A silent exodus: Trump’s federal buyouts trigger historic loss of institutional knowledge

A silent exodus: Trump’s federal buyouts trigger historic loss of institutional knowledge

Across Washington, the machinery of American governance is quietly being dismantled. In agency after agency, a wave of voluntary and forced departures under the Trump administration’s latest government overhaul is draining the federal workforce of decades of accumulated knowledge. From the National Institutes of Health to the Treasury Department, senior officials, mid-level managers, and behind-the-scenes technical experts are walking out — many for the last time, the Washington Post reported.

An internal offer of early retirement and voluntary separation launched in January triggered 75,000 exits. A second wave, now cascading through agencies one by one, could push the total into the hundreds of thousands, according to internal records and interviews with 18 federal employees across 10 departments. The pattern is clear: older, more experienced career staffers are leaving, many out of fear that their roles will be reclassified as political or eliminated altogether.

An aging workforce purged amid chaos and fear
The stated aim of the Trump administration’s resignation program — overseen by the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk — is to reduce government bloat and modernise federal services. But what critics see is a brain drain of unparalleled scale. “We’re losing some really smart people and really senior people,” said Jeffrey Grant, a former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services official who retired after 42 years. “They’ll disappear, and they may never come back.”

Others describe the exits as a mixture of exhaustion and existential uncertainty. “People are tired of the chaos,” said a longtime US Patent and Trademark Office employee. “They don’t want to wait around to be fired.”

Whole divisions, decades of expertise wiped away
The exodus has touched nearly every corner of the federal bureaucracy:

NIH has lost six directors, including leaders in infectious disease, child health, nursing, and genomics.
FAA is watching its top leadership — including its chief air traffic officer and five major program vice presidents — walk away during a moment of safety crises.
Treasury has seen over 200 senior staffers exit, many of whom ran core financial systems.
HUD, NHTSA, and PHMSA have lost critical leadership teams, including those responsible for public housing, vehicle safety, and pipeline emergencies.
At CMS alone, which oversees over $1 trillion in healthcare spending, those leaving include individuals who directed operational strategy. At the IRS, which was just beginning to recover from years of understaffing, four commissioners and countless top-level officials are gone. Some agencies, such as the General Services Administration, are losing seasoned staffers who’ve spent decades navigating bureaucratic hurdles that aren’t recorded in any manual.

Federal operations under strain
While agencies are officially downplaying the impact — with spokespeople calling the workforce “resilient” and replacements “in the pipeline” — employees tell a different story. Delays in food safety warnings, slowdowns in payment systems, and lapses in enforcement are already emerging. The damage may grow worse in the coming months as less experienced replacements take over critical roles — or as roles go unfilled entirely.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, speaking at a recent internal town hall, admitted bluntly: “We’re going to lose some knowledge… some expertise.”

A cultural shift toward disposability
The exodus represents more than just a staffing transition — it reflects a cultural shift. Some departing employees say they were demoralised by the administration’s apparent contempt for career public service, with rumours swirling about “political reclassifications” and at-will purges. Others describe a chilling effect: staff who spent years serving across administrations are being treated as partisan liabilities rather than institutional assets.

The cumulative loss is hard to quantify. These are employees whose job titles are often opaque to the public — COOP managers, deputy assistant administrators, technical procurement leads — but who quietly ensured that government functioned day to day. “They were the doers,” said one GSA employee. “The ones who knew how to make things happen.”

What comes next
Supporters of the administration’s efforts, such as Avik Roy of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, argue that trimming the senior ranks may clear out “status-quo-biased” staff. But even Roy acknowledges the risk: “The government isn’t Twitter. You can’t just fire half the people and expect it to run smoothly.”

Those still in government say the legacy of this moment will be lasting — not only in the form of delayed services and policy missteps, but in the erosion of public trust. A Treasury staffer described the loss of a veteran colleague who specialized in one foreign country: “When a crisis hits, we’ll no longer have someone who remembers what happened in 2003 and can pull the record. That’s the difference between flailing and responding with wisdom.”