The Trump administration is threatening to use the government shutdown to permanently reduce the size of the civil service. Its ambitions for these cuts are many, including punishing Democrats by harming their pet projects and curbing “agencies that don’t align with the administration’s values” and are a “waste of the taxpayer dollar,” as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt warned last week. Yet as a tool to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the federal government, these cuts are risible.

Let’s first take the claim that the U.S. federal government is reckoning with problems of bloat. The truth is that even before DOGE took a chain saw to government programs, the United States was actually understaffed relative to other advanced industrial democracies. Federal-, state-, and local-government employees in the U.S. made up about 14.6 percent of total employment in 2023, according to OECD data. This is below the OECD average of 18.4 percent for member countries, and well below that of France (20.7 percent), Canada (20.2 percent), the United Kingdom (17.1 percent), and Australia (15.7 percent).

It bears noting that in the U.S., most public employees—just under 88 percent of all government workers, or about 20.65 million as of August 2025—work for state and local governments. They are our police officers, teachers, firefighters, land-use planners, and transportation engineers. Excluding the military, only about 2.9 million work for the federal government.