Texas is home to roughly 156,000 federal civilian employees — about 7.7 percent of the entire federal workforce, according to the Congressional Research Service’s tally of federal employment by state. They staff VA hospitals, IRS and Social Security offices, federal courthouses, and the field offices of agencies that inspect food, monitor air and water, and manage public land. So when the federal civilian workforce contracts, the effects do not stay in Washington — they ripple through Texas waiting rooms, processing times, and local economies.
This article lays out what the federal payroll data shows about which agencies are shrinking the most, where the cuts are concentrated, and why the Texas field-office angle matters for residents who depend on federal services. It sticks to what the records can and cannot prove.
What the payroll data shows
Between October 2025 and March 2026, the federal government lost roughly 90,000 civilian positions nationwide. The Office of Personnel Management’s workforce data, drawn from its Enterprise Human Resources Integration records, logs every hire and separation processed through the federal payroll system. Those records show total executive-branch civilian employment dropping from about 2.28 million in September 2025 to about 2.19 million by the end of March 2026, with departures outpacing new hires every month in that stretch.
A handful of departments account for most of the losses. The Department of Health and Human Services posted the steepest decline of any single department. The Department of the Interior shed roughly 12,000 positions, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs absorbing a disproportionate share. The Environmental Protection Agency lost a large fraction of its workforce, and smaller agencies such as the Department of Education and the General Services Administration posted sharp percentage declines. These are net figures: OPM has not broken the separations into voluntary versus involuntary categories for this period, so they reflect total losses, not confirmed layoffs alone.
The one agency under formal audit
So far, only one agency’s reduction has been examined in detail by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO report on Indian Affairs workforce reductions reviewed internal tracking systems and the notification process used to inform affected employees. Its central finding: record-keeping was uneven enough that auditors could not verify whether every affected worker received the procedural protections required under federal Reduction in Force rules, codified in 5 CFR Part 351. Those rules dictate a strict sequence for releasing employees based on tenure, veterans’ preference, and performance, and are designed to prevent arbitrary firings.
No equivalent audit has yet been published for HHS, EPA, Education, or any other department where the data shows significant contraction. GAO investigations take months and are prioritized by congressional request, so the Indian Affairs case should not be treated as representative of every agency until others receive the same scrutiny.
What it means for Texas field offices
The agencies losing the most staff all have a Texas footprint. HHS oversees programs and regional offices across the state. The EPA’s Region 6 office, which covers Texas, monitors air and water quality and processes permits. The Interior Department manages national parks, wildlife refuges, and federal land in Texas. When headcount falls at a department, its field offices generally feel it through longer processing times, fewer inspections, and thinner coverage.
OPM’s national data does not publish a clean, agency-by-agency breakdown of how many of the lost positions sat in Texas specifically. But OPM’s own FedScope tool does let users filter federal civilian employment by duty-station state, and outside groups have used it to pull real Texas numbers. The nonpartisan Texas think tank Every Texan ran those queries directly and published Texas-specific agency counts: roughly 3,300 Social Security Administration employees, 3,100 at the National Archives, and smaller contingents at the SEC, EPA, and FCC, all working in Texas as of the analysis. The Dallas-Fort Worth metro area alone accounted for an estimated 57,790 federal employees, the largest concentration in the state. A separate Congressional Research Service count put total Texas federal civilian employment at 130,686 as of September 2024 — a lower figure than the CRS’s own 156,000 estimate cited elsewhere, a reminder that even official tallies vary somewhat by methodology and date.
Agency-specific Texas cuts are also starting to surface in local reporting, even without a comprehensive statewide tally. The IRS’s Austin campus, one of the agency’s largest processing centers with roughly 6,587 employees according to an Urban Institute analysis of OPM data, lost workers in the February 2025 round of probationary firings; U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett’s office confirmed to KXAN that Austin employees were among those let go, with local estimates putting the statewide IRS toll at around 600 positions. HHS closed its Dallas regional Office of General Counsel outright in March 2025, consolidating Texas legal staff into offices in Kansas City, Atlanta, and elsewhere, as healthcare law firm Stevens & Lee reported. And the Social Security Administration listed at least two Texas field offices — in Nacogdoches and Victoria — for closure in 2025, according to Newsweek’s tracking of the closure list, though SSA’s own March 2025 public statement maintains it has not permanently closed any field office since the start of the year — a live dispute between the published lease-termination list and the agency’s official framing that residents should watch for a final resolution.
The effects of thinner staffing are easiest to see in the agencies Texans interact with directly. A VA medical center with fewer schedulers and support staff can mean longer waits for appointments. An IRS office with a reduced workforce can mean slower refunds and longer hold times during filing season. A Social Security field office with fewer claims representatives can mean delays for retirees and disability applicants. These are not hypothetical: they are the predictable downstream consequences when the offices that deliver federal services to the public lose headcount, and they fall hardest on the people least able to navigate a slower system.
What is driving the cuts
Several forces are compounding. A government-wide efficiency initiative directed agencies to identify redundant positions, and executive orders on workforce restructuring added pressure, with multiple departments citing reorganization authority as the legal basis for reductions. Congressional budget fights made it worse: a series of continuing resolutions and spending caps left some agencies without funding to maintain existing staffing levels, let alone fill vacancies. The combination produces headcount drops faster than any single policy would on its own.
One thing the civilian data does not capture is the federal contractor workforce. Historically, when agencies cut civilian employees, contract spending sometimes rises to fill the gap. Whether that is happening now is unclear, because contractor data is reported on a different timeline and through different systems.
What the data cannot tell us
OPM’s records are administrative data — every entry reflects a real personnel action — which makes the headcount figures reliable. But the data has blind spots. It does not separate involuntary RIF actions from voluntary resignations, retirements, and transfers, and that distinction matters: a workforce shrinking because experienced employees are leaving in anticipation of cuts carries different risks than one being deliberately reduced through formal layoffs. There is also no published dataset tracking what happens to separated workers after they leave, so accounts of disruption remain largely anecdotal.
For historical context, the last comparable contraction came during the sequestration years of 2013 and 2014. The current losses are larger in absolute terms, though the workforce was also smaller then.
What happens next
Three things will determine whether the contraction continues or levels off: the next federal budget, which sets agency funding; pending litigation over whether specific terminations followed proper RIF procedures, which courts could use to force reinstatements; and OPM’s upcoming monthly data releases, which will show whether the early-2026 gap between separations and hires was a peak or a waypoint.
For Texans who rely on federal programs — veterans seeking care, taxpayers waiting on the IRS, communities depending on environmental oversight — the practical stakes are processing times and service coverage. The payroll data confirms the contraction is real and picking up speed. What it cannot yet answer is exactly how deep the Texas-specific cuts run, and that gap is worth keeping in mind whenever a precise local number is claimed.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
