Federal Hiring Freeze 2026: Who’s Exempt and What It Means for Government Services

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From January 20 to March 31, 2025, federal workforce numbers dropped by 23,744 positions—from 2,313,216 non-military federal workers on September 30, 2024, to 2,289,472 by March 31, 2025. This decline spans both the months before the freeze took effect and the first two months after.

On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed a directive that froze hiring for federal positions across the government. What started as a 90-day pause has become a permanent framework governing how federal agencies can hire. It includes exemptions that reveal the administration’s priorities and restrictions that have left some agencies struggling to function.

The Hiring Freeze Becomes Permanent Policy

The initial order was straightforward: no federal position vacant at noon on January 20, 2025, could be filled. No new positions could be created. It was supposed to last 90 days while the Office of Management and Budget developed a plan to shrink the federal workforce through “making government work better and letting people leave naturally.”

Instead, Trump extended the freeze through October 15, 2025. On that October date, he issued Executive Order 14356—which didn’t lift the freeze but made it permanent policy. The temporary pause became permanent rules requiring committees at each agency to approve hires, yearly hiring plans coordinated through OPM and OMB, and strict compliance with new hiring rules that focus on hiring based on skills rather than degrees.

The administration announced it had exceeded its target of four departures for every new hire and locked that ratio into place as the new normal.

Exemptions: Immigration, National Security, and Public Safety

Military personnel were exempt from day one. That includes not just the Armed Forces but the Coast Guard, Public Health Service officers, and NOAA’s Commissioned Officer Corps.

Beyond that, three categories of civilian positions got exemptions: immigration enforcement, national security, and public safety. Agencies had to justify which positions fell into those categories, and OPM had to approve those decisions.

The Department of Defense specified that exemptions could only be granted for “positions essential to military operations.” The Secretaries of the Military Departments could approve exemptions for their civilian workforces, but only after review by a senior Pentagon official.

The Department of Veterans Affairs worked out guidance clarifying its ability to fill positions providing health care and other services to veterans. The original order explicitly stated the freeze shouldn’t adversely impact Social Security, Medicare, or veterans’ benefits—but agencies still had to request exemptions in writing and wait for OPM approval.

Political appointees and other non-permanent positions never fell under the freeze. Presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation could be filled throughout the freeze.

The Four-to-One Hiring Ratio

For every four workers who leave, an agency can hire one.

Agencies can only count departures from the current fiscal year. The more than 300,000 federal workers who left during calendar year 2025—including roughly 144,000 who took offers to leave later with a bonus through September—mostly don’t count toward fiscal year 2026 hiring ratios because they left before October 1.

An agency that lost substantial staff in early 2025 enters fiscal year 2026 already short-handed, but it can’t use those departures to justify new hires. It has to wait for four more people to leave in the new fiscal year before it can fill a single position.

Federal agencies averaged nearly 23,000 new hires monthly from April 2024 through January 2025. Once the freeze took full effect in February and March 2025, that dropped 70 percent to 7,385 per month.

Strategic Hiring Committees

Under the October 2025 executive order, every agency had to establish a Strategic Hiring Committee by November 17, 2025. These committees—which must include the deputy agency head and the chief of staff, plus other senior officials—have to approve every single hire.

The OPM guidance states committees “should not rubber-stamp or automatically accept recommendations of others” but should “use its independent judgment.”

These committees operate within the framework of new hiring rules that emphasize “hiring based on what people can do” and eliminate unnecessary degree requirements. Hiring must be “consistent with the priorities of my Administration.”

The original plan required applicants to write essays describing how they would implement the president’s policy priorities. After pushback, OPM walked that back. The emphasis on hiring people “committed to improving the efficiency of the Federal government, passionate about the ideals of our American republic” remains. Federal employee unions filed suit in November 2025, arguing this merges political loyalty tests with merit-based hiring in ways that violate civil service protections.

Social Security: Wait Times Spike

From January to April 2025, the average wait time to get a callback about Social Security or disability claims rose to 180 minutes. SSA had accepted 2,477 bonuses to encourage people to quit by mid-March, leaving the agency shorthanded as demand spiked.

By September 2025, after reassigning 2,000 staff members to fill empty positions and implementing technology upgrades, wait times improved. Average callback time dropped from a peak of 2 hours and 32 minutes in January to about 1 hour and 2 minutes in September. Average queue wait time fell from 1 hour and 40 minutes to 19 minutes.

These improvements are still worse than October 2024, before the freeze. About 25 million calls ended without callers receiving service—because they disconnected, didn’t answer the callback, SSA couldn’t reach them, or all lines were busy.

The IRS Discovers It Can’t Function

The IRS laid off more than 6,000 new and newly-promoted staff members—roughly 6-7% of its 100,000-person workforce. Then it discovered it couldn’t process tax returns and collect revenue without them.

The IRS announced plans to bring back 400 revenue agents and 300 revenue officers who had accepted offers to leave later with a bonus. The rehiring was “spurred by the discovery of skill gaps in tax processing, IT, and customer service.”

The Yale Budget Lab found that in all scenarios, gross foregone revenue from IRS staffing cuts exceeded the savings from layoffs. Staffing reductions come with “dramatic increases in people not paying taxes owed which would outstrip any budgetary savings several times over.”

Agencies That Expanded: Immigration Enforcement

While most agencies contracted, some expanded. The Department of Homeland Security was “one of the biggest beneficiaries” of the 68,000 federal workers hired as of August 2025, with most of those hires concentrated in immigration and border enforcement.

Roughly 317,000 federal workers left during 2025. The administration hired 68,000, heavily concentrated in immigration enforcement. Net reduction: roughly 249,000 positions.

Forced Reversals: When Cuts Go Too Deep

After the government shutdown that extended into late 2025, the Federal Aviation Administration reported concerning increases in controller callouts and staffing triggers. Airports saw increased reports of strain from pilots and air traffic controllers. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the FAA would freeze flight reductions at six percent. He noted that controller staffing was improving from its earlier low point—an implicit acknowledgment that air traffic control isn’t a place where you can experiment with bare minimum staffing levels.

The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” changed tax law, requiring updates to dozens of federal tax forms. Key IRS functions responsible for managing filing season had lost 17 to 19 percent of their workforce. Senators pushed for an end to the IRS hiring freeze ahead of filing season, warning that the agency couldn’t process returns with its depleted staff.

Agencies Hit Hardest by Layoffs

The Environmental Protection Agency laid off 388 newer workers still in their trial period and placed another 171 on paid leave. The Department of Energy saw roughly 2,000 people fired, including at the National Nuclear Security Administration. Interior lost about 2,300 people—roughly 800 from the Bureau of Land Management, another 1,000 from the National Park Service.

These weren’t positions eliminated through careful analysis of which functions the government could stop performing. They were cuts driven by the four-to-one ratio and restrictions on hiring, applied broadly across agencies regardless of their specific missions or workloads.

As of November 13, 2025, roughly 73,000 active job postings appeared on USAJOBS. Agencies were advertising positions they couldn’t fill, either because they hadn’t received exemption approval or because they hadn’t accumulated enough departures under the four-to-one ratio.

Historical Precedent: Past Freezes Didn’t Deliver Savings

The Government Accountability Office examined freezes from 1977 to 1981 and found they “resulted in only small employment reductions” and “it was undetermined as to whether they resulted in net savings.” Carter’s 1977 freeze produced a decrease of 2,965 positions—and after it lifted, hiring increased so that by November, employment was only 2,965 less than when it began. Reagan’s 1981 freeze decreased federal employment by 0.1 percent.

Trump’s first-term hiring freeze lasted 79 days and resulted in a decrease of 0.81 percent in permanent employment. The permanent workforce dropped from 1,962,965 workers to 1,947,048. Agencies compensated by increasing use of part-time, temporary, and contract workers—sometimes violating hiring limitations in the process.

GAO warned that past freezes “made it harder for agencies to do their jobs, caused wasted employee time and skills and clerical shortages, and resulted in lost revenue and uncollected debts.” Agencies ended up spending more on contractors, overtime pay, and delays than they saved in salary expenses.

Legal Challenges to the Freeze

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, argues there’s “no legitimate rationale” for slashing the federal workforce given that its size has barely shifted over the last 50 years while the U.S. population has grown significantly. AFGE President Everett Kelley stated the action is “not about making the federal government run more efficiently but rather is about sowing chaos and targeting a group of patriotic Americans.”

On November 6, 2025, AFGE and two other unions filed suit challenging the administration’s use of a “Loyalty Question” in hiring decisions. They argued that evaluating applicants’ commitment to supporting administration priorities violated federal law and merit system principles.

A federal judge issued an order requiring the administration to nullify terminations of federal workers at four agencies following terminations during the October 2025 shutdown. Congress, in voting to end the shutdown, included a provision pausing agency layoff actions through January 30, and a federal court intervened to enforce it.

These legal interventions created uncertainty about the administration’s ability to execute layoffs through its preferred mechanisms. But restrictions on hiring continued operating through the Strategic Hiring Committee framework and four-to-one ratio.

Schedule F: Removing Civil Service Protections

Restrictions on hiring exist within a larger effort to reshape the federal civil service.

The administration is advancing plans to implement a new job category that would remove protections (called “Schedule F,” renamed “Schedule Policy/Career”). This would strip the right to a hearing before being fired from tens of thousands of workers. Staff converted to this schedule would become workers who can be fired without cause, subject to removal without the protections historically afforded to career civil servants.

OPM announced plans for systems that rank staff and force some out. The idea is to reward high performers and “figure out a way to get people who are not delivering money to the taxpayer” to either get on board with administration policy or leave.

Combined with restrictions on hiring, these changes would give the administration control over who works in the federal government and whether they keep their jobs. Permanent federal workers with job protections—designed to provide continuity and expertise across administrations—would become more likely to follow political orders and easier to fire for political reasons.

2026: Continued Workforce Reductions

As 2026 began, agencies were operating under the October 2025 executive order framework. They had submitted or were finalizing yearly hiring plans. They had established Strategic Hiring Committees. They were bound by the four-to-one hiring ratio until those plans were approved.

The administration’s plans for running government explicitly list continued “cutting of the federal workforce” as a pillar of its plans for 2026. This is the new normal.

Polling data shows 63% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the federal government. Significant numbers worry the cuts have gone too far.

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