New Numbers Show Washington Has Not Been This Small Since LBJ Was President

Joe Biden left office having grown the federal government to more than three million workers.

New numbers released this month show exactly how far Donald Trump has cut that bloated workforce since then.

The federal government just shrank to a size this country has not seen since before the moon landing.

Federal Payrolls Fall to a 60 Year Low Under Trump

Federal employment now sits at 2.674 million workers, a level this country has not touched since May 1966.

That number comes straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' August jobs report, released Friday, September 4.

Economist Mark J. Perry was the first to flag it, calling it "the lowest level in more than 60 years, going back to May 1966."

Trump inherited a federal workforce of 3.010 million when he took the oath of office in January 2025.

Getting from there to here means wiping out roughly 336,000 government jobs in a year and a half, an 11.2 percent reduction in the size of the federal payroll.

Even without counting the Postal Service, more than 251,000 positions are simply gone.

This did not happen by accident.

How Trump Actually Did It

Acting OPM Director Chuck Ezell laid out the mechanics back in July 2025, when the agency's first workforce snapshot showed 23,000 positions already gone.

New federal hiring collapsed by 70 percent after Trump's hiring freeze took effect, dropping from roughly 23,000 hires a month under Biden to just 7,385 a month.

Ezell put it plainly: "The American people deserve a government that is lean, efficient, and focused on core priorities."

Then came the Deferred Resignation Program, which pushed hundreds of thousands of federal employees out the door starting in October 2025.

No mass firings required, no drawn-out union fights over every position.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has described the broader project as a "reprivatization" of the American economy, one built around letting Main Street thrive instead of Washington.

Bureaucrats who spent years padding their departments with taxpayer money are simply not being replaced when they leave.

Nobody Has Pulled This Off in 60 Years

Reagan tried this with the Grace Commission in 1982, dragging in 161 corporate executives and community leaders to hunt for waste.

Congress buried most of those recommendations before they ever took effect.

Bill Clinton and Al Gore had more luck with their "Reinventing Government" initiative in the 1990s, eventually trimming the federal workforce by roughly 377,000 positions.

It took Clinton and Gore the better part of eight years to get there.

Trump matched that scale of cuts in about a third of the time, without a single Al Gore task force or blue ribbon commission.

The Swamp Spent 60 Years Building This and Trump Tore It Down in 18 Months

Every president since Reagan has promised to shrink Washington, and every one of them ran into the same wall: a bureaucracy built to protect itself.

Clinton needed two full terms and a friendly Congress to get there.

Trump did it through a hiring freeze, a buyout program, and the simple refusal to backfill jobs nobody in Kansas or Ohio ever asked Washington to create in the first place.

That is the real story behind these numbers.

The federal government did not shrink because some commission wrote a polite report.

It shrank because Trump made it painful to stay bloated and easy to walk away, and Chuck Ezell's OPM data shows career bureaucrats are taking the exit in record numbers.

Every one of those 336,000 vacated desks is a taxpayer dollar no longer funding a job Washington invented to justify its own existence.

Sources:

• Mark J. Perry, post on X regarding August 2026 BLS federal employment data, X, September 6, 2026.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "The Employment Situation – August 2026," U.S. Department of Labor, September 4, 2026.
• Chuck Ezell, "New Data Shows Trump Administration's Progress in Right Sizing the Federal Bureaucracy," U.S. Office of Personnel Management, July 1, 2025.
• Thomson Reuters Institute, "Reforming Federal Government Agencies: From Reagan's Vision to Trump's Promise," Thomson Reuters, 2026.
• Scott Bessent, remarks on economic "reprivatization," U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2026.