Internal White House document details layoff plans across U.S. agencies

Federal officials are preparing for agencies to cut between 8 and 50 percent of their employees as part of a Trump administration push to shrink the federal government, according to an internal White House document obtained by the Washington Post that contains closely held draft plans for reshaping the 2.3-million-person bureaucracy.

The details are compiled from plans that President Donald Trump ordered agencies to submit, according to two people familiar with the document who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about it. The numbers, which have not been released to the public, show what could be next for the efforts that Trump says will make government more accountable but that have also upended agency functions and triggered restraining orders from the courts.

The document covers 22 agencies and doesn’t have information in some categories. Several people familiar with the document stressed that planning remains fluid and that the numbers do not necessarily reflect what agencies will ultimately cut.

But it indicates that broad staff cuts are likely to have a significant impact on the scope of the government’s work. For example, the document lists the Department of Housing and Urban Development as cutting half of its roughly 8,300-person staff, while the Interior Department would shed nearly 1 in 4 of the workers it had when Trump took office and the IRS would cut nearly 1 in 3.

A White House official said the document wasn’t up-to-date.

“It’s no secret the Trump Administration is dedicated to downsizing the federal bureaucracy and cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. This document is a pre-deliberative draft and does not accurately reflect final reduction in force plans,” White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields said in an email. “When President Trump’s Cabinet Secretaries are ready to announce reduction in force plans, they will make those announcements to their respective workforces at the appropriate time.”

Trump and Elon Musk, his billionaire adviser, have repeatedly said that they are working to achieve a smaller government with less fraud, waste and corruption, but they have provided little clarity about how services might be affected as a result. Trump has said agencies should pare down to their minimum essential functions as required by law, with some exceptions such as the U.S. Postal Service and White House staff.

The document obtained by the Post was last updated Tuesday. Trump instructed the Office of Management and Budget in a Feb. 11 executive order to work with the U.S. DOGE Service and Musk to shrink the workforce. Agency heads’ blueprints for meeting this goal were due to the budget office and the government’s human resources arm, the Office of Personnel Management, earlier this month. Plans for reorganization and further staff reductions are due by mid-April.

The document shows reductions of 8 percent at the Justice Department, 28 percent at the National Science Foundation, 30 percent at the Commerce Department and 43 percent at the Small Business Administration, among others.

The National Science Foundation declined to comment on the cuts. A Justice spokesperson said officials were “working relentlessly” to make the department efficient and keep the country safe.

The numbers in the document might reflect only a partial estimate of the cuts that the administration will ultimately pursue. The White House has not yet released its official budget, a proposal that traditionally lays out the amount of agency spending the president wants to see in the coming fiscal year. Supplemental budget documents often include personnel requests.

Spending on the civil service accounts for a small fraction of the national budget, but workforce cuts could pave the way for shrinking the costlier government programs the employees help to administer. Experts said the reduction-in-force (RIF) process is more likely to survive legal challenges than the administration’s error-riddled mass firings of probationary employees earlier this year.

“The RIF process is the one that is established in law and regulation about how to reduce workforces,” said Robert Shea, a Republican who served in senior political roles at the White House budget office. Shea predicted that attempted cuts would draw additional litigation but added: “Because this is a well-established path, it’s more likely to succeed than some of these other avenues.”

The numbers in the document appear to include employees who already took a deferred resignation offer, were fired because of their probationary status or were planning to leave their jobs regardless of White House directives. It did not appear that the totals factored in court rulings that found the probationary firings unlawful and required agencies to reinstate the affected workers, which the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to reverse.

The document included some estimated cost savings for each agency’s planned reductions, which amount to a small fraction of the $1.8 trillion federal budget deficit that DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, is seeking to address. The document said firings would save the Education Department $6.1 billion, the Justice Department $1.9 billion, and HUD more than $1.2 million through fiscal 2026 and $800 million annually after three years.

The document projects a 10 percent cut at the Environmental Protection Agency, where the downsizing will include firing up to 1,115 people from the Office of Research and Development, which runs labs and research centers across the country. But it didn’t estimate how much money that would save. The potential cuts to this EPA division have been previously reported.

An EPA spokesperson said, “This does not track with any current EPA plans.”

The document also projects a roughly 30 percent personnel cut at the Treasury Department. The Trump administration has moved aggressively to downsize the tax agency, which senior officials now believe will contribute to a decrease in tax receipts of 10 percent or more. In a statement, a Treasury spokeswoman said: “The Treasury Department is considering a number of measures to increase efficiency, including a rollback of wasteful Biden-era hiring surges, and consolidation of critical support functions. … No final decisions have yet been made.”

For most agencies, the document doesn’t get into details about which divisions would be most affected or which government services were on the chopping block. But the scope and impact of the firings have begun to surface in court documents and through reports from employees.

At the Social Security Administration, field office managers have resorted to answering phones in place of receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out, and the website overloaded four times this month, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts. Inside national parks, run by federal workers, lines have doubled and reservations were canceled after, in one instance, firings dismissed an entire team that managed reservations for renting historic farmhouses.

Cuts have already been announced at some agencies, including the Education Department, which said this month that it would be reducing its staff by half. The document did not list those reductions among its totals. It also did not specify staff reduction goals for certain agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A draft proposal obtained by the Post for how Veterans Affairs could shed 80,000 workers focuses on policy and program analysts, medical and health-care support staff, and call centers. The document, provided by two VA employees, states that call centers “are expected to be streamlined with automation,” which would reduce the need for workers.

An agency spokesman said that there is no set plan for how VA will achieve its goals but that agency leaders will assess “how to improve care and benefits for Veterans without cutting care and benefits for Veterans.”

“We’ve not made any final decisions yet, but the end result of our reforms will be maintaining and expanding VA’s mission-essential jobs like doctors, nurses and claims processors, while phasing out non-mission essential roles like interior designers and DEI officers,” spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz said in an email.

Andrew Huddleston, communications director for the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents the largest number of federal workers, said cuts to support staff would fit “with the narrative that these are administrative people, support people, bureaucrats. But those people are the ones helping veterans get appointments and their paperwork in on time.”