How many staff does it take to run a country? The answer is no joke

In Washington, one gag is growing tired. This week, Donald Trump celebrated the news that the US economy had surpassed expectations, with promising job growth last month. But among federal employees, jokes about how many of them it takes to change a light bulb – or run a country – are told relentlessly.

Just a year ago, Elon Musk’s now-dissolved Department of Government Efficiency was taking its hacksaw to the US federal workforce – but the Trump administration is finally realising that it takes a significant number of staff to govern a country. When Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, there were 2.4 million federal employees. In the space of a year, more than 317,000 of them were pushed out. Some retired but most took payouts and quit. Others were fired or found that the agencies that they worked for had simply disappeared.

The president assured voters that this culling was necessary to eliminate waste, streamline spending and improve performance. But a year later, it turns out that all of those lawyers, interns, analysts, project managers and accountants were useful after all – and agencies from the Department of Justice to air-traffic control are scrambling to hire new staff to replenish a depleted workforce. 

The rehiring began not long after the firing. At the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Safety Administration, which is tasked with keeping the US nuclear arsenal safe, about 350 people were let go, only for the government to realise that they were rather important and ask them to come back. The same thing happened at the Department of Agriculture, where 25 per cent of staff tackling avian-flu outbreaks were laid off and then rehired. The Internal Revenue Service invited back sacked staff when it became clear that it needed people to process tax returns. And it didn’t take long for some bright spark to realise that culling food-safety examiners could have stomach-churning consequences.

The Brookings Institution think tank, which has been tracking federal comings and goings, estimates that 25,747 federal employees have been fired and rehired. However, not everyone has gracefully accepted the invitation to return. Publicly maligning a group of people as “crooked” or “rogue” tends not to engender loyalty. There are certainly some federal workers dedicated to public service and willing to look beyond partisan politics for the greater good. But there are plenty of others giving a metaphorical middle finger to the White House and taking their talent elsewhere. 

Now, many agencies are hiring again. Brookings found that in mid-November 73,000 jobs were posted on USAJobs, the federal government’s official employment site. Only 14,400 candidates, however, were found. The agencies struggling the most to find suitable candidates appear to be those most closely aligned with Trump’s divisive policy agenda. The New York Timesrecently reported that the US attorneys’ offices had shrunk by 14 per cent in a year, a record annual drop.

Many attorneys have chosen to quit rather than work on the nakedly political cases that the administration is sending to their desks. There’s also a hiring bonanza at Homeland Security, which is implementing Trump’s migration crackdown. Staff have already been seconded from other areas, including the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency. But it’s still not enough and the department is offering candidates a $50,000 (€42,140) signing bonus in a bid to hit its hiring targets.

So what does this mean for the coming years? There is plenty of doom-mongering: taking FBI agents off the surveillance of extremism could lead to lapses in intelligence gathering, the cuts to weather monitoring could prove deadly and backlogs in processing will mean delayed social-security payments. Time will tell but polls suggest that Americans are worried, with a recent Washington Post survey finding that 63 per cent of people disapprove of their president’s handling of the federal workforce. While most agreed with trimming a little flab off the civil service, paring it right down to the bone is foolish. The self-proclaimed greatest country on Earth cannot be run by a skeleton crew.

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson is a Washington-based journalist and regular Monocle contributor. Read her thoughts on Kristi Noem here.