Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has already cut a sizable chunk of the roughly 3 million-strong federal workforce, slashing more than 216,000 government jobs in March alone, according to a new report.

According to the latest monthly report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, total layoffs of American laborers skyrocketed by a staggering 205 percent this March compared to the same time last year, led by the 216,670 job cuts directed by Mr. Musk under President Trump’s orders.

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

So far this year, the government has cut 279,445 jobs, an increase of 672 percent from the 36,195 cuts announced in the first quarter of 2024, the report said.

March’s overall total is the third-highest ever recorded, the report said. The highest monthly total occurred in April 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic when 671,129 cuts were recorded, followed by May 2020 with 397,016.

Thursday’s reported numbers are the highest total for the month of March since Challenger began reporting on job cut plans in 1989.

Federal agencies hit the hardest include the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. The DOGE office has also been aggressively shutting down entire agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

DOGE has vowed to cut out government waste and abuse in a quest to trim $2 trillion from the federal government’s annual budget. In January, more than 2 million federal officials were offered buyout packages that included full salary and benefits through September in exchange for resigning. By the February deadline, 75,000 laborers had agreed to the deal — a record-setting exodus.

Thousands of probationary employees — mostly those with less than two years of service — were fired en masse following the DOGE initiatives. Federal judges have ruled against the sweeping actions and ordered many of the officials reinstated, but the Trump administration is appealing to the Supreme Court to keep the cuts in place. 

Mr. Musk’s team has moved to effectively dismantle entire federal departments. The Department of Education has become an immediate target for elimination, with drastic measures underway that include halting programs and reducing staff to skeleton levels. Major layoffs tied to these actions are, predictably, tangled up in federal courts.

While layoffs dominate the headlines, there’s more bad news for the workforce. Challenger’s report also revealed that American employers have announced plans to hire only 54,000 new laborers this year — a 16 percent drop compared to last year and the lowest start-of-the-year hiring figure since 2012. 

For those looking for a silver lining, the government’s jobs report — set to drop on Friday — is expected to show that hiring slowed to 130,000 new positions in March, a slight decline from 151,000 in February. The unemployment rate is also predicted to creep up to 4.2% from its previous 4.1%.