Led Restructuring as Head of Government Efficiency Department in Trump Administration
As the second administration of Donald Trump is expected to wield the axe of layoffs against 2.3 million U.S. federal employees, reports indicate that civil servants are trembling with anxiety. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, who has been nominated as the head of the newly established 'Department of Government Efficiency,' has announced plans to restructure more than half of the civil servants, drawing attention to the actual scale of the cuts to be implemented.
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on the 17th (local time), about 70% of general federal government employees work in the military or security-related agencies. According to related statistics from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the department with the largest number of general employees is the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which operates hundreds of hospitals and clinics for veterans, with 486,522 employees. This was followed by the Department of Homeland Security (222,539), the Army (221,037), the Navy (216,537), the Air Force (168,505), the Department of Defense (156,803), the Department of Justice (116,614), the Department of the Treasury (108,869), and the Department of Agriculture (92,072). The department with the fewest general employees was the U.S. Department of Education, with only 4,425 employees.
The Office of Personnel Management reported that the budget spent on annual salaries for these general federal employees was $213 billion (approximately 296.3 trillion KRW) as of April this year. By sector, the median salary for general employees in the Department of Education was the highest at $118,410 (approximately 160 million KRW), while the median salary for general employees in the Department of the Treasury, which has a high proportion of office workers, was the lowest at $59,557 (approximately 80 million KRW). The median salary for all general federal employees was $97,024 (approximately 130 million KRW).
By occupation, healthcare workers such as doctors, nurses, and public health workers numbered 360,000, making up about 15%, the largest share, with administrative and clerical workers also close to 15%. WSJ noted, "General federal employees perform a wide range of jobs, from nurses at veterans hospitals to rangers at Yellowstone National Park, federal prison guards, and the 19 staff members of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (NWTRB), with over 80% working outside Washington, D.C."
President-elect Donald Trump, who will take office in January next year, has announced large-scale cuts under the pretext of streamlining the bloated government. There are talks of reclassifying general civil servants, whose positions are guaranteed, as political appointees and then dismissing them, filling the vacancies with loyalists. In particular, Trump has appointed CEO Musk and entrepreneur-turned-politician Vivek Ramaswamy as heads of the Department of Government Efficiency, stating that the restructuring will be completed within a year and a half. CEO Musk previously laid off 80% of the staff when he acquired the social networking service X (formerly Twitter) in 2022.
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