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Government Workforce Exodus
00:08:55
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unidentified
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| Follow it all on C-SPAN as events unfold in Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, and the 2026 campaign season. | ||
| C-SPAN, bringing you democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by Max Steyer. | ||
| He is president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service to discuss the federal workforce and the cuts over this past year. | ||
| Max, welcome back to the program. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you so much, Mimi. | |
| It's great to be here. | ||
| Remind us of your mission and your funding for the partnership. | ||
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unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| Mission really straightforward, and that is we believe in better government, stronger democracy. | ||
| Our theory of the case is having a well-run government, both the federal level and state and local level, is fundamental to our democracy. | ||
| It's a non-partisan issue. | ||
| No matter what policy position you want to pursue, having public institutions that can deliver good results to the public is essential. | ||
| Our funding comes from government, so we do fee-for-service work from traditional foundations, individuals, company sponsorship. | ||
| We are, again, a non-partisan nonprofit, so a challenging issue for all nonprofits, but we work to make sure we can get a double bottom line, achieve our mission, and have the resources to be able to get stuff done. | ||
| And what would you say is the state of the federal workforce right now? | ||
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unidentified
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Not good. | |
| Worst, certainly in my lifetime and probably well beyond that. | ||
| You know, we just had important data released from the Office of Personnel Management that shows net 10% decrease in the federal workforce, not exactly over the full year of the first year of the Trump second term. | ||
| But the issue isn't numbers. | ||
| The really more prominent problem is the way those folks were chased away from our government and who was chased away. | ||
| A good example, we've had challenge for a while of getting young people in our government, and we saw a drop of a full percentage point in those under the age of 30. | ||
| So now we're looking at closer to 8% under the age of 30 rather than 9% over the course of a single year. | ||
| You had a third of the food safety inspectors, Department of Agriculture leave. | ||
| You had a quarter of the IT management from Social Security Administration. | ||
| Defense Department had the largest number of people leave. | ||
| I mean, you basically saw a hurricane go through our government, and the damage was non-planned, idiosyncratic, and profound. | ||
| The argument, though, Max, is that that hurricane, as you call it, had to go through the federal government because there were so many extra people. | ||
| It was so bloated and so inefficient. | ||
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unidentified
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And a couple of thoughts on that, just to look at the data. | |
| Actually, the size of the federal workforce is the same as it was in the 1960s. | ||
| I'm talking absolute size. | ||
| Our country has grown a great deal since then, and the responsibilities of our government has as well. | ||
| You could imagine a world in which you did see a 10% reduction in the staff that was smart and that didn't reduce the actual capability of our government. | ||
| That's not what happened here. | ||
| It was not the right people. | ||
| Again, as I mentioned, it was disproportionately young people, disproportionately people with tech savvy, those that were willing to speak truth to power, those that represented positions that the current administration doesn't like as opposed to not being quality people. | ||
| These were not the right people to let go. | ||
| And any smart leader would have understood that. | ||
| The easiest way to understand it is Russ Vogt walking in said, I want to traumatize the workforce. | ||
| I've never in my entire life seen a manager who you would ever want to hire say that he wanted to traumatize his workforce. | ||
| It's what they did, and they chased away great talent in doing so. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation with Max Deyer at the Partnership for Public Service, you can start giving us a call now. | ||
| Lines are bipartisan. | ||
| Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| We also have a line set aside for federal workers. | ||
| That line is 202-748-8003. | ||
| So if you're currently in the federal government or if you were laid off or took early retirement, took the fork in the road, do give us a call on that line and share your experience with us. | ||
| Max, the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, has released some data. | ||
| And you can see this at data.opm.gov. | ||
| It shows the federal civilian workforce over time. | ||
| This is a chart that goes back to 2015, essentially showing that it had gone up and then back down to those 2015 levels. | ||
| It talks about each agency and how many people work for each agency, etc. | ||
| What are your thoughts on data coming from the OPM and if they have been transparent with that data? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, look, I mean, starting point, you know, kudos to Scott Cooper, the OPM director and OPM, for putting this data out. | |
| It is so important when the administration is making changes and really important changes, providing that information is vital. | ||
| And they did it here. | ||
| That's not been the case in many other instances across our government where we've seen huge change, often harms to our government and the data needed to understand it hidden. | ||
| So this is actually unusual for this administration and definitely to be celebrated. | ||
| And thanks to the whole OPM team for doing that. | ||
| The story it tells, as I just outlined, is not a good one. | ||
| You're right that you can imagine a world in which coming back down to 2015 levels or below even might be a good way to save resources. | ||
| That is not what happened here. | ||
| This was unplanned. | ||
| I mean, again, I use the metaphor of Hurricane. | ||
| You can think of Godzilla. | ||
| Across the board, the people who were let go were not the right ones, and no planning was done to make sure that was the case. | ||
| You can look at some of the individual numbers. | ||
| When you think about the very first people that the president fired, it was the inspector general, 17 inspector generals whose job it is to find waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| They're responsible for saving billions and billions of dollars for the American taxpayer. | ||
| And he let them go. | ||
| And why? | ||
| You know, not because they did their job poorly. | ||
| There was no cause here. | ||
| It's because he didn't want anyone looking over his shoulder. | ||
| He didn't want anyone second-guessing his choices. | ||
| He didn't want to have the oversight that Congress wanted and that the American people should want. | ||
| So again, it's how it was done more than anything else that people should be troubled by. | ||
| And the future doesn't bode well either because what I see coming forward in 2026 is not necessarily the continuation of massive firings, but a change in the system so that the people who are restocking the federal workforce are those that are loyalists as opposed to those that have the best quality capabilities that can work on behalf of the American people. | ||
| We're seeing a critical change in the way our government is run. | ||
| It is now moving back to the spoil system, away from nonpartisan experts being in our government to instead those that are willing to do whatever this president wants, no matter the law or the Constitution, both at the political and the career level. | ||
| That's not what our system should be designed to do. | ||
| It's bad for the American people, and we're going to have corruption and incompetence as a result. | ||
| Let's put some numbers up on the screen for everybody. | ||
| These are reductions in the federal workforce in 2025. | ||
| There were more than 322,000 employees that left the federal workforce during that year. | ||
| Every federal agency was impacted. | ||
| As far as the percentage of the workforce, it was the Department of Education, HUD, and Treasury saw the most cuts. | ||
| But in terms of raw numbers, it was the Defense Department, Veterans Affairs, Treasury, and HHS was impacted the most. | ||
| And Max, just in terms of the impact that this has on the American people, I know during the shutdown that happened towards the end of last year, there were callers that called in and said, you know what, the government's been shut down. | ||