Trump Ordered A Federal Hiring Freeze. Previous Ones Backfired.

President Donald Trump ordered a hiring freeze at government agencies shortly after he was inaugurated on Monday, setting the stage for another four-year clash with the federal workforce.

Under Trump’s executive order, agencies won’t be able to fill most vacancies for 90 days, though military, national security and immigration enforcement roles are exempted. An agency must develop a plan to reduce its head count and submit it to the White House before it can start hiring again.

The rules are tighter for the Internal Revenue Service, a favorite GOP bogeyman. The freeze won’t be lifted at the government’s tax-collecting agency until the Treasury secretary and White House officials agree it’s “in the national interest” to do so.

An immediate hiring freeze is a flashy way to signal that you’re serious about cutting the size of the federal government, which Trump claims to want to do. But does a blanket stop to hiring actually make agencies smaller and more efficient in the end?

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Not according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the top government watchdog.

This is hardly the first federal hiring freeze by a president — Trump rolled out a substantially similar one after his first inauguration in 2017, and both Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter instituted their own before him. (Carter’s allowed agencies to fill one of every two vacancies that opened.) In all cases, the idea was to shrink the government through attrition.

These freezes disrupted agency operations, and in some cases, increased costs to the Government.The GAO's findings in a 1982 study

In 1982, the GAO took a look at the effects of the Carter and Reagan freezes and found they simply didn’t work. The workforce reductions ended up being smaller than anticipated and, at some agencies, actually increased operating costs and “decreased efficiency and effectiveness.” 

Not only did the freezes hurt agencies’ work, they actually cost the government money due to lost tax revenue. Unfilled positions at the IRS led to an estimated $222 million in unpaid taxes, while saving just $10.9 million in agent salary and benefits. 

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One of the biggest problems, the GAO found, was that government-wide hiring freezes are “arbitrary” and “not based on sound analyses” of the workforce. They simply create the “illusion” of control and belt-tightening.

“Because they ignored individual agencies’ missions, workload and staffing requirements, these freezes disrupted agency operations, and in some cases, increased costs to the Government,” the report concluded.

President Donald Trump holds up an executive order after signing it at an indoor presidential inauguration parade event in Washington on Monday.
President Donald Trump holds up an executive order after signing it at an indoor presidential inauguration parade event in Washington on Monday. Matt Rourke via Associated Press

The GAO’s estimation of hiring freezes hadn’t changed much by the time of Trump’s first presidency. In 2017, Gene Dodaro, the office’s top official, testified before Congress that blanket freezes had turned out to be a bad idea in the past. 

“They haven’t proven to be effective in either reducing costs and they cause some problems if they are in effect for a long period of time,” Dodaro said. 

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Freezes may reduce agencies’ head counts, but they don’t reduce their responsibilities, he explained.

“If you want to reduce the number of federal employees, in my opinion, you have to reduce the function those employees are doing,” Dodaro said. “If you just eliminate the people but keep all of the functions, you are going to have a problem.”

The GAO did not produce a report on the effects of Trump’s January 2017 hiring freeze, which was lifted less than three months later. Then, as now, Trump promised to take an ax to the federal bureaucracy, purge the conspiracy theorists’ “deep state” from agencies, and create a leaner and more efficient government.

In reality, Trump left the federal workforce a little larger than when he’d arrived. It increased by an average of 0.9% each year between December 2016, just before his inauguration, and December 2020, just before his exit, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that advises on making the federal government more efficient.

The group’s president, Max Stier, said in a statement Monday that if Trump is serious about creating a more competent government, a hiring freeze is the wrong way to go about it. It will end up leaving “critical” gaps in hiring and drive away talented people, he predicted. 

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“Hiring freezes are management by autopilot rather than a thoughtful choice about where we need more or perhaps fewer federal employees to achieve good outcomes for American taxpayers,” Stier said.

Are you a federal employee with something to share? You can email our reporter here, or contact him over Signal at davejamieson.99.