The Trump administration is threatening to use the government shutdown to permanently reduce the size of the civil service. Its ambitions for these cuts are many, including punishing Democrats by harming their pet projects and curbing “agencies that don’t align with the administration’s values” and are a “waste of the taxpayer dollar,” as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt warned last week. Yet as a tool to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the federal government, these cuts are risible.Let’s first take the claim that the U.S. federal government is reckoning with problems of bloat. The truth is that even before DOGE took a chain saw to government programs, the United States was actually understaffed relative to other advanced industrial democracies. Federal-, state-, and local-government employees in the U.S. made up about 14.6 percent of total employment in 2023, according to OECD data. This is below the OECD average of 18.4 percent for member countries, and well below that of France (20.7 percent), Canada (20.2 percent), the United Kingdom (17.1 percent), and Australia (15.7 percent).It bears noting that in the U.S., most public employees—just under 88 percent of all government workers, or about 20.65 million as of August 2025—work for state and local governments. They are our police officers, teachers, firefighters, land-use planners, and transportation engineers. Excluding the military, only about 2.9 million work for the federal government. If you deduct roughly 593,000 postal workers who work for an independent agency, the total civilian federal workforce is currently about 2.33 million. Put differently, in the United States, federal civilian employees number about one in 10 civilian government workers and well below 1 percent of the population.[Stephen Macekura: The government waste DOGE should be cutting]The notion that reducing that group will result in significant savings is also mistaken. The cost of their salaries, near $336 billion annually, may appear impressive, but this is only about 5 percent of the most recent federal budget of $6.8 trillion. Social Security, defense, Medicare, and interest on the federal debt are the main drivers of cost, and much of this spending is mandated either by legislation or the cold, hard fiscal reality of servicing government debt. Of the 27 percent of the budget that is discretionary and subject to annual appropriation by Congress, civilian salaries account for only about 18.6 percent. A 20 percent cut in the federal civilian-wage bill would yield about $67 billion, equivalent to a roughly 1 percent reduction in the government’s overall budget. For context, the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that Medicare and Medicaid made more than $100 billion in improper payments in 2023.Republicans from President Donald Trump down have decried the excesses of the public-sector workforce and blamed Joe Biden for it. Some prominent social-media influencers have claimed that the former president increased the civilian workforce by nearly 50 percent. In reality, Biden oversaw an increase of about 4.8 percent. The increase in Trump’s first term was 2.6 percent.After surging to 3.4 million during World War II and crashing to 1.4 million in 1950, the overall size of the federal civilian workforce has remained relatively consistent, fluctuating between 1.8 million and 2.3 million even as the country’s population has more than doubled. Spending on civilian personnel in the executive branch has also been fairly stable, between 4 and 7 percent of total federal spending since 2000.Another persistent bone of contention is whether federal civil servants are overpaid. The average salary across the federal workforce, at $106,382 as of March 2024, does exceed the national average of $63,795. Yet about 92 percent of federal employees work in white-collar positions, and a higher proportion of federal workers possess a bachelor’s or an advanced degree (31.5 percent in 2023) than the broader labor force (27.7 percent). Civil-service wages have also grown more slowly, on average, than those for private-sector jobs, and the federal government must compete on the open market for staff in high-demand areas such as statistics and data science, technology, aerospace engineering, medicine, law, and operations research. The federal workforce also tends to be older than the general labor force.Federal civil-service salaries tend to be more generous than private-sector alternatives for employees with lower educational qualifications, and they flip negative for those with a master’s, doctorate, or professional degree. So a postal worker with a high-school diploma likely fares better than she might have in the private sector than, say, a NASA analyst with a Ph.D. in computer science. The benefits associated with federal employment are higher than those in the private sector, although this gap also diminishes with education.Just as many federal agencies are still coping with deep cuts from DOGE, another round of cuts promises to create dire new costs by compromising essential services and putting lives at risk. The recent floods in Texas, which claimed 138 lives in July, offer a grim example of what’s at stake. DOGE had sent packing nearly 600 staffers from the National Weather Service’s workforce of 4,200 earlier this year, which left the service without a warning-coordination meteorologist; the person who had handled this crucial outreach with local emergency responders had taken voluntary retirement months before, leaving the position vacant. This meant that no one was making sure that the service’s emergency warnings were being received and acted upon on the ground. Of course, many factors contributed to the system failure at the heart of this tragedy, including the event’s extreme nature and the local governments’ failure to invest in flood-warning systems. But federal-staffing cuts also played a role.[Olga Khazan: We should, in fact, politicize the tragedy]Across government, an estimated 154,000 civil servants have already accepted deferred-resignation packages. The National Park Service has lost 24 percent of its permanent workforce. The IRS has lost 25 percent. FEMA has lost about 9.5 percent of its full-time employees. Reductions of this magnitude would be difficult for any institution—public, private, or nonprofit—to absorb without compromising services. This challenge is made worse by the fact that the government workers most likely to accept early retirement are those with the most essential and marketable skills. Voluntary buyouts tend to ensure that the workers in high demand elsewhere leave first, leaving behind a workforce that is typically less talented and capable. At the IRS, for example, staff reductions have fallen particularly heavily upon auditors and revenue agents, whose numbers were down by 31 percent in the first three months of this year. (It is no small irony that few government investments offer a higher rate of return than tax audits on upper-income filers, which can yield as much as $12 for every dollar spent.) A recent GAO analysis of FEMA found that its cadre of experienced managers was halved after the departure of 24 senior executives from January to June this year, just before hurricane season.The rapid, deep, and often ham-handed nature of these cuts has led to frequent mistakes and missteps. Some have made headlines, such as the decision to fire and then rehire the staff charged with guarding America’s nuclear stockpile. Others have gone unnoticed but are no less pernicious. Air-traffic controllers remain employed, but other safety staff such as the mechanics and technicians responsible for servicing radar, landing, and navigation equipment have been let go. ICE staffing has surged, but immigration judges have been culled.Given the many lessons now being learned the hard way, quite a few of these cuts are being quietly undone. Hundreds of federal workers turfed by DOGE are now discreetly being brought back. Yet many cuts are not so easily reversed. It takes about two years of Federal Aviation Administration training to become a radar technician, for example, and at least several years more to become an air-traffic controller. Other agencies face similar constraints in their efforts to onboard staff, particularly in areas that require substantial training or skills that are in high demand elsewhere. Most departments aspire to a steady intake of recruits and a pipeline of senior staffers. Major cuts disrupt this effort and can create both gaps and demographic bulges that can take decades to resolve.This is not to argue that the federal government’s approach to staffing and services shouldn’t be reformed. Practitioners and academics from across the political spectrum have advocated for ways to streamline processes, improve and rebalance skills, and upgrade IT systems. It should be easier to sideline or terminate poor performers and promote high achievers. Yet such improvements require a scalpel. The administration’s proposals are a wrecking ball.[Annie Lowrey: The American people deserve DOGE]Government agencies have done their best to cope and deliver for the American public despite the cuts. Many staffers are working longer hours and performing tasks on top of their regular duties that are outside of their training, such as National Park Service scientists who suspended their duties in order to clean toilets during peak summer months. Metrics showing declines in performance and customer service have even been scrubbed from government websites. It won’t be long before crucial agency missions begin to fail. This won’t matter to those for whom the goal is vengeance and demolition. (As Grover Norquist once famously quipped, he wanted to shrink the government to the point that it could be drowned in the bathtub.) But it is sure to matter for the rest of us.