For a workforce once synonymous with stability, the mood among U.S. federal employees is starting to look anything but secure.
Starting off with the overall sentiment: the share of federal workers classified as “thriving” has slid to 48% in 2025, down from 58% in 2024 as per Gallup. It’s not just a dip rather a steady unwind and it’s not happening in isolation. State and local government workers now sit slightly ahead of the curve at 50% in 2025, while the broader U.S. worker average parallels the federal employees at 48%.
Federal workers have slumped from spearheading the pack to lagging behind, and that isn’t unfounded. Afterall, employees are now working at the backdrop of a political leadership which strives in strife with chaos and only 7.5% of employees believe political leadership creates high motivation.
Fewer Workers, Bigger Questions
Policy signals are only adding to the uncertainty, and this time the numbers are doing most of the talking. It’s a fact that the federal workforce didn’t just decline, it cascaded down by 271,000 employees in 2025 alone, a roughly 9% drop from the start of the year. That translates to a total headcount from 3 million in January 2025 to 2.74 million by November.
But why those workers left matters just as much as the question of how many left. The bulk of the exits weren’t traditional layoffs, in fact about 25,000 employees were actually terminated. Much of the mass exodus took place in October with 162,000 employees officially off the books
A closer look into inside agencies, then the cracks become even more palpable in the form of a deteriorating morale. If this were an exam then the score for government-wide employee engagement failed to make the passing grade at just 32 out of 100, while 58.2% of employees say their engagement has worsened over the past year.
On a departmental level, things aren’t any different, at the Department of the Treasury, engagement falls to 22.9, and the morale of 70.2% employees is on a decline. Peeking over at Health and Human Services, the score drops even lower to 20.4, with 14,417 employees (15.6%) calling it quits early 2025. Even the “best” performers aren’t thriving anymore for instance, the Department of the Army which tops large agencies with a score of 48.1, yet nearly 49.5% of its workforce reports a worse experience than the year before.
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