If there’s one immutable truth about government, it’s this: it never stops growing. Bureaucracy expands by inertia, not necessity, and once it entrenches itself, it fights ruthlessly to protect its own power.
As of December 2025, there were roughly 2.9 million federal employees, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s not a lean operation — it’s a behemoth. A sprawling, self-protecting administrative state that answers more readily to internal rules and unions than to voters.
That’s why Donald Trump’s move to make it easier to fire federal workers matters:
The Trump administration is planning to make it easier to discipline—and potentially fire—career officials in senior positions across the government, a move that would affect roughly 50,000 federal workers.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the federal workforce, issued a final rule on Thursday that creates a category of worker for high-ranking career employees whose work focuses on executing the administration’s policies. Workers who fall into that category would no longer be subject to rules that for decades have set a high bar for firing federal employees.
Naturally, federal workers are furious — and so is the leftist media class that reflexively defends them. CNN is already clutching its pearls, warning that the move could “weaken” the federal workforce. Oh, the horror.
What they really mean is that it weakens the bureaucracy’s grip on power. For decades, Washington has operated on the assumption that federal employees are effectively untouchable — immune from accountability, insulated from elections, and free to undermine any administration they dislike.
Donald Trump has made it clear that he intends to change that. Slimming down government, cutting waste, abuse, and fraud, and removing officials who actively oppose the agenda voters elected him to carry out isn’t radical — it’s basic governance:
The change is part of a far-reaching effort by the administration to overhaul federal agencies and reduce the size of the government’s workforce. Senior political appointees, spurred on by President Trump’s longstanding contention that a “deep state” is undermining his agenda, have shut down government programs, fired thousands of employees and offered others voluntary separation agreements.
Naturally, Democrats are freaking out; federal workers are one of their biggest constituencies.
The Trump team frames the move far more honestly: it restores the executive branch’s ability to actually govern. Instead of allowing an entrenched bureaucracy to quietly sabotage elected leadership, the administration is asserting its authority to shape the workforce so it carries out — rather than undermines — the agenda voters approved:
The administration has been clear that the goal of the rule is to more easily fire workers they argue are hindering Trump policies — a nod to the president’s claims of a “Deep State” within the federal government trying to undermine him.
“This is not about people’s views or ideas. This is about whether they are refusing to actually affect their duties on behalf of the American people consistent with the objectives of this administration,” said Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which promulgated the rule.
