Linked to this Kalshi question:
If there are more than 250000 federal employees no longer working relative to the January 2025 employee count before Jan 2026, then the market resolves to Yes. Outcome verified from FRED.
Note the resolution criteria—what matters is the change in the count of federal employees, not whether we can confirm Trump and/or Elon directly fired them.
1,000
3.00Change in fed govt employees following elections charts I made, data from https://www.statista.com/statistics/204535/number-of-governmental-employees-in-the-us/
@summer_of_bliss hm this is pretty interesting. Thanks for putting together. Wonder where those mostly came from (as in which departments or areas)...
From this source, 70% of federal employees works in natl security / defense (unsurprising)
However, I would have likely expected a spike in 2001 after 9/11, not the largest decline as seen in Brad's chart. However, possibly changes either didn't show up to 2002, showed up according to a different physical year boundry, or did not actually affect things as I expect.
@Dgfold yeah on 9/11, shows change in average number of employees across 2001 versus 2000, so wouldn’t pick up much change
here’s a more comprehensive chart:
@summer_of_bliss The big spikes followed by drops are probably from the census every ten years. It's not as volatile as it might seem.
@summer_of_bliss it would be nice to see a chart that also counted contractors, though that would probably be hard to do, since the move to have more of those is masking the growth rate.
@Predictor I'm pretty sure there's a replacement for him, so not a cut
Actually, is there a market for how many government employees are fired so more aligned (geographically or ideologically) replacements can fill the position?
I believe this is the relevant chart (not binding, if it turns out I'm reading it wrong):
Trump took office in Jan 2017 with 2.813M federal employees.
The latest figure (Oct 2024) is 3.001M federal employees (this question uses the future Jan 2025 starting point).
So to resolve YES, they would need to slash the federal workforce back to its size when Trump took office 8 years ago, and then cut ~50k more.
Trump has talked about cutting the Department of Education, but that's only ~4000 employees. To cut 250k employees, you'd almost certainly need to tackle the largest departments, like defense, VA, homeland security, & DoJ.
@Ziddletwix Yeah, the full rules on Kalshi have a link to that page.
I think it's very unlikely that they'll be able to move that quickly.
@Ziddletwix Important to note that if Trump freezes all new hires, roughly 8% of employees will leave voluntarily according to standard rates. 8% is roughly 250k people. Some combination of pausing hires and firing people from certain agencies could achieve this, but to do so within a year and without properly identifying which employees to let go of and which positions to freeze just doesn't seem possible.
https://ourpublicservice.org/fed-figures/a-profile-of-the-2023-federal-workforce/