The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on July 1 announced plans to modernize its FedScope platform which serves as a resource for accessing data about the Federal workforce, and released some new – though now out of date compared to other sources – data on the size and composition of the Federal workforce as of March 2025.
OPM said its working on “immediate enhancements” to FedScope. As a first step, the agency has published updated employment, accessions, and separations data through March 2025 on the existing website.
In the coming months, OPM said it will launch a redesigned platform with interactive visuals, comprehensive datasets, and tools to answer frequently asked questions about Federal employment.
“Data transparency is essential to building trust in the federal government,” Acting OPM Director Chuck Ezell said in a press release. “By modernizing FedScope, we’re delivering on our promise to make federal workforce data easier to access and understand, ensuring the public and agencies alike have the information they need to make informed decisions.”
The agency said it plans to launch the new site by this fall, and it is working with regular FedScope users – such as journalists, researchers, and Federal managers – to help inform the redesign.
Federal Civilian Workforce Cuts Neared 1% as of March
At the same time, OPM released data showing that the Trump administration’s campaign to slash the Federal government workforce yielded a 0.99 percent overall reduction in the civilian workforce as of March 2025.
According to the data newly published on FedScope, there were 2,289,472 Federal civilian employees in March 2025, down from 2,313,216 on Sept. 30, 2024. OPM said this reduction of over 23,000 positions – totaling 0.99 percent of the civilian workforce – aligns with the Trump administration’s goal to cut “unnecessary bureaucracy.”
OPM’s snapshot from March is out of date compared to data released by the Labor Department in June that shows the Federal government down by 59,000 jobs since January 2025, including a 22,000 drop in May of this year.
“This data marks the first measurable step toward President Trump?s vision of a disciplined, accountable federal workforce and it?s only the beginning,” Ezell said of the data through March in a Tuesday press release.
OPM noted that the hiring freeze implemented by President Donald Trump on his first day in office is also reflected in the new data.
From April 2024 through January 2025, OPM said that Federal agencies averaged nearly 23,000 new hires monthly. That number dropped by nearly 70 percent to just 7,385 per month “once the freeze took full effect in February and March 2025,” according to OPM.
The agency also said that “hundreds of thousands more workers will drop off the rolls in October 2025,” when workers will depart the Federal government as part of the Deferred Resignation Program. The program allows Federal employees to resign but be paid through Sept. 30, when their resignation becomes effective.
However, OPM noted that “tens of thousands of employees who have received reduction-in-force or termination notices remain on government payrolls due to court orders that the administration is now challenging.”
The courts have blocked the Trump administration from implementing its large-scale layoff plans – also known as reductions in force (RIFs) – at most Federal government agencies. However, as OPM hinted at, the administration has already appealed both RIF cases to the Supreme Court.