The Trump administration is paying about 154,000 employees not to work as a result of novel resignation incentives offered to federal workers since Inauguration Day, the government’s human resources arm said on Thursday.
That estimate is the first comprehensive disclosure from the government about the scale of President Trump’s effort to downsize the federal work force.
Still, the figure represents just a portion of the total number of workers who have left the federal government since the beginning of the Trump administration — only those who accepted an offer to resign early in exchange for many months of pay. It does not include the thousands of people who were laid off or fired.
While the Trump administration has not made public a complete picture of the cuts, the work of Mr. Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency under Elon Musk amounts to the largest reduction to the federal work force in the modern era. The government employed roughly 2.3 million nonmilitary workers at the start of the year.
A spokeswoman for the Office of Personnel Management said that as of June, about 154,000 employees had resigned or retired early with the promise of being paid through Sept. 30 or Dec. 31, depending on the offer. The Washington Post reported the figure earlier.
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that works to promote best practices in the federal government, had estimated the total number of departures — voluntary resignations, layoffs and firings — to be around 148,000 as of July.
The organization relied on agency announcements, court filings and media reports to track the departures. It calculated the number of separations from the resignation incentive programs to be around 80,000, which is 74,000 less than the administration’s count. The disparity underscores how little information the administration has disclosed about the scale and scope of the separations.
“We are dealing with a pitch-black battlefield where there is enormous carnage growing every day, and there’s little penlights providing us some visibility in terms of what’s happening,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the partnership. “And we need a floodlight.”
The total number of departures is likely to change, with more layoffs planned and continued efforts underway in some pockets of the federal bureaucracy to rehire employees deemed essential to operations.
In the early days of the administration, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, the president’s former job-cutting adviser, cast the resignation incentives as part of a larger initiative to rein in government spending and eliminate waste and inefficiency. But critics say paying more than 150,000 employees not to work for months runs contrary to that goal.
Instead, Mr. Stier said, “this has been a waste-creation exercise.”
The firings have drawn a range of court challenges, placing thousands of employees in employment limbo. Some have described anxiety around opening an email out of fear that it will be an electronic pink slip. Those who continue to work in the government have described their jobs as chaotic as they contend with spending freezes and new layers of approval that they say have made the government less efficient. In addition, the administration has been paying thousands of employees not to work.
“From the start of this administration, they’ve tried to force us to quit and to intimidate us, and put us on leave inexplicably,” said Sheria Smith, 42, who worked as a civil rights lawyer at the Education Department.
She is among more than 800 employees who are expected to be formally separated from the department on Friday. The labor union representing the workers estimates that the government has been spending more than $7 million a month for employees to stay home on administrative leave.
And while hundreds of former education workers are expected to no longer receive paychecks as of Friday, the agency has not provided details about severance or health insurance coverage, said Ms. Smith, who also serves as the president of a local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents many of the Education Department workers affected by the terminations.
The Partnership for Public Service estimates that nearly 2,100 employees have been fired or left the department. Ms. Smith said she could not corroborate that number because the agency has not provided the union with employment information.
“The shroud of secrecy behind the administration’s dramatic cuts to the federal work force should concern every American and every taxpayer,” Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement. “The administration is going to great lengths to prevent the release of details on how many federal jobs are being eliminated and what impact these indiscriminate cuts will have on communities across the country.”
In January, millions of federal employees were offered a buyout of sorts in an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” which many workers said they initially thought was a phishing attempt. There was very little information about the offer and no indication of which positions would be cut in future downsizing efforts. About 75,000 people took the first offer, the administration said. Some agencies chose to offer the incentive again in the spring, as a potentially more appealing option for employees who had been living under the threat of being fired for months.
“It just got to be so much anxiety and stress and not an enjoyable place to work,” said Andrew Cabiness, 51, a longtime employee with the Internal Revenue Service who decided to take advantage of a resignation incentive. Mr. Cabiness, of Indiana, said the constant threat that he could be laid off weighed heavily on his choice. Like many former federal employees, he has struggled to find a new job. But he said he did not regret his decision to leave.
The Partnership for Public Service estimates that the Treasury Department, which includes the I.R.S., has lost 31,201 employees since the beginning of the administration, the largest total compared with other departments.
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
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