In his first year back in office, President Trump has made unparalleled changes to the federal government, shrinking its footprint both in the services it provides and the size of its work force.
The extent of the effect on the public so far is unclear. Some of the White House’s moves are stalled by a mountain of litigation — more than 200 lawsuits have been filed challenging the firings of federal workers and the freezing of grants and elimination of programs, a vast majority of which are still pending. And agencies have not fully detailed the number of staff members and services that have been cut, making it difficult to discern the full scope of the difference between today’s federal government and the one from a year ago.
Mr. Trump pledged in February to make the government “smaller, more efficient, more effective and a lot less expensive.”
By one specific standard, Mr. Trump can claim a degree of success: The work force is definitely smaller.
The number of civilian federal employees declined by about 10 percent this year, according to government data. After weathering months of threats and anxiety, many federal workers resigned or took early retirement. Others were laid off. In all, there are now about 249,000 fewer people on the government payroll than there were in the beginning of the year.
However, there are indications that the president’s other goals have not yet been achieved.
Even after Elon Musk’s bureaucracy-shrinking initiative upended agencies across the government, an analysis by The New York Times found it misstated its claims of large savings and failed to reduce federal spending.
And many current and former officials and people who routinely interact with the federal government say that it is far less efficient and less dependable in the services it provides to the American public.
Take the Agriculture Department, which lost 20,000 workers, nearly one-fifth of its staff.
Many farmers have found they cannot get critical information about the grants and conservation projects they had incorporated into their business plans, said Wes Gillingham, a farmer in upstate New York and the president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association. Just getting routine support from the agency is difficult because often there is no one in the regional office to answer the phone, he added.
“We’re just going to see a huge amount of farms going out of business this year because of the mayhem,” he said.
Among the other changes: The government’s most comprehensive system for tracking food-borne illnesses has been scaled back. It has canceled programs to deter young people from using tobacco, the leading cause of cancer. It curtailed research into cancer, as well as Alzheimer’s disease and workplace safety.
As of September, the government no longer issues reports about nationwide food insecurity, even as the problem is currently on the rise. The federal housing agency is doing less work enforcing fair housing laws. And in one of the biggest moves, the Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, cutting off foreign aid around the globe.
“It’s a disaster,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that promotes an effective federal work force. “It’s the single largest loss of capacity to keep us safe and to promote the public good that we’ve had in our history, by far and away, and it is for no purpose.”
Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Trump was fulfilling the mandate he had “to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government.”
“In less than a year in office, he has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer,” she said.
The administration cited improvements in processing times for veterans’ benefit claims and new policies requiring federal employees to work in the office five days a week, along with broad efforts to shutter diversity programs, loosen regulations and ease reporting requirements for businesses and consumer protection.
Top officials have said the changes were needed to stamp out what they view as an ideological bias inside the bureaucracy.
“Every agency became a tool of the left,” Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a longtime advocate of shrinking the government, told House lawmakers in June. “Under President Trump, those days are over.”
Downsizing the federal government is not a new idea. It has been embraced by Republicans and even some Democrats.
For the last two decades, a majority of Americans have said they believe the federal government has too much power, according to Gallup.
Still, the public generally wants the government to cover some basic needs. In an April survey, Pew Research Center found that nearly all Americans felt the federal government had a responsibility to provide a strong military, a secure border, clean air and water, and national parks. Smaller majorities said it had a duty to provide high-quality education, health insurance and an adequate standard of living.
Even some supporters of a leaner government say the Trump administration’s approach has not been effective.
Spending continues to outpace economic growth, said Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute. Most federal funds, she noted, go to Medicare and Social Security, two programs that neither political party has the will to substantially change. That’s also the case for another big-ticket item: paying interest on the debt.
“A lot of the spending reductions that I’ve observed coming from the administration have been less focused on cutting big budget items and more on reorienting government funding based on ideological or different cultural priorities,” Ms. Boccia said.
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Indeed, inside the government, federal workers said the focus on freezing initiatives related to climate change; environmental justice; and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility had overwhelmed any other mandate.
“They’re pretty clear about what they don’t want, but it is a struggle to figure out what they do want,” said Spiro Stefanou, a former top official for research, education and economics at the Agriculture Department.
Mr. Stefanou, who left government in September, oversaw data collection and research, including an annual survey about household food security, which the administration recently canceled because it said the reports were “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fearmonger.”
Managing his division this year was a challenge, Mr. Stefanou said, and it was incredibly demoralizing to watch seasoned, talented subject matter experts leave government. As the size of his staff dwindled, there was little guidance coming from above.
“Frankly, there wasn’t a lot of work going on since the inauguration,” Mr. Stefanou said.
Alec Varsamis, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department, said the administration was “being transparent about plans to optimize and reduce our work force and to return the department to a customer service focused, farmer first agency.”
“President Trump is utilizing all the tools available to ensure farmers have what they need to continue their farming operations,” he said.
The Internal Revenue Service, which lost about 25 percent of its work force, is now contending with a substantial backlog of cases because of those departures and the recent government shutdown, according to the Taxpayer Advocate Service, a branch of the I.R.S. that helps taxpayers in disputes with the agency.
“It’s going to be painful for the next couple months until we can get out of the hole we’re in,” Erin Collins, the national taxpayer advocate, recently told a group of tax lawyers and accountants.
The agency’s ability to audit companies and wealthy individuals has been most likely weakened because of the staffing cuts, several current and former I.R.S. officials said. It will be several years before data is available to illustrate the true impact.
The agency declined to comment, pointing instead to an interview in which Frank J. Bisignano, the agency’s chief executive officer, asserted that there would be “substantial refunds to working American households” in the coming year.
Many of the changes to the federal government’s services are hard to distinguish because the public is not always aware of its role. And some ramifications may not be felt for years.
That is among the top concerns about the drastic cuts to scientific research — the consequences may not be immediately apparent. And if more people are being diagnosed with cancer in 15 years, it will be difficult to point to the termination of specific grants as the reason, scientists note.
The administration distributed about $13 billion in National Institutes of Health grants from February to June of this year, which is about $8 billion less than it did during the same time period a year earlier, according to the Government Accountability Office. This includes grants for cancer research, cuts that have been described as America’s retreat from the war on the disease.
Another agency that has been hard hit is the Environmental Protection Agency, which lost about 25 percent of its work force.
“E.P.A. is a skeleton of what it once was,” said Francesca Grifo, the former scientific integrity official at the agency, describing it as “an agency that cared about the air that people breathe, the water they drink, the land on which they live.”
Ms. Grifo led the effort to ensure that research was transparent, objective and credible before it went out the door. A large part of her job was talking to researchers who raised concerns about their data being manipulated. Not long after Mr. Trump returned to the Oval Office, Ms. Grifo stopped hearing from employees.
“My phone literally stopped ringing, period, full stop,” she said, adding that people were afraid of raising a concern and facing retribution.
The E.P.A. also had $28 billion in grants terminated, according to a count by the website Grant Witness, a project run by data scientists tracking some government grants.
Mike Bastasch, an agency spokesman, said the E.P.A. was cutting wasteful spending and was not scaling back any research or science that was required by statute.
Some reductions did little to shrink government spending, such as staff cuts to the Center for Tobacco Products at the Food and Drug Administration, which has been funded with fees from the tobacco industry, not taxpayer dollars.
Matt Minich, previously a scientist at the center, said it helped protect young Americans by finding the most efficient ways to deter adolescents from starting to use tobacco.
“Parents in the United States had a free service of experts trying to persuade their kids not to adopt probably the most established unhealthy habit that there is, and that service is gone,” he said.
The F.D.A. did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Minich was fired in February and is headed to Austria to begin a new research job with other American scientists, part of a larger European effort to take advantage of the Trump administration’s dismissal of top scientists.
Many other federal workers chose to leave the government this year because of the drastic priority shifts they witnessed.
Jill Shields, formerly a supervisory intelligence analyst at the F.B.I., said she was directed to pull analysts off transnational crime cases and assign them to immigration tasks, she said, which had not previously been an agency focus.
“I wasn’t able to do my job because there was all this ridiculousness of ‘Hey, we’re going to work on this immigration push instead of working on the actual threats that the F.B.I. has been working on for years,’” she said.
“It’s not the same F.B.I.,” she added. “It’s not the same job, and it’s sad.”
The F.B.I. said its commitment to transnational crime was unchanged.
The exodus of experienced career workers comes as the government has also cut programs to recruit the next generation of employees.
The Trump administration ended the Presidential Management Fellows Program, intended to bring recent graduates into the civil service.
Overall, the number of federal internships has dwindled. Agencies posted 461 internship openings from February to mid-December, a 72 percent decrease from the same period the year before, according to USAJobs Listings Tracker, an independent research project that tracks federal job postings.
“We have not found a single agency that’s placing interns,” said Trevor Brown, the dean of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University.
The lack of investment in the next generation of federal workers deepens the need for the public to grapple with the question of what it wants from its government, Mr. Stier said.
“Is our government there for the public good?” he said. “Or is it in fact there for the interests of the leaders of the day?” That’s a question, Mr. Stier added, that he never thought he would pose in his lifetime.
Andrew Duehren in Washington and Andrea Fuller, Hiroko Tabuchi, Ruth Igielnik and Emma Schartz in New York contributed reporting.
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
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