Under Trump Wisconsin Lost 2,400 Federal Workers Yet Spending Rose

Finding a job feels like full-time work for Robin Lee. Every day, the Madison resident checks his email to see if he’s received responses to dozens of job applications that he’s submitted. On a recent January afternoon, he was hunting for work online at the Lakeview Library in Madison.

Checking his inbox, Lee found he had been turned down for a city job. But he felt some hope about an interview for a job doing grant work for the state.

Until June, Lee worked as a technical project officer with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Weatherization Assistance Program. He’s one of 2,400 federal workers in Wisconsin who have left, retired or been fired from the federal government since November 2024, according to the state’s most recent jobs figures.

As the months pass, he said he feels pessimistic about job prospects.

“Two years ago, it felt like people were throwing jobs at me, and there was a lot of work in the field that I’m in,” Lee said. “Now … they’re not refilling the federal positions that they’ve eliminated.”

Lee monitored grants awarded to low-income clients for energy efficiency work that included installation of furnaces, insulation or lighting. Lee ensured charges were compliant and that installations met program expectations and policy requirements.

But then President Donald Trump returned to the White House and launched the Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The administration moved quickly to freeze federal grant and loan programs, promising to root out waste, fraud and abuse. Within weeks, thousands of federal workers like Lee faced pressure to consider buyouts or face layoffs under the Trump administration’s plans to drastically shrink the federal government.

The dramatic shift resulted in thousands of layoffs in the months that followed, many of which were challenged in court. Some jobs were later restored. One year later, the DOGE project failed to reduce federal spending, and workers in Wisconsin say they’ve had to move on from federal employment or find ways to continue their work under challenging conditions.

This week marks one year since President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term. From immigration, to the federal workforce, to the economy, to education, the last year reshaped the country. WPR is taking a look at how the administration’s policies are impacting Wisconsin so far.

As the threat of mass layoffs loomed, Lee felt pushed out of his job. He sees an irony in the fact that jobs like his were victims of the DOGE pressure campaign. His former role, he said, was aimed at rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the grant program.

Trump slashed the federal workforce, not spending

In the last year, Trump policies have upended the federal workforce. In December, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management estimated 317,000 federal employees are now gone. Wisconsin had around 18,000 civilian federal workers, excluding employees with the U.S. Postal Service. As of November, the number of overall federal jobs in the state had dropped from 31,300 to 28,900, according to the state Department of Workforce Development.

In a March speech before a joint session of Congress, Trump said his administration was “draining the swamp” and seeking to reclaim power from an unaccountable bureaucracy.

“The days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over,” Trump said.

Trump said he created DOGE to end “flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars.” Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who led DOGE, said at a rally in Green Bay later that month that his team wanted to “get rid of waste and fraud” and save the government $1 trillion.

That did not happen.

While DOGE has claimed $215 billion in savings, a New York Times analysis found many of its top savings claims were inaccurate. In fact, federal spending increased in 2025, from $6.95 trillion to more than $7 trillion. Last month, Musk said DOGE was “somewhat successful,” but suggested he wouldn’t do it again.

The reduction in the federal workforce “is not the huge win that it appears to be,” said Alex Nowrasteh, a senior vice president for policy at the libertarian Cato Institute. “I am really disappointed that they were not able to reduce federal spending.”

DOGE achieved the fastest reduction in the federal workforce since the end of World War II, Nowrasteh said. But it failed to cut spending because most federal money is spent on entitlement programs that include Social Security and Medicare, as well as the Department of Defense.

In the first year of his second term, President Trump’s administration shed nearly three-quarters of the roughly 428,000 jobs eliminated during President Bill Clinton’s entire presidency. But Clinton didn’t offer resignations under the threat of layoffs, said Don Moynihan, professor with the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Trump introduced a dramatic “shock to the system” that brings instability, damages recruitment and risks failure of agencies to maintain services, he said.

“The way in which they’ve made these cuts and the way in which they have removed people whose primary job was to deal with fraud suggests that it’s less effective as a government to date than it was 12 months ago when Donald Trump took office,” Moynihan said.

Remaining federal workers face more work, fewer resources

When Lee left, he estimated a handful of people remained on his roughly 40-person team to oversee grant awards.

“It was hard with 40 people. I can’t imagine how hard it is now,” Lee said. “I feel for them, but I also miss it.”

On Memorial Day, Lee signed onto a deferred resignation offer with the understanding that he could change his mind. It turned out there was no going back. His paid leave and benefits ended last fall. Since then, he’s been doing odd jobs and volunteering at a local food bank as he hunts for work. Lee and his wife are living off their savings, which are dwindling.

Lee said he’s not losing hope, and he knows he’s fared better than others. But it’s hard to keep up confidence as he’s passed over for jobs.

WPR reached out to around a dozen current and former federal employees. Most didn’t respond or declined to talk about their experiences of Trump’s second term. Those who did say they have struggled with morale. Some say funding cuts have impeded research or blocked access to resources to do their work.

VA worker: Federal cuts put pressure on staff

Jim Stancil is a supply technician who works at the Zablocki Veterans’ Administration Medical Center in Milwaukee. He said remaining workers on his shift face double the workload as the number of employees has dropped by half, from six to three employees.

Stancil stocks and distributes medical supplies and equipment used by doctors and nurses in rooms across the hospital. He said there’s less time to check the expiration dates on supplies that help maintain a sterile environment, and items are sometimes misplaced. He said the cuts have made his job harder.

“Everyone there is completely focused and dedicated to the veteran, 100 percent,” Stancil said. “It gets a little frustrating for all of us when policies over the last year have not helped.”

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has lost around 30,000 jobs through buyouts and attrition, and VA Secretary Doug Collins told NPR in December that another 25,000 vacant positions would be removed from the books. That 55,000-job reduction amounts to about an 11 percent cut to the VA’s national workforce.

Others who are no longer with the federal government are starting over. Jules Reynolds just started a new job teaching environmental studies courses at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She was among probationary employees fired and then rehired at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She had been a program coordinator for the Soil Health Alliance for Research and Engagement, or SHARE, Initiative at the Dairy Forage Research Center in Madison.

On the day she went back to work, the USDA sent out a second offer for employees to opt into the deferred resignation program. Reynolds didn’t want to leave after just getting her job back, but she said employees were told that more “reductions in force” were on the way.

She said accepting the buyout and leaving was one of the hardest decisions she ever made. During the spring and summer, Reynolds submitted dozens and dozens of applications. More often than not, she never heard anything back. That went on for six months.

“It was not only a relief to get a job, but to get an incredible job, like a job that I’m thrilled to have and that actually uses my degree and keeps me in my field,” Reynolds said.

Reynolds began working remotely this month, but she will soon start packing to leave Wisconsin after living in Madison for almost a decade. While searching, she said it felt hard to believe encouraging words from friends and family that she could find work alongside thousands of former federal employees vying for jobs in a sluggish labor market.

“It’s just really easy to get in your head and to think about this competition and scarcity,” Reynolds said. “But the flip side of that is that there’s so many people in this together.”

For Robin Lee, he said he feels he and other federal employees have been vilified and punished, saying those he knew worked hard for the American people. He hopes to find a job where he can provide for his family and be of service once again.

“I would like to find employment again where I can sleep well at night,” Lee said. “I really find a reward in trying (to make) the world a better place.”

Under Trump and DOGE, Wisconsin lost 2.4K federal workers — while spending increased was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.