The number of layoffs in March hit its highest level since the pandemic, with U.S. employers announcing 275,240 job cuts—many of which are attributed to the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts.
The number of job cuts jumped 60 percent in March compared to the same data from February, which the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas attributed to DOGE’s massive cuts to the federal government.
“Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] plans to eliminate positions in the federal government. It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs,” Andrew Challenger, the senior vice president for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement.
Elon Musk’s team in DOGE has been tasked with the responsibility of making job-cut recommendations as part of their efforts to reduce federal spending.
An estimated 280,253 federal workers and contractors layoffs across 27 agencies are attributed to DOGE’s actions, according to Challenger tracking.
More than 497,000 layoff were announced in the first three months of the year, the highest since 2009, when the economy was at the tail end of the Great Recession.
More than half of those cuts were in Washington, D.C., reflecting the federal government layoffs.
Thousands of other job cuts have come as a result of the Trump administration ending federal aid or government contracts with a majority from nonprofits and health organizations.
However, the DOGE job cuts likely won’t heavily impact the economy all at once because some government position eliminations will be staggered. Other attempted layoffs are being challenged in court as well, preventing those from being reflected in the labor market.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that there were 18,000 layoffs in the federal government in February, with another 28,000 people voluntarily quitting state or local government education jobs.
The bureau’s March job report is expected to be released on Friday.
March’s layoffs numbers are the third-highest recorded by Challenger since they began reporting on job cut plans in 1989.
The highest number of cuts were in April 2020, followed by May 2020 – when the U.S. economy went into a recession due to the pandemic.
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