While various Democrats have been critical of the Trump administration’s ongoing mass government layoffs, they are seemingly ignoring the fact that the federal workforce has remained largely unscathed by job cuts for the past several years compared to the private sector.
A growing number of American private sector workers have been laid off in recent years while government workers have faced much lower layoff rates. In 2024, the layoff and discharge rate for all U.S. nonfarm payroll jobs ranged from 1% to 1.1%, while the government layoff and discharge rate ranged between 0.3% to 0.4%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data collected by Trading Economics.
U.S. employers reported 761,358 job cuts in 2024 — the highest since 2020 — with only 38,375 of those cuts being government roles, according to a January report from U.S.-based outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and…
