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. Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Listen free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Music: Audio Network - "West Green Road," "Raise Up," and "Blue and Green."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What happens when a president attempts to shrink the federal workforce?
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Tell me again how to pronounce your name.
A tear. So think of a teardrop. Like a teardrop is rolling down. Okay. Yes, but happy tears. Are you happy?
I'm fine. I'm fine. A tear, Cole, is doing fine for a federal worker right now.
For the past year and a half, a tear has been working on basically tracking biological things that can kill you.
So like anthrax, Zika, contaminated food, even like lead poisoning.
Yeah. So like If someone eats some bad lettuce with E. coli, a doctor would flag it. And then this system that Atir works on would help everyone try to identify where the E. coli outbreak is coming from.
This system is where all the puzzle pieces come together. And it's how you move quickly in a moment of emergency.
Atir worked closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Technically, though, her job was at this government unit called the U.S. Digital Service. But on the day of President Trump's inauguration, Atiyah found out that was changing. By the way, there was an executive order.
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Chapter 2: What was the National Performance Review?
Okay, the actual size of the federal government, like the number of federal employees, hasn't changed much in 50 years. 50 years ago, there were 2.1 million federal employees. Today, there are 2.3 million. This is not including the military. We are only talking about civilian jobs here. Also, this number doesn't include postal workers.
So, yeah, the number of federal jobs has stayed about the same, even though the U.S. population has grown by 68 percent. But, you know, yeah, maybe there's still too many jobs. OK, surely you think that there is some waste in the government, right, or that there are some federal positions maybe that shouldn't even exist.
Absolutely. Yep. You think that? I do think that. I do think that. You can probably always find 5%, maybe 10% in waste and unnecessary workers.
And you would know because you have done this exact thing.
30-plus years ago. That's what we did. Elaine Kamark studies the federal workforce and government operations at the Brookings Institution. And Elaine knows probably better than anyone about bloat in the federal government because back in the 90s, the number of federal jobs actually peaked at over 3 million. And Elaine's job was to bring that number way, way down. But she did more than just that.
Her job was to look at all government waste.
Yeah. At the time, there was this story circling around about government waste and government inefficiency. And it all started with this mythical hammer. The story was if you bought a hammer like on the street, your local hardware store, it would cost six dollars. But if the federal government bought a hammer, it cost four hundred dollars. The $400 federal hammer.
And it cost this much because of all the federal rules and regulations around buying something for the government. The paperwork, the red tape, the people involved in just procuring the hammer.
When Bill Clinton became president, he and Al Gore in particular vowed to cut government waste.
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Chapter 3: How did the government identify waste in the 90s?
A lot of times the inefficiencies were not people inefficiencies. A lot of times the inefficiencies were obsolete statutes or obsolete regulations that were requiring the civil service to do things in a sort of backwards convoluted way that was costing money and costing time.
Elaine actually found that the most cumbersome regulations were around procurements, the way the government, mainly the Defense Department, had to buy things. It's this massive system of rules and checks and balances for even the tiniest purchases.
They added cost. They would add cost to everything from hammers and staplers to airplanes.
the mythical expensive government hammer was real. And Elaine says they also found like the over-regulated expensive ashtray and super expensive government floor wax. They collected all their inefficiencies from across the government. And on September 7th, 1993, Elaine and Al Gore presented their big report on the White House lawn with a lot of fanfare.
If you want to know why government doesn't work, Look behind you.
Behind Al Gore were these giant stacks of paper taller than him on forklifts.
The answer is at least partly on those forklifts.
It's always a show, these things, you know. Al Gore also went on David Letterman to brag about all of the inefficiencies that they found.
Please welcome the vice president of the United States, Al Gore.
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Chapter 4: What are the inefficiencies in government spending?
Yeah, it was a real hammer. Yeah, we put a real hammer in a real picture frame. I mean, it was pretty tacky looking.
Yeah, kind of tacky, but also their effort was pretty comprehensive.
To be clear, that hammer, only $6.
They were very proud of their $6 hammer awards. And, you know, they did many, many rounds of reviews and cuts over many, many years. They cut jobs, they cut whole offices, and they got...
granular like they found all of these small programs and agencies that were kind of like little snapshots of history that maybe they made sense at one point in time but really really did not anymore you point to a couple which is the tea tasters board uh-huh what is the tea tasters board well obviously the tea tasters board was left over from the revolutionary war
Right, obviously. This is basically the start of our relationship with tea. Okay. Wait, these were tea tasters? Yeah, they were tea tasters. Like a real little agency with paid government employees under the Food and Drug Administration who met every year in a converted Navy warehouse in Brooklyn to sample the tea that was being imported into the U.S. So refined. Right?
The board was technically a remnant from the 1890s when there were these... concerns about tea exporters sending the U.S.
their bad scrap tea. I don't know why they were still in the government, right? I guess to assure the quality of the tea coming into the United States. But it was obviously silly. It was obviously unnecessary, and we closed it.
Her team cut 250 of these programs and agencies. No more tea tasting.
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Chapter 5: How does the current federal workforce compare to the past?
There were also subsidies that Elaine says were costing taxpayers money that they also got rid of, like the wool and mohair subsidy.
Mohair is a fabric, OK, that goes in sweaters and stuff. All right.
It's like wool. OK. A lot of wool and mohair were coming from sheep and goats in places like Wyoming.
Before and during the Korean War. We knew that American soldiers were going to be fighting in very cold territory. And we wanted to make sure there was enough wool and mohair for their uniforms. So, in fact, a subsidy was given to farmers under national defense thinking so that we'd have enough wool and mohair for uniforms.
It was like to boost domestic production of wool, basically?
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Domestic of wool and mohair. Obviously, since the Korean War, which was in the 1950s, right, it was no longer a national defense priority to have enough wool and mohair around. And so we got rid of the subsidy. It can be quite hard to get rid of a subsidy. Yeah.
Like it doesn't just go away, right?
Yes.
The Wyoming farmers, I'm sure, pushed back. Right. This wool and mohair thing is actually really indicative of how difficult it is to undo things in the federal government. Even a really small, not that beneficial anymore subsidy.
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Chapter 6: What lessons can we learn from previous budget cuts?
And also, of course, the U.S. is not going to fire every single federal employee to get that full $271 billion in savings.
It's impossible to cut all $271 billion of this. You wouldn't have a government left. In other words, you're lucky to cut $50 billion.
OK, but to be fair, if we only look at the official federal jobs, that doesn't really give us the whole picture because there is another kind of like hidden category of worker doing government-ish work that the government also pays for, federal contractors.
Basically, the government can't do all the work it needs to do with just the official federal employees. So they hire contractors. And there are a lot of them.
Oh, yeah. No, we've got more contractors than we have civil servants.
We have more contractors than civil servants.
Yeah, that's the estimate. Yeah.
We don't actually know how many federal contractors there are. According to Elaine's estimates, there are 2.7 million individual contract workers. Some say more. And that is on top of the official federal employee numbers. And contract workers have been losing their jobs, too, when the Trump administration stopped paying some of its contracts.
Now, there are two kinds of federal contractors. There's the contract workers that get paid to make goods for the U.S.
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Chapter 7: What was the significance of the $400 hammer story?
Take the Defense Department. It was initially announced that the Defense Department would cut 76,000 defense-related civilian jobs. But there are laws that the cabinet secretary, Pete Hegseth, has to follow.
He then said, hold on, hold your horses. I under statute, the secretary of defense has to justify before he does any firing. He has to study and justify that the firing will not decrease our national defense readiness. So he had to go through that step. OK, and he's still going to cut people.
But it's I'm thinking that this may happen in a less chaotic and somewhat more sensible way once there are cabinet secretaries in place.
And Elaine wonders if the Trump administration might focus more on the area that she found so ripe for savings 32 years ago, regulations.
That was something that I was hoping the Doge effort would do, is cut regulations. Because, I mean, every couple of years you got to do this because some regulations just get obsolete.
Deregulation is coming. Trump issued an executive order telling all agencies they had 60 days to identify regulations that could go. And their deadline is late April.
By the way, Atir Kohl, the federal worker who found herself suddenly on the Doge team, she was not fired. She quit. She says she is not going to apply to any federal government jobs right now, but says she will in the future. The best way to support Planet Money and the work that we do is to become a member of Planet Money Plus or NPR Plus. You get sponsor free listening and bonus episodes.
And it really means a lot to us. It is super helpful. You can learn more or sign up at plus.npr.org. And thank you to everyone who has already signed up.
This episode of Planet Money was produced and also reported a little bit by Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jing and engineered by Jimmy Keeley with fact-checking help from Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. We also want to give a special thanks to Ben Zipper at the Economic Policy Institute. He also really helped us understand who the federal workforce is.
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