Analysis of changes in the federal workforce in the first year of the second Trump administration

Data and R code to reproduce the analysis underlying Inside Climate News articles examining changes in staffing at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior.

Data and code

In January 2026, the Office of Personnel Management started releasing monthly snapshots of the entire federal workforce, together with monthly files documenting staff who were hired (accessions) and who left government employment (separations). The most recent release, on March 4, provides a snapshot as of the end of January 2026, allowing for an analysis of changes in the first year of President Donald Trump's second term. The employment files, which contain a single row for each federal employee, are too large to share on GitHub. Download from the OPM website and place in a data/employment subfolder if you wish to repeat the analysis.

While the data is anonymized for privacy, it contains a wealth of information on each employee, including age, occupation, level of education, supervisory status, and length of service — allowing for detailed analysis.

This repository contains the following scripts:

• run_analysis.R Loads the employment data files for January 2025 and January 2026 and then runs the scripts below, to analyze data for the EPA, the Department of the Interior and the entire federal workforce.

  • epa.R

  • interior.R

  • entire_federal.R

Questions/feedback

Email Peter Aldhous.