Federal Agencies Say They Fired 25,000 New Staff Under Trump (1)

Federal agencies said they fired nearly 25,000 probationary federal employees since Inauguration Day, in the fullest accounting to date of government-wide workforce cuts.

The Trump administration provided the figures Monday night for 18 agencies, after a Maryland judge demanded it. The Treasury Department fired the largest percentage of its workforce at 7%, according to Bloomberg Law’s analysis of the statistics. Agriculture fired 6%.

Bloomberg Law did not independently verify all of the Trump administration’s figures, though they track closely with previous reporting.

Probationary employees are the federal government’s newest hires. President Donald Trump in his first days in office demanded federal agencies downsize, prompting them to terminate those workers. The abrupt firings spurred lawsuits in California and Maryland, and judges ordered a slew of agencies to temporarily reinstate the employees. The Trump administration is appealing those rulings.

Federal agencies largely responded by temporarily rehiring employees and placing them on administrative leave. The Commerce Department, Food and Drug Administration, and Internal Revenue Service, for instance, said they would pay their fired employees while the litigation proceeds but not bring them back to work immediately.

“The department may revert your prior termination action to its original effective date” if the government prevails in court, Commerce Acting General Counsel John K. Guenther told affected employees in a letter.

Terminated probationary workers in multiple agencies described a haphazard and disorganized effort to slash the size of the federal government in recent weeks.

Adding to the confusion, a Trump administration lawyer told a judge on March 12 that he didn’t know how many probationary workers lost their jobs at more than a dozen agencies. The administration told a California federal judge a few days later that it would need to reinstate more than 16,000 employees to comply with his order to rehire probationary staff fired by six agencies.

The case is Maryland v. USDA, D. Md., 1:25-cv-00748, 3/17/25.