US Federal Workforce Shrinks by 11% While Britain's Civil Service Stays Near a 20-Year High
The US federal workforce fell by nearly 256,000 people, more than 11%, between December 2024 and January 2026, according to GAO. Eighteen of the 22 large agencies it examined shrank by more than 10%.
Britain set out to shrink its state too. In March 2025 Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised to cut departments’ running costs by 15% by 2029-30 and said civil service numbers could fall by 10,000. In January 2026 the target rose to a 16% cut in administrative costs over five years. Yet the Office for National Statistics counted 557,000 civil servants in June 2026, 1,000 fewer than in March and 6,000 more than a year earlier. In full-time equivalents the civil service reached about 524,000 in March 2026, the highest since 2005.
Two governments both said they wanted a leaner state. One cut a quarter of a million jobs in a year. The other is still adding staff. The contrast says a lot about how each system works.
Why Whitehall moves slowly
Britain is cutting money first and people second. The 15% target is on administrative budgets, not headcount, and departments can meet part of it through property, consultancy and IT savings. The January 2026 plan promised to halve spending on consultants as well as cutting admin costs, with more than £2 billion a year saved by 2030.
Headcount usually falls through attrition and hiring freezes, which takes years. The UK civil service has strong employment protections and redundancy terms that make fast cuts expensive. The ONS figures show the net result so far is roughly flat.
The biggest single move: NHS England
The largest structural change is the abolition of NHS England, the body that runs the health service in England day to day. The government announced it in March 2025, with the plan to merge its functions into the Department of Health and Social Care by March 2027, and later set a target of cutting the combined headcount by half by March 2028.
That needs legislation. The Health Bill cleared the House of Commons in September 2026 and is due for its second reading in the Lords in October. The government says the change will save up to £1 billion a year. How the merged body will actually work is still being settled between the department and NHS England.
Why Washington moved fast
The US route was close to the opposite. The administration used deferred resignation offers, probationary dismissals and reductions in force, and froze most hiring. GAO counted about 378,000 separations across 22 agencies in 2025 against about 127,000 hires. Most departures were voluntary on paper, but they happened in months.
US federal employees have civil service protections too. What differed was the willingness to test them in court and to accept the disruption. Some of it is reversing: the IRS was cleared to fast-track 8,000 hires in 2026, and HHS said it was hiring 12,000.
What the comparison shows
Neither approach has produced clear savings yet. Britain’s admin-cost targets run to 2030. The US savings claims are disputed, and GAO found it paid out $9.5 billion in 2025 to employees who weren’t working, mostly through the deferred resignation programme.
The deeper difference is method. Britain is trying to make the state cheaper by changing what it buys and merging bodies, with headcount following slowly. Washington cut people first and is working out afterwards which functions it still needs. The first is slow and easy to stall. The second is fast and expensive to get wrong.