and some employees never received their notices because the IT staff responsible for delivery were themselves furloughed.¹²

Where the Courts Have Landed

The layoffs generated more than a dozen lawsuits. The Supreme Court intervened twice during 2025, and lower courts repeatedly halted specific actions.

Shutdown RIFs: Blocked

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco became the central figure in the fight over the shutdown firings. On October 15, 2025, she issued a temporary restraining order halting the shutdown-era RIFs for union-represented employees, calling the notices “both illegal and in excess of authority.”¹² On October 28, she converted that order into a preliminary injunction, writing that the layoffs appeared intended for “political retribution.”¹³

Congress reinforced the court’s position in the continuing resolution President Trump signed on November 12, 2025. The bill prohibited agencies from using federal funds for RIFs through January 30, 2026, and declared that any RIF carried out between October 1 and the bill’s enactment “shall have no force or effect.”¹⁴ When several agencies continued issuing separation notices in December, Judge Illston on December 17 ordered the Departments of Education and State, the Small Business Administration, and the General Services Administration to rescind the notices and reinstate about 680 employees with back pay.¹⁵ The government filed an emergency appeal and then voluntarily dismissed it on December 31, 2025.¹⁶

The Executive Order: Allowed to Proceed

A broader challenge targeted Executive Order 14210, which mandated the government-wide restructuring. In May 2025, Judge Illston issued a preliminary injunction blocking implementation of agency restructuring and RIF plans. The Ninth Circuit declined to stay that injunction, and the administration went directly to the Supreme Court. On July 8, 2025, the Court granted the government’s emergency request and stayed the injunction, holding that the administration was “likely to succeed on its argument that the Executive Order and Memorandum are lawful.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, warning the ruling would allow a “congressionally unsanctioned dismantling of the Federal Government” to proceed.¹⁷

Probationary Firings: States’ Case Dismissed

The administration’s early-2025 termination of about 25,000 probationary employees spawned a separate track. A Baltimore federal judge initially ordered 18 agencies to reinstate more than 24,000 workers, and a San Francisco judge ordered reinstatement of nearly 17,000 probationary employees at six agencies, though the Supreme Court paused that ruling in April 2025. In September 2025, the Fourth Circuit ruled 2-1 that the 19 states and D.C. that had sued lacked standing, overturning the Baltimore judge’s injunction. A related union-led case remained pending in California.¹⁸¹⁹

Firings That Had to Be Reversed

The speed of the cuts produced a counter-current of rehires. The Brookings Institution documented 25,747 instances of employees fired and then rehired, compiled from news reports because no official tracker existed. About half were court-ordered reinstatements, and roughly a quarter were preemptive reversals by agencies that realized they had cut essential staff.²⁰ Notable reversals included:

350 National Nuclear Security Administration workers fired on February 13, 2025, and reinstated within 24 hours
950 Indian Health Service workers dismissed and brought back
CDC reversals covering more than 722 employees, including 400 in infectious disease and environmental health, plus 700 rescinded RIF notices
USDA firings at 58 avian flu response facilities reversed
IRS efforts to rehire 400 revenue agents and 300 revenue officers who had taken the deferred resignation

Brookings senior fellow Elaine Kamarck described the cuts as “big, deep and random.” A GAO analysis found that layoffs in the Education Department’s civil rights division alone cost $38 million, largely in continued pay to employees after their terminations.⁷

What Americans Felt at the Service Window

The IRS lost roughly 25% of its workforce, including about 2,000 IT employees, forcing leadership to reset digitization efforts and its filing-season capacity.¹¹ The administration’s fiscal 2026 budget requested funds to hire 11,000 customer service workers to replace 8,600 lost positions.²¹

The Social Security Administration planned to cut 7,000 positions and initially announced closures of 47 field offices. After public backlash, the office closures were walked back, but the agency reassigned 2,000 employees to backfill vacancies. Between January and April 2025, average callback wait times for Social Security and disability claims reached 180 minutes.²⁰ Over 50 House Democrats reported that agency liaison offices, once responsive to constituent casework, were sending bounce-back emails or no reply at all.²¹

Changes That Outlast 2025

Beyond the layoffs themselves, the administration moved to rewrite the rules that govern federal employment, making future reductions easier and giving political appointees more control over career staff.

Schedule Policy/Career

On June 3, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order reclassifying approximately 8,000 career federal positions into a new category called “Schedule Policy/Career,” reviving the “Schedule F” concept first floated in October 2020 and rescinded by the Biden administration. Roughly 97% of affected positions sit at the GS-15 level or higher. Covered employees become at-will, losing the ability to challenge adverse actions at the Merit Systems Protection Board and losing eligibility for recruitment and retention incentives. Covered roles include agency division heads, chief officers, regional leaders, senior attorneys, regulation writers, and officials involved in budget, grantmaking, and legislative affairs.²²²³

The policy faces multiple lawsuits from federal employee unions arguing it violates due process, the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. When OPM proposed the underlying regulations in April 2025, about 94% of the more than 40,000 public commenters opposed them.²³²²

Proposed RIF Rule Changes

In March 2026, OPM proposed overhauling the rules that determine whom agencies lay off. The current system prioritizes tenure, veterans’ preference, length of service, and then performance. The proposal would make recent performance ratings the primary factor and would exclude probationary and temporary workers from RIF procedures entirely. A separate proposal would strip the Merit Systems Protection Board of jurisdiction over RIF appeals.²⁴²⁵ AFGE president Everett Kelley said the combined effect would “pave the way for arbitrary mass firings.” The public comment period closed in May 2026, and the rule had not been finalized as of mid-2026.

What’s Next

On February 26, 2026, a Ninth Circuit panel vacated Judge Illston’s injunction against the executive order rolling back collective bargaining rights, though it limited its ruling and sent the merits back to the district court. AFGE was weighing en banc review.²⁶ The congressional pause on RIFs expired when a stopgap spending bill lapsed in mid-February 2026.²⁷ The larger questions, including how far a president can go in dismantling the civil service without congressional approval and whether Schedule Policy/Career survives, are widely expected to reach the Supreme Court.²⁸

1
Pew Research Center. Federal Workforce Shrank 10% in Trump’s First Year Back in Office
2
Federal News Network. How Staffing Cuts in 2025 Transformed the Federal Workforce
3
Partnership for Public Service. The Federal Workforce One Year Into the Trump Administration
4
Government Executive. OPM Says 92% of Fed Departures This Year Were Voluntary. Those Who Left Disagree
5
Government Executive. Project 2025 Wanted to Hobble the Federal Workforce. DOGE Has Hastily Done That and More
6
Public Citizen. $11 Billion Resignation Program
7
Federal News Network. A Year After Trump’s DOGE Cuts, Workers Whose Lives Were Upended Question What Was Saved
8
NPR. Musk Leaves DOGE: What Comes Next
9
CNN. Elon Musk Announces Departure From Trump Administration
10
Politico. White House Directs Agencies to Prepare for Mass Firings During Shutdown
11
Federal News Network. OMB Says Substantial Federal Employee Layoffs Have Begun
12
Federal News Network. Court Blocks Trump Administration’s Latest Mass Layoffs for Federal Employees
13
Government Executive. Shutdown Layoffs Indefinitely Blocked Following New Court Injunction
14
Politico. Government Mass Layoffs Hearing
15
Federal News Network. Federal Judge Orders Reversal of Hundreds of Layoffs Finalized During Shutdown
16
Courthouse News Service. Feds Drop Appeal Challenging Court Order Halting Federal Layoffs
17
SCOTUSblog. Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration to Implement Plans to Significantly Reduce the Federal Workforce
18
Reuters. US Appeals Court Rejects States’ Lawsuit Over Trump Mass Firings
19
Federal News Network. Appeals Court Dismisses States’ Case Challenging Probationary Employee Firings
20
Brookings Institution. How Many People Can the Federal Government Lose Before It Crashes
21
Government Executive. Bounce-Back Emails and No Replies: IRS and Social Security Workforce Reductions Are Hurting Constituent Service
22
Federal News Network. Trump Moves About 8,000 Federal Positions to Schedule Policy/Career
23
Government Executive. Trump Reclassifies Federal Employees Under Schedule F
24
Government Executive. OPM Proposes New Layoff Rules Emphasizing Performance and Reducing Employee Protections
25
Federal News Network. OPM Wants Agencies to Prioritize Employees’ Performance, Not Tenure, During RIFs
26
Federal News Network. Appeals Court Axes Injunction on Trump’s Collective Bargaining Rollback
27
Federal News Network. Congress Gave Feds a 3-Month Break From Layoffs. A Court Decides What Happens Next
28
NPR. Trump Federal Employees Civil Service Job Protections Schedule F