Data Reveals Details About DOGE, Government Hiring in 2025
The IRS hired 1,313 employees in January 2025. Over the next two months the agency laid off 11,000 workers, or about 11% of its workforce. Additionally, the data identifies employees tied to DOGE.
Protesters rally outside the Office of Personnel Management headquarters in Washington on February 05, 2025.
Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images North AmericaWelcome back to FOIA Files! I hope you had a spectacular end to 2025. Just a week into 2026 and it’s already clear the news cycle will keep me very busy filing Freedom of Information Act requests. But writing about 2025 will be unavoidable because government agencies are still responding to the requests I filed last year. With the FOIA, the past is always present. Case in point: Last March, I requested from the Office of Personnel Management a list of all the employees hired by the federal government, including a description of their duties, job titles, salaries, and the agencies to which they were assigned. I recently obtained that dataset and enlisted Bloomberg News data reporter and frequent FOIA filer, Aaron Gordon, to explain what it reveals. If you’re not already getting FOIA Files in your inbox, sign up here.
A few important points before I turn it over to Aaron. The Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, is the federal government’s human resources agency. When I requested this data last March, Elon Musk and the young technologists hired to work for his Department of Government Efficiency had already eviscerated a couple of agencies under the guise of rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. At the time, there was intense secrecy around DOGE and the identities of the team members associated with the quasi agency.