The Philadelphia area’s federal workforce was cut down by thousands last year under President Donald Trump — and for the first time, what agencies were hit the hardest by job loss has become clear.
Since Trump took office, his administration has sought to shrink and reshape the federal workforce. Last year, government agencies laid off workers, offered them the opportunity to leave their jobs and continue getting paid for months, and required them to report to their in-person workplaces full-time, which pushed some to quit.
Agencies that saw the most employee loss in the region were the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration.
In the 11-county Philadelphia metro area, which spans Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, there was a net loss of 3,906 federal jobs from January 2025 through February 2026 — a 16.7% decline in the area’s federal workforce, based on recent data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the human resources arm of the federal government.
A collective 61% of the region’s federal job loss took place at the VA, Social Security, and Treasury, which includes the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Mint.
Treasury alone saw 1,590 jobs cut in the Philadelphia region.
The data does not include the U.S. Postal Service, which operates independently of tax dollars, funding itself through sales. The Postal Service employed 8,814 people in Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties in March 2025, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry.
The Departments of Education and Energy, which already had small workforces in the Philadelphia region, were both nearly cut in half — to 51 and 26 employees, respectively.
Shrinking the federal workforce
On his first day in office, Trump ordered the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to “submit a plan to reduce the size of the federal government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition,” directing the agency to consult with OPM and the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Later in January, OPM invited federal workers to resign from their jobs and continue to be paid through Sept. 30, in what was called the deferred resignation program. OPM noted that a majority of federal agencies would likely be “downsized through restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force.” Those who passed up the offer were not guaranteed that their jobs or agency would continue to exist, the memo noted.
Agencies were instructed in a February memorandum to submit reorganization plans to reduce the number of full-time roles. At the VA, so many workers had left by July that the agency said a layoff plan was no longer necessary.
» READ MORE: These Philly federal workers loved their jobs. But amid Trump’s shakeup they chose to leave.
By the end of February, just over a year after Trump’s inauguration, the federal workforce shrunk overall by almost 272,000 workers, according to OPM. Nearly 139,000 of them, or 51%, left through the deferred resignation program.
The federal workforce is 12% smaller than it was in 2024, when 2.3 million had U.S. government jobs.
At Philadelphia-area agencies, employment shrank by 1,583 between September and October — the greatest change between any months — seemingly revealing how many took the government’s resignation offer. Another big drop came between December 2025 and January this year, when workers who took the resignation offer but were already retirement eligible were officially removed from their roles.
Recently, roughly 500 TSA employees across the U.S. quit during the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, according to the department.
» READ MORE: TSA officers at Philadelphia airport wonder why Trump waited so long to pay them
What happened in N.J., Pa., and Del.?
Across Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, dozens of counties saw job losses in federal workplaces.
Those include the sole employee at the Mine Safety and Health Administration in Butler, Pennsylvania; 14 staffers at the Food Safety and Inspection Service in Sussex County, Del.; 12 of the 14 Department of Environmental Protection staffers in Camden County.
In each state, the federal workforce was about 14% smaller at the end of February than it had been 13 months prior, according to OPM data.
Roughly 8,300 jobs were cut across the three states, with 6,054 lost in Pennsylvania, 1,869 in New Jersey, and 369 in Delaware.
Losses at the Treasury and the VA were among the largest across agencies in all three states.
Across all three states, no agency with 50 or more employees at the start of the Trump administration saw employee headcount increase.