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
3.00
@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/