FUSA | GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY & PUBLIC AFFAIRS REPORT
Anyone who has watched a business get stripped from the inside will recognize exactly what is happening right now.
By James T. Beaumont
FUSA Correspondent, Corporate Accountability & Public Finance
April 9, 2026
The workforce data, agency statistics, spending figures, and financial facts in this article are factual and verified. They are drawn from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the Partnership for Public Service, the Brookings Institution Hamilton Project, the Cato Institute, NPR federal data analysis, Wikipedia federal layoffs records, and cross-referenced through AI-assisted multi-source analysis. Nothing here is manufactured or disputed.
Anyone who has worked in corporate finance knows what a liquidation looks like from the inside. First, you terminate the workforce. Fast, loud, and without sentiment. Then you dissolve the divisions that cost money but do not generate it. You fire the compliance officers and the auditors because they slow things down and ask uncomfortable questions. You extract whatever personal value you can before the doors close. And when it is all over, the creditors, meaning the people who were actually owed something, are left sorting through what remains. The people who ran the liquidation are long gone, considerably richer, and entirely unaccountable.
That is a business liquidation. It is also a precise description of what has happened to the United States federal government since January 20, 2025.
Start with the workforce. By the end of 2025, nearly 317,000 federal employees had departed, a 13.7 percent reduction in the civilian federal workforce, the largest peacetime workforce reduction on record according to the Cato Institute. The IRS lost 25 percent of its staff, meaning less tax revenue collected and more debt. The USDA lost 22 percent of its people, meaning food safety inspection gaps across the country. Veterans healthcare processing slowed. Social Security offices thinned. The Partnership for Public Service warned that the loss of institutional expertise will take decades to repair. In a liquidation, you do not worry about what happens after you leave. That is someone else’s problem.
Then you dissolve the subsidiaries. USAID, which delivered $30 billion in humanitarian and diplomatic programming in 2024, was gutted and folded into the State Department. The Department of Education was targeted for complete elimination. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had returned $21 billion to Americans harmed by financial fraud, was attacked. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s election security office was shut down entirely. These are not redundant departments. They are the institutions that serve the public. In a liquidation, anything that serves the customer but costs the owner gets cut first.
Then you fire the auditors. The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, created after Watergate to prosecute corrupt officials, was reduced from 36 lawyers to two. The SEC’s top enforcement officer resigned after clashing with the Trump-appointed chair over pursuing cases connected to the president’s financial circle. The head of the Office of Government Ethics was removed. When the people whose job is to catch corruption are gone, corruption becomes a great deal easier to conduct.
And then you take your cut. While the workforce shrank and the agencies dissolved, Trump’s personal net worth grew by an estimated $3.4 billion. His crypto ventures extracted hundreds of millions from foreign sovereign wealth funds. A foreign government gifted a $400 million aircraft. The federal deficit, despite all the cutting, grew by nearly $2 trillion in fiscal year 2025. Government spending rose almost 6 percent. The liquidators promised savings. The savings never came. They rarely do.
The one difference between this and a standard corporate liquidation is the most important one. In bankruptcy court, a judge oversees the process. Creditors have legal rights. Managers have fiduciary duties. There are rules. When a government liquidates itself from within, the people running the process are also the people who write the rules, appoint the judges, and decide which laws get enforced. The exits are wide open and the alarm has been disconnected. What the American public is owed, the services, the protections, the institutions built across generations with their tax dollars, is being sold off, dissolved, or simply taken. And the bill, as always, stays with them.
References
1. U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Federal Workforce Data, 2025. OPM Director Scott Kupor, December 2025.
2. Partnership for Public Service, “Dangerous gaps in key federal services” analysis, 2025.
3. Cato Institute, “Largest peacetime workforce reduction on record,” December 2025.
4. Federal News Network, “How staffing cuts in 2025 transformed the federal workforce,” January 2026.
5. Brookings Institution Hamilton Project, Federal Spending Tracker. Fiscal year 2025 outlays rose nearly 6% year over year.
6. NPR, DOGE federal data analysis: deficit grew nearly $2 trillion, Oct. 1, 2024 to August 2025.
7. Wikipedia, “2025 United States federal mass layoffs,” cross-referenced against OPM and agency records.
8. Government Executive, “DOGE has done the most chaotic execution possible,” April 2025.
9. Forbes, Trump net worth analysis, September 2025. Net worth $7.3 billion vs. $3.9 billion in 2024.
10. Axios, “Mysterious trading patterns follow Trump into war.” Public Integrity Section reduction from 36 to 2 lawyers, March 2026.