Authored by James Hickman via SchiffSovereign.com,
In January 2025, the federal government employed about 3 million people. By November, that number had fallen by roughly 270,000 workers — a reduction of about 9%.
According to the Cato Institute,that was the largest peacetime federal workforce reduction EVER.
More than 150,000 employees took the “Fork in the Road” buyout offer to resign or retire. Tens of thousands more were laid off outright. Entire offices were emptied. Agencies that had been growing for decades shrank to staffing levels not seen since 2014.
And yet, despite historic federal layoffs, government spending went UP last year.
The federal government spent $7 trillion in Fiscal Year 2025— roughly $300 billion more than the year before. Bear in mind, 2025 was the year that DOGE was supposed to take a chainsaw to the budget and cut spending.
This is not a failure of DOGE. It’s a revelation about the actual problem.
The total federal payroll— every salary, every benefit, for every civilian federal employee (excluding the military)— comes to about $336 billion a year— less than 5% of total federal spending.
In other words, you could fire every federal employee tomorrow— every bureaucrat, every regulator, every paper-pusher in Washington— and 95% of the spending would continue as if nothing happened.
That’s because around 60% of the budget is mandatory spending— Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid— programs that pay out automatically based on laws that were passed decades ago. Congress doesn’t vote on these expenditures each year. The checks just go out.
Source: ZeroHedge News
