- On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will publish the much-watched jobs report for February.
- Federal workforce terminations led by the White House DOGE office largely won’t be reflected.
- Though Trump and DOGE have sparked thousands of firings, they will likely still show up as employed.
The impact of Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce largely won’t yet show up in the economy’s monthly employment report card, due to the timing of firings and data collection.
It matters because large-scale job losses are one early sign of a weakening economy. And as Trump’s new tariffs have some worried about an uptick in inflation, Americans will be watching the economic data closely in the coming months for signs of a downturn.
For now, however, economists told Business Insider that the federal government job cuts inspired by Trump’s DOGE office likely won’t show up in the official unemployment figures just yet.
Many DOGE firings won’t be in the February jobs report
The Bureau of Labor Statistics will publish the closely watched US jobs report on Friday, showing how the labor market changed last month. The two surveys behind the numbers capture a snapshot of the economy in the middle of the month. Since many of the DOGE-inspired employment cuts happened during and after that period, they won’t show up until the jobs report that’s set to come out the first week of April.
Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, said many of the fired government workers would still be considered employed in the household survey, which is used to estimate the unemployment rate. The reference week for this month’s report, or period when the Census Bureau and BLS are out asking Americans if they have a job, was February 9 to February 15. Many of the cuts fell during or after that week, and any government employees who were still working for at least part of that week will show up as employed in the coming jobs report.
For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs dismissed over 1,000 people on February 13 and over 1,000 on February 24. The Internal Revenue Service made job cuts on February 20.
“It’s unlikely cuts that happened between February 12 and February 20 would show up in the February jobs report,” Zhao told BI.
The second survey behind the jobs report, which canvasses business establishments across the country, has a similar timeframe. The survey, which uses the pay period including the 12th of the month, will likely not show most of those government terminations on Friday either.
Despite the timing of the surveys, Julia Pollak, chief economist of ZipRecruiter, told BI that February’s change in federal employment could end up being quite a bit lower than what’s been seen in the past couple of years.
“As of mid-February, about 75,000 federal workers had resigned under the Trump Administration’s ‘deferred resignation’ program,” Pollak said. “It is unclear whether these people will still be counted as being on payroll.”
In April, BLS will publish the jobs report covering the state of the market in mid-March, which will likely show a drop in federal employment. Gregory Daco, EY’s chief economist, told BI that the cuts to the federal workforce “will undoubtedly impact the March payrolls print, but we don’t know by how much.”
DOGE cuts aren’t expected to dent future jobs reports much either
Among DOGE’s first targets were probationary workers who have typically been in their roles for only a short period of time. Even if the Trump administration cut all of the roughly 200,000 federal workers who have been in their roles for under one year, the impact on the overall workforce wouldn’t be too large. Daco said federal employment accounts for less than 2% of US employment.
David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, said in a note that “contrary to popular opinion,” federal government civilian employment “has not been rising quickly in recent years.” BLS data showed 3 million federal employees in January, which has grown by just 1.6% from a year ago.
That doesn’t mean the recent terminations won’t affect Americans and government functions. IRS workers told BI they expect tax season will be affected by the terminations of probationary workers. Kelly said that “the volume of layoffs and quits will likely slow many of the functions of the federal government, ultimately impacting both private businesses and American citizens.”
More turnover is expected in the federal workforce this year. A memo from the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management said agencies should “seek reductions in components and positions that are non-critical” in addition to considering areas to consolidate, including management, and put together reorganization plans by March 13. The Department of Education proposed a “one time offer in advance of a very significant Reduction in Force” to employees.
Additionally, Pollak said that there could be job losses in the private sector ahead because of contractors who may be affected by cuts to budgets and programs.
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