Slashing the federal payroll did not prove to be the catastrophe many opponents feared, though that wasn’t the metric by which success was judged.
As the Trump administration’s brief Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) pushed its plan to pare down the federal workforce, liberal institutions in Washington, D.C. sounded a chorus of alarm.
Federal employee unions united to block the initiative in court. NPR aired profiles of workers who, for the first time, confronted the possibility that their job security might not be guaranteed forever. The Brookings Institution questioned how far the government could shrink before it collapsed.
The verdict: there was room to shrink. The Trump administration reduced the federal workforce by more than 10 percent, and the government did not implode. In fact, by measures tied to expenditure rather than headcount, it didn’t even contract.
In a recent piece for City Journal, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Judge Glock underscored the stark gap between the gloom surrounding DOGE’s reductions and the reality that emerged more than a year after DOGE was discontinued. He notes that, despite a modest effect on overall spending, DOGE “had a massive impact on the federal civil service.”
That claim has some truth—and deserves further scrutiny. Aside from a slight retrenchment in the 1990s, the federal workforce had been expanding for decades. Reversing that trend stands out as one of the few genuinely libertarian achievements credited to the Trump era.
The downsizing of federal personnel, Glock contends, demonstrates that “DOGE worked.”
Well, perhaps—
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who left DOGE before Trump took office and later sought the governorship of Ohio) set ambitious objectives when they were named DOGE co-chairs in late 2024. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed from November 2024, they pledged, “we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”
Musk repeatedly attached some rather extraordinary figures to that pledge. He claimed DOGE would shave $1 trillion or even $2 trillion from federal spending. In the end, the tally—based on DOGE’s own, arguable accounting—stood at about $170 billion. Meanwhile, federal outlays rose in both of Trump’s first two years, and the deficit widened as well.
Indeed, Musk and Ramaswamy also asserted that they would reduce the federal workforce, but this was framed as a natural consequence of spending cuts rather than the primary objective.
Consider it like this: if I spent months telling friends and family that I would shed 50 pounds on a new diet, and then I failed to lose any weight, would it be fair to say the diet “worked”?
What if I trimmed the number of donuts I consumed daily but still didn’t lose weight? That could improve my health in some respects—much as reducing unnecessary federal positions can benefit the nation’s fiscal health—but it would hardly prove that the goal of weight loss had been achieved.
Finally, even the claim that DOGE reduced the federal workforce requires a caveat. As Glock observes in his analysis, declines in federal employees were offset by a rise in federal contractors.
It isn’t a one-for-one exchange, of course. The new contractors were predominantly concentrated in areas such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, while the cuts mainly targeted other departments, notably the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Most of that increase came from the buildup in homeland-security and defense contracting, including purchases like surveillance aircraft and tanks, rather than replacements for government workers,” Glock writes. “DOGE achieved real savings through contracts, but these were more than offset by higher spending elsewhere, signaling a shift in priorities rather than an overall drop in contracting.”
So the government is eating fewer donuts but enjoying more pizza.
There are libertarian arguments to favor contractors over civil servants—after all, contractors are less likely to enjoy a guaranteed, lifelong tenure. Yet there is nothing inherently beneficial about a policy that cuts jobs in some areas merely to create more space in the budget for poorly trained immigration-enforcement agents and defense contractors. That outcome could even be detrimental to liberty.
Ultimately, the DOGE project appears less a meaningful effort to reduce government spending or the size of the payroll and more a maneuver to prune out portions of the federal workforce that might hinder Trump’s second term. “As long as [Trump’s] broader aim remains extending power rather than rolling it back, you shouldn’t expect the government to stop growing,” Reason’s Jesse Walker wrote last year when comparing DOGE to President Richard Nixon’s attempted civil-service purge.
Did DOGE succeed? Only if evaluated against a particularly steep standard.
Yes, it showed that a president can trim bureaucratic roles—especially the bloated managerial and administrative strata—without inflicting serious damage on the government’s core duties. That’s a takeaway future administrations should bear in mind.
Perhaps, someday, a president will test applying the same logic to overall government spending as well.
