For five years, Layoffs.fyi creator Roger Lee has kept a watchful eye over Silicon Valley, maintaining a much-studied database of layoffs at tech companies. But the biggest startup-style firings these days aren’t happening in San Francisco; they’re in Washington, D.C., where Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is taking a chainsaw to the federal government.
As Lee — who is also CEO of the compensation management platform Comprehensive and a founder of the 401(k) provider Human Interest — read reports of Musk’s mass firings, he realized the billionaire was cutting costs “in a very similar manner to what the tech sector was going through in 2022, 2023.” That’s when Meta, Google, and Musk’s own X slashed thousands of jobs to correct for what they saw as over-hiring during the pandemic.
This week, Lee released an update to his layoffs database, culled from media reports and public filings: a government layoff tracker, where, alongside tallies of firings at companies like Cruise and Salesforce, people can follow the Trump administration’s quest for efficiency through pink slips.
According to Layoffs.fyi, more than 110,305 federal employees have departed since Trump took office. Among them are more than 33,000 who were fired from DOGE; some 290 non-DOGE firings, including federal prosecutors who were working on criminal investigations related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack; and about 77,000 who accepted the administration’s deferred resignation program.
“There’s something about quantifying the number that really makes this feel more concrete and as significant as it really is,” Lee said.
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Lee has his work cut out for him. White House officials on Wednesday sent a memo warning government leaders to prepare for more “large-scale reductions,” according to The New York Times, and President Donald Trump declared on Truth Social that his cabinet members are “EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON.”
“I suspect that this is just the beginning,” Lee said.
Despite the gloom and doom, Lee hopes Layoffs.fyi will help government workers, similar to how it became a resource for tech recruiters. He’s already spoken with people in government about creating an opt-in list of fired employees. “This could certainly be useful, from a matchmaking perspective, to help the laid off government employees land on their feet,” he said.