ARRC Awards Six Stipends to Advance Research on Federal Workforce Changes
The Volcker Alliance awarded six stipends to support research teams across nine universities that seek to analyze the impact of recent reductions to the federal workforce on public service delivery, citizens, and democratic governance. This is the inaugural round of stipends issued by the Accountability and Reform Research Consortium (ARRC). All six projects align with the research agenda outlined by ARRC’s Workforce and Expertise Community of Practice:
- Mark Richardson of Georgetown University will assess trends in the size, composition, and geographic distribution of the federal workforce, with particular attention to workforce contraction and hiring patterns during the second Trump administration. By placing these changes in historical context, the project will identify which agencies, occupations, and regions have experienced the greatest workforce loss and whether recent patterns depart from prior partisan or administrative cycles. The project will curate publicly available datasets from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and data.opm.gov into a publicly available data repository, dashboard, and user guide.
- L. Jason Anastasopoulos and Greg Porumbescu, of the University of Georgia and Rutgers University–Newark, respectively, will compare how performance and agency ideological orientations under the Biden and first Trump administrations predict layoffs, and provide insights into how political climate shapes federal talent pools. The research will also explore whether an “America First” programmatic orientation, measured by the extent to which agencies distribute resources internationally, independently predicts workforce reductions. The findings will provide a baseline for understanding which agencies lost personnel and why.
- M. Blake Emidy, Anmol Soni, and Evan Mistur, of Texas A&M University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Texas at Arlington, respectively, will analyze who left the federal service in 2025 and how the characteristics of separated employees differ from those who have left in the previous decade. The research will utilize data between 2015 and 2025 to investigate whether separations in 2025 differed from previous years in terms of workers’ levels of expertise (e.g., education, STEM occupations), experience (e.g., age, length of service), and appointment type (e.g., competitive service). The results will shed light on the fallout from 2025 personnel actions, clarify the implications for government capacity, and identify pathways to strengthen the federal service moving forward.
- Abby André of The Ohio State University/The Impact Project will document loss of the federal workforce in each state, down to the occupation level. With this information, local and state policymakers will better understand potential gaps in services and plan appropriate responses. The work will combine datasets to create new, publicly available dashboards that will serve as an ongoing resource for researchers.
- Benjamin M. Brunjes of the University of Washington will investigate how the Trump administration is transforming federal procurement and contracting systems. This research will explore questions such as how has centralizing civilian purchasing authority in the General Services Administration (GSA) affected the procurement workforce, the availability of relevant expertise, the allocation of federal contracts, and contractor accountability and performance? How have workforce reductions affected procurement ethics, system efficiency, workforce quality, and contractor accountability? The project will also examine how Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been implemented across federal procurement to identify contracts and grants for termination, substitute for procurement staff, and to what effect.
- Don Moynihan of the University of Michigan will focus on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which embarked on a significant modernization effort following new funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. A notable component of this modernization was the development of Direct File, a free tax-reporting system offered by the IRS, which was later discontinued during the Trump administration. Documentation and analysis of the IRS Direct File case offer a high-profile opportunity to assess new personnel and technological investments in a core government function alongside the implications of its sudden reversal.
“The projects selected represent an urgent and coordinated effort to move from anecdote to evidence on federal workforce changes,” said Bill Resh, Professor and Chair of Public Management and Policy at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University. “ARRC is proud to support research that equips policymakers and the public with the tools they need to understand what is changing and make informed decisions about what comes next.”
“Producing rigorous, publicly accessible scholarship is precisely what schools of public service should be doing at this moment,” said Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of Public Policy, University of Michigan. “The projects underway here are not just academic exercises; they are generating the data infrastructure and analytical frameworks that government officials, journalists, and our communities will rely on for years to come. We are proud to support this work and the researchers behind it.”
The findings and tools produced by these researchers will be made public and accessible on the ARRC webpage this summer.
The Volcker Alliance is grateful for the support of the Luce Foundation and ARRC’s Founding Member Schools.
