Since the start of the second Trump presidency, the federal government has slashed nearly a quarter of a million employees, with some of the biggest staff cuts taking place in government entities connected to the food supply.
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The US Department of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Federal Workforce Data tool shows the Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services are among the hardest hit, losing 22,253 and 17,406 jobs, respectively, since the beginning of 2025.
Bureaucracies with tens of thousands of employees may have unnecessary layers of managers and administrators, which can undergo reasonable cuts, but bureaucracies are often complex for good reasons, according to Don Schaffner, department chair for the Department of Food and Science at Rutgers University.
Even large bureaucracies should not be cut indiscriminately or without some consideration, Schaffner said in an email.
“It seems to me that many of the DOGE cuts were the opposite of this,” he said, adding that terminating workers and later replacing them comes with its own problems.
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Brain drain, or the loss of institutional knowledge, … is Schaffner’s biggest concern with mass layoffs.
