Trump promised to ‘reclaim power’ from civil servants in his 2025 speech to Congress. Here’s what has changed since

Ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday, Government Executive is revisiting his 2025 address to Congress, looking at progress his administration has made over the past year on priorities that he set with respect to the federal workforce. 

'Reclaim power from this unaccountable bureaucracy’

In his speech last year, Trump warned that federal employees who resist his policies would be removed. 

The Office of Personnel Management in December reported that more than 300,000 federal employees had left government since January 2025, with the vast majority of those being due to separation incentives that the administration pushed. 

OPM also recently finalized regulations implementing Schedule Policy/Career, a reinstitution of a similar federal job classification from Trump’s first term that could remove civil service job protections for tens of thousands of government workers in “policy-related positions.” 

Good government groups have argued that Schedule P/C will lead to civil servants being hired and promoted based on their political affiliation rather than merit, while federal employee unions have sworn to file a lawsuit blocking the implementation of the job classification. 

Trump also has removed, or sought to remove, officials who lead agencies that were designed to have some degree of separation from the White House, including inspectors general, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. 

Department of Government Efficiency 

The president’s shout-out of DOGE in 2025 elicited cheers from Republican lawmakers and boos from Democrats. 

DOGE’s influence in the second Trump administration has waned since its leader, tech billionaire Elon Musk, stepped away and had a public feud with the president. Many DOGE staffers also left the government. 

Still, DOGE is associated with the deferred resignation program, the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the alleged improper access and sharing of agency data. 

Musk had said that DOGE would identify $2 trillion in savings for the government, but its website estimates that it only yielded $215 billion. And even that is in doubt, as multiple analyses found that DOGE overstated and miscalculated its savings. 

Immigration enforcement

During his 2025 address, Trump asked Congress to provide additional funding for mass deportations. About four months later, GOP lawmakers passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included $12 billion for staffing at Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Since then, ICE has reported that it more than doubled its workforce, going from 10,000 officers and agents when Trump took office to more than 22,000. 

Scrutiny of immigration enforcement agencies has increased following the killings of two immigration protestors in Minneapolis by federal agents. Funding for the Homeland Security Department lapsed on Feb. 14 after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on related reforms. 

Partisan protests 

During Trump’s 2025 address to Congress, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, was escorted out of the chamber for interrupting the speech. 

About a dozen Democratic lawmakers this year have said that rather than attend the State of the Union they’ll participate in a counter event called the “People’s State of the Union” on the National Mall that will be going on at about the same time.