All 22 major agencies got smaller last year. The audited count: 256,000 people, 11 percent.

The finding, in one paragraph: the numbers argued about all year now have an audited version.▸ The Government Accountability Office asked every major agency for its actual payroll headcount — who was in pay status, when — and the answer is that the federal government's civilian workforce fell by nearly 256,000 people, 11.3 percent, in thirteen months; that the cuts were radically uneven, sparing Homeland Security almost entirely while removing a quarter of Treasury and 95 percent of USAID; that the reduction was executed overwhelmingly through voluntary-exit incentives rather than reductions in force, which a continuing resolution froze in November; and that two agencies declined to give the government's own auditor their staffing data at all.

The ledger is GAO's Federal Agency Workforce Changes: Update for July 2025 to January 2026 (GAO-26-108583, June 17, 2026) — agency-reported headcounts as of June 28, 2025 and January 10, 2026, against an OPM baseline from December 2024, read directly in full.▸ The other side of the equation is the year's oversight record, each document read directly in BlackLeaf's prior investigations: the National Taxpayer Advocate's mid-year report (the 21 percent phone answer rate), TIGTA's Taxpayer Assistance Center audit and its federal-employee delinquency report (a collection caseload's staff halved), and the DOJ Inspector General's DEA registration audit (a fee-funded vetting office at 19 percent vacancy under the hiring freeze).

Eighteen of the 22 agencies lost more than a tenth of their staff.▸ The exceptions map the administration's priorities: Homeland Security essentially flat (−0.9 percent), Veterans Affairs (−7.3), Justice (−8.8), Defense (−10.7) — the enforcement and uniformed-adjacent side — against −26.1 percent at Treasury, −29.4 at Energy, −30.5 at HUD, −33.9 at OPM itself, and −45.6 percent at Education. The continuing resolution's RIF freeze (P.L. 119-37 § 120, November 12, 2025 through January 30, 2026, which also invalidated the October RIF notices) means nearly all of this happened without layoffs in the formal sense:

The two agencies that did not answer their auditor are their own finding.▸ GAO requested the same data from all 24 CFO Act agencies; the Small Business Administration and USAID did not provide it, so GAO read OPM's public website instead: SBA down 37 percent, and USAID — an agency of 4,895 people at Christmas 2024 — reduced to 258. A 95 percent reduction is the kind of number that usually requires an agency to be abolished by statute; USAID still legally exists, which is precisely why its headcount still appears in OPM's database for GAO to find.

The workforce table is one half of a ledger; the year's inspector-general reports are the other half, and they were written against the same months.▸ Treasury: −26.1 percent, the largest decline of any cabinet department with more than 100,000 staff — and the IRS answered 21 percent of its 48.1 million filing-season calls, gave wrong answers at 46 percent of audited walk-in visits, and cut the staff working its federal-employee delinquency inventory from 242 to 121 while the balance owed hit a record. Justice: −8.8 percent — and the DEA's registration office, funded entirely by user fees with money in the bank, ran a 19 percent vacancy because the freeze applied anyway, leaving 1.5 million renewals auto-approved without review. Veterans Affairs: −7.3 percent, nearly 35,000 people — in the year its health-record modernization accelerated from six go-lives in six years to a planned thirty per year. None of these pairings is a causal proof; each is the same government describing itself twice, once in headcount and once in audit findings, during the same fiscal year.

The RIF freeze expired January 30, 2026; litigation over the invalidated October notices continues, and GAO's report is explicitly an "update" — a third installment tracking the next window is implied by the series.▸ The FY2027 budget proposes further reductions at most non-enforcement agencies. The unknowns GAO flags are the ones that will decide what the cuts cost: how many of the 127,000 hires were rehires of the people just paid to leave, and how many of the deferred-resignation departures came from the retirement-eligible cohort that was already going. Neither is answerable from the data agencies currently keep.

All figures are from GAO-26-108583 and the cited oversight reports, each read directly. Workforce counts are pay-status headcounts, not FTEs; SBA and USAID figures are OPM public data because the agencies did not respond to GAO. Service-failure pairings are contemporaneous, not causal claims.