The last time we shrank the federal workforce

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you cut every single federal job President Donald Trump wants to cut, how much money would that save?

A president has tried to massively shrink the size of the federal government before. It was in the 90s, under a Democrat.

Today on the show: Where they found waste the last time we really looked. (Hint: it wasn't jobs.) And why the pace of firings under Trump might start to slow down.

For more:
- Lessons for the Future of Government Reform
- Is government too big? Reflections on the size and composition of today's federal government
- Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less

This episode of Planet Money was produced by Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jiang and engineered by Jimmy Keeley. We had fact-checking help from Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks to Ben Zipperer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.4	Tell me again how to pronounce your name.
0:08.7	A tier. So think of a teardrop. Like a tear drop is rolling down. Okay. Yes, but happy tears.
0:14.1	Are you happy? I'm fine. I'm fine. A tear coal is doing fine for a federal worker right now. For the past year and a half,
0:23.7	a tier has been working on basically tracking biological things that can kill you. So like anthrax,
0:31.6	Zika, contaminated food, even like lead poisoning. Yeah. So like if someone eats some bad lettuce with
0:38.8	E. coli, a doctor would flag it. And then this system that Ateer works on would help everyone
0:44.4	try to identify where the E. coli outbreak is coming from. This system is where all the puzzle pieces
0:50.4	come together. And it's how you move quickly in a moment of emergency.
0:56.0	Ateer worked closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
0:59.1	Technically, though, her job was at this government unit called the U.S. Digital Service.
1:04.1	But on the day of President Trump's inauguration, a tear found out that was changing.
1:09.3	By the way, there was an executive order where now Doge.
1:12.5	Doge.
1:13.3	The U.S. Digital Service was now going to be the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk's team.
1:19.1	So did anything change? Did your email change?
1:22.3	No. Nothing. Nothing.
1:24.9	Was your boss like Elon Musk?
1:27.5	No. My boss was still my boss.
1:29.9	Atir says some Doge people did ask everyone on her team for this interview.
1:34.3	Like a tell us what you do here interview.
1:37.8	The whole call didn't even last 15 minutes.
	...

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