Now we know how big DOGE's firings really were

• The DOGE office's actions have led to over 216,000 firings, a new report found.
• Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.'s report is the most comprehensive look at scale of the group's firings.
• Elon Musk, the de facto leader of the DOGE office, has seen his popularity tumble amid the firings.

The White House DOGE office's actions have led to 216,670 announced job cuts of federal workers and contractors in March, according to a new report by a global outplacement firm.

The DOGE office has only sparingly confirmed specific numbers of layoffs, meaning Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.'s report is one of few estimates of the sheer size of its actions.

Challenger found that DOGE office actions accounted for the majority of job cuts announced from US-based employers in March, making it now the third-highest monthly total ever recorded since the firm began tracking the data in 1989. The other highest months came in April and May of 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] plans to eliminate positions in the federal government," Andrew Challenger, Senior Vice President and workplace expert for Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a statement. "It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs."

The government led all sectors in job cuts last month, the firm found. Challenger said the DOGE office's actions have led to a 624% increase in government layoffs compared to the first quarter of 2024.

Harry Holzer, a nonresident senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings Institute and a public policy professor at Georgetown, told Business Insider that he wasn't surprised by the Challenger findings, given the reported scale of the layoffs.

"They might even understate the cuts to federal grantees and contractors, on top of the federal employee terminations," he said.

After taking office, President Donald Trump tasked the DOGE office and its de-factor leader, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, with slashing government spending and reducing the federal workforce in its stated effort to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.

The job cuts to the federal workforce have come in a variety of forms. At the end of January, over two million federal workers received a buyout offer, which offered to pay employees their full salary and benefits through September, without the need to work during that time, in exchange for their resignation. The offer finally closed on February 12, with 75,000 workers accepting the buyout, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

DOGE also fired en masse thousands of probationary workers — generally, federal employees who have less than a year or two of service — from a wide swatch of federal agencies. Two federal judges ruled against that action and ordered the Trump administration to rehire those fired employees. The White House has said it is complying with the orders while it works through the appeals process, but many of the workers' futures remain uncertain as the Trump administration is asking the conservative-majority Supreme Court to weigh in.

DOGE actions to effectively end the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) have also resulted in job losses, though it continues to be litigated in federal court. And major changes remain as the White House pushes to dismantle the Department of Education.

On Wednesday, the White House downplayed a Politico report that Musk will leave the Trump administration soon due to the 130-day deadline for special government employees that would be up in either late May or early June. Musk's popularity has cratered amid his de facto leadership of the DOGE office, harming both Republican candidates and Tesla's bottom line.