President Donald Trump has made slashing the federal workforce one of his top priorities in his first months back in office. Reflecting plummeting public trust in government overall, Trump has blamed career federal employees for “destroying this country,” and cast them as “crooked,” “dishonest” and “unnecessary.”
That’s an inaccurate representation of those workers, said Rob Shriver, former acting director of the Office of Personnel Management under President Joe Biden.
What federal workers “really care about, no matter who is in charge, is trying to figure out how, consistent with that administration’s priorities and the directions from their leaders, they can help the government work better for American people,” he said.
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So who is your average government employee? Federal data paints a varied portrait of the people who make up the U.S. civil service.
A typical government worker may be a Customs and Border Protection administrator in Sanderson, Texas; a nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic in Pittsburgh; or a programmer at a courthouse in Savannah, Georgia.
The Office of Management and Budget directed agencies on Wednesday to implement “large-scale reductions in force” that would include laying off or firing employees and renegotiating collective bargaining agreements with federal workers’ unions to improve “government efficiency and employee accountability.” Ultimately, the memo instructs agencies to replace every four terminated employees with one worker.
It’s not clear yet how Trump’s recent executive orders or his administration’s downsizing of agencies – and the many legal challenges filed against these actions – have affected federal workforce numbers so far.
Graphic by Jenna Cohen/PBS News
The president has called the workforce “bloated,” though the federal government hasn’t substantially changed in size since the late 1960s, when employment hovered around 2 million. Except for once every decade, when hundreds of thousands of additional workers are hired to help conduct the census, the government has employed between 1.8 and 2.4 million people over the last 60 years. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics calculates total federal workforce monthly, which hit 2.4 million in January.
Here are five more facts about U.S. government employees, based on the most recently available data from September 2024 released by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
The vast majority of federal workers live outside the nation’s capital region
Federal workers live and work in all 50 states and overseas. While about 454,000 federal employees do work in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, more than 80 percent of the federal workforce lived elsewhere in the U.S. or abroad in 2024.
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Of the other 1.8 million in the U.S., about 151,000 federal workers lived in California, 131,000 lived in Texas, and 95,000 lived in Florida.
Looking to some of the least populated states, around 5,700 federal workers were based in North Dakota while Wyoming had around 6,800.
Graphic by Jenna Cohen/PBS News
“There are USDA offices in every county in the country, and in places like Iowa, they provide support to farmers who are seeking financial assistance or other things,” Shriver said.
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Outside of the states, some 19,000 workers lived in the U.S. territories of American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, the Midway Islands, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. An additional 31,000 or so lived in foreign countries, and another 4,200 lived in what the government calls “unspecified” locations around the world.
And a final, whopping number: There were around 276,000 employees of agencies like the FBI and Secret Service whose location in the U.S. was a secret.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is the largest employer of federal workers
About 1 in 5 people who work for the government — around 483,000 federal workers — were employed by the VA. That’s more than double the number who worked at the Department of Homeland Security, which was the next largest employer. Nearly two thirds of VA employees were women.
The VA also topped the list as the biggest agency employer for most states. In others, the top agencies were the Department of Agriculture (Montana and Idaho), Department of the Interior (Wyoming and Alaska), Department of the Navy (Washington, Hawaii, Virginia, Rhode Island and Maine), Department of the Army (Alabama, Kentucky and New Jersey), Department of Health and Human Services (Maryland) and Department of the Air Force (Oklahoma and Utah).
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Around 46 percent of the VA’s employees were nurses, medical facility support staff or medical officers.
Graphic by Jenna Cohen/PBS News
Across all agencies, nursing is the occupation with the greatest number of federal employees (around 111,000), followed by IT management (around 101,000).
Of the 2.3 million federal employees, around 2.1 million were classified as “white collar.” The remaining are “blue collar” or “unspecified” employees, working jobs such as custodians, mechanics, food service workers and electricians.
Other federal jobs you may not have known about include roughly 900 workers in laundry, dry cleaning and pressing, 1,200 meat cutters, 900 naval architects and 150 funeral directors.
The federal government employed more than 642,000 veterans last year
About 1 in 4 federal workers were veterans, far outpacing the wider civilian labor force, where veterans make up about 5 percent of workers. Most of the veterans who worked for the federal government were employed by the VA, the Defense Department, branches of the military or the Department of Homeland Security. But about 20 percent of those veterans worked in other agencies, including the Departments of Transportation, Agriculture, the Interior, the Treasury and Health and Human Services.
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A handful of veterans were employees at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Federal Maritime Commission and the Office of Government Ethics.
Graphic by Jenna Cohen/PBS News
Veterans are prioritized in government hiring, which could contribute to their overrepresentation in the federal workforce.
“It is certainly the case that the hiring preference makes a difference in terms of the ability of veterans to get jobs in the general space,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. But veterans may also be predisposed to serve the country.
“There’s a very high alignment between the military and civilian services. You’re serving the public in different ways, but you’re still serving the public.”
1 in 5 federal workers identifies as having a disability
Around 531,000 federal employees self-identified as having a disability. Only about 5 percent of the national labor force identified as having a disability, according to government data from Feb. 2024.
Graphic by Jenna Cohen/PBS News
The average salary for a federal employee with a disability was $95,000. In 2022, the average salary for someone with a disability working a full-time, year-round job was about $61,000, according to the Center for Research on Disability.
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About 45 percent of those with a disability were veterans.
More than half of federal employees made less than $100,000 a year
The average federal worker salary was about $106,000 in 2024. Only 17 percent made more than $150,000 a year, and many workers made much less than the average. The average blue collar worker made about $70,000, compared to $110,000 for the average white collar worker. At the VA, about 40 percent of the employees made between $50,000 and $80,000 a year.
Men made about $7,000 more yearly than women on average. And while the average salary for a white federal worker was $111,000, Black and Hispanic/Latino federal workers earned less than $97,000 on average.
Graphic by Jenna Cohen/PBS News
The federal workforce also tends to stay at their jobs longer than the private sector. The average length of service for a federal government employee was just under 12 years as of Sept. 2024. Though it’s not a direct comparison, the median tenure for American workers at a single employer was just under four years.
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Civil service protections and relatively good pay could be additional reasons for long tenures, said Roger Nober, a professor and director of the Regulatory Studies Center at The George Washington University.
But that long length of service may also be due to the “purpose-driven” attitude of many government employees, Stier said.
“The large majority are there because they want to serve the public. They are motivated by their desire to make the world a better place and to do that through our government.”
