In his first days in office, President Donald Trump signed executive orders that sent many federal employees reeling: looming layoffs, a freeze on federal hiring and and new back-to-office expectations for many remote workers. On Wednesday, he announced that employees in diversity, equity and inclusion roles would be put on paid leave.
He’s vowed to do much more, tapping Tesla CEO Elon Musk to run a new Department of Government Efficiency.
While the White House sits more than 2,000 miles from the Golden State, the commander-in-chief’s actions stand to affect plenty of Californians. About 250,000 federal workers live in California, including tens of thousands in the Bay Area.
Only Virginia and the District of Columbia had more civilian federal workers than California last year, according to data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, closely followed by Maryland.
“It’s the great unknown,” said Bobbie Scopa, a retired firefighter and former chief with decades of experience in the U.S. Forest Service. She now advocates for federal firefighters. While past hiring freezes have not affected the fire services directly, “everything seems to be a little bit different this time,” she said.
The federal government is one of the largest employers in the country, with just over 3 million employees. They work for federal agencies such as the Forest Service, NASA, FEMA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Postal Service.
An estimated 38,000 federal workers live in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, according to data from California’s Employment Development Department.
Many of those local workers are watching the news, waiting to see how the next executive order might affect them. At least one local veteran of the federal government isn’t too worried, however.
“This is all kind of a PR game right now,” said Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense and current chairman of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, based at CSU Monterey Bay. Trump “can make it uncomfortable for federal employees, but I don’t think he can take a lot of the steps that he’s threatening to take.”
Panetta, also former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, described Trump’s move as “campaign hoopla… to convince the American people that he’s getting things done.”
Trump has often vowed to cut federal spending and eliminate some agencies entirely, but he made many of the same promises before his first term as president, and the federal workforce actually grew from 2.81 to 2.88 million employees during his term.
“Reagan came in and said he was going to get rid of the Department of Education and a bunch of other things, and ultimately was unable to do it,” Panetta said, referring to former Republican President Ronald Reagan. He said the same thing could happen with Trump’s new promises.
Already controversy is swirling around Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, dubbed DOGE.
The commission, which formally joined the government within the Executive Office of the President, has been tasked with finding ways to reduce the federal budget, though Congress would get the final say. Within hours of the new administration taking office, unions and government watchdog groups had sued over the commission, asserting there must be public input and transparency to comply with the law.
“If you really want to focus on efficiency in government, if you really want to focus on reducing the debt and trying to implement fiscal order, there are better ways to try to accomplish those goals,” Panetta said, adding that real change at the federal level takes time and cooperation.
The fear, and the reality, of a Musk-induced termination is familiar for thousands of Bay Area residents, including around 6,000 former employees of Twitter, which Musk acquired and turned into X. Some whom are suing Musk over their abrupt terminations.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is the federal government’s largest employer agency, with just over 21% of the workforce, followed by the Navy and the Army, which employ about 10% each.
Since 1999, the number of federal workers has remained somewhat stable at around 2.8 million people, until 2019 when it started to grow, reaching over 3 million in 2024 for the first time since 1993, outside of the census staff hiring that happens every 10 years.
“There is no legitimate rationale for slashing the size of the federal workforce. The number of federal workers has grown by roughly 6% over the past 50 years, while the U.S. population served by the federal government has increased by 57%,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union that represents hundreds of thousands of federal workers, and is one of the groups suing the administration over DOGE.
While uncertainty swirls, Scopa said the new administration could present an opportunity to make the federal fire services more efficient, but says a hiring freeze would put them in a bind, with many critical senior positions unfilled as fires continue to consume large swaths of California. Even absent a hiring freeze, Scopa worries all the talk of slashing the federal workforce could deter would-be applicants.
“With everything going on and all the threats against federal employees,” she said, “why would [someone] want to take a chance and go to work for the feds?”