POLITICS: Guess what: DOGE’s federal headcount cuts really ARE making a difference

After years of bureaucratic bloat, President Donald Trump is making good on his promise to right-size the government.

Slashing duplicative and counterproductive jobs has reduced the federal workforce to its lowest level in over a decade, which in turn will help make life more affordable for Americans.

And the cuts are poised to continue.

This stands in stark contrast to the four years of the Biden administration, during which the former president egged on Congress to spend faster than drunken sailors, including on new bureaucrats in Washington, DC.

The federal workforce grew by more than 160,000 from June 2022 until Biden left office.

That was a massive expense for taxpayers not only in terms of salaries and benefits, but also in terms of the trouble those workers caused.

Consider that every government regulator costs the economy millions each year just by throwing red tape in the face of entrepreneurs and consumers.

As the Biden administration placed DEI and ESG officers in every government agency, along with countless other diversity hires in useless offices, those people did little more than raise compliance costs on businesses.

And as those new costs were passed to consumers, they added insult to injury, exacerbating the price increases families were already dealing with thanks to excessive government spending.

Trump flipped the script: With the help of Elon Musk, his team unleashed the Department of Government Efficiency to root out abuse, corruption, fraud and waste throughout the federal budget.

Their targets included moral busybodies and countless government workers who just weren’t pulling their weight.

Hence, federal payrolls have declined every single month of Trump’s second term, for a cumulative reduction of more than 270,000 — a tremendous saving for taxpayers.

Shifting more than a quarter million people out of the unproductive public sector and into the productive private sector will be a boon for the economy.

Those folks now must go from making trouble to making themselves useful.

Unlike in the federal workforce, which has historically been infamous for tolerating inefficiency, employees in the private sector must perform or lose their jobs.

Instead of being a net subtraction from overall economic activity, their labor will now help produce more goods and services, growing the economy — and putting downward pressure on prices.

Additionally, taxpayers will no longer be on the hook for all those federal workers’ salaries, health-insurance premiums, retirement contributions, etc.

The savings are tens of billions of dollars per year.

Profligate government spending fueled the cost-of-living crisis that began during the Biden years, so reducing federal labor costs will help alleviate those deleterious effects, including lower inflation.

In the short term, however, fixing the government workforce can appear to be harmful, just as exploding federal payrolls appeared to be good.

Every government payroll addition under Biden boosted the nation’s overall jobs number, even though such hires did nothing to grow the real economy or produce anything useful.

Similarly, shrinking the bureaucracy is now dragging down the nation’s payroll, as reflected in the government’s monthly jobs report.

That, in turn, makes the economy look like it’s performing worse than it really is.

In fact, since Trump took office, the private sector has added 687,000 jobs, more than offsetting the long-overdue cuts to government jobs this year.

Unlike during Biden’s tenure, when the federal workforce repeatedly set records, all net job growth during Trump’s second term has come from the private sector, not government bureaucracy.

It’s amazing what can be done when businessmen like Musk and Trump are in charge, instead of bureaucrats who never spent a day of their lives in the private sector.

Of course, there’s more to be done; far too many bureaucrats continue to gum up the swamp, making trouble for American families.

Fortunately, Team Trump isn’t letting DOGE rest on its laurels — whether it’s stopping Social Security payments to dead people or eliminating duplicative government jobs — and the work to root out government waste is ongoing.

The more efficient they make government, the more it’ll save taxpayers and help the economy.

E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.