Published on: June 18, 2025 at 2:41 pm
The Trump administration cut almost 300,000 federal jobs in the first four months of 2025 alone, according to a report by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. While regular restructurings involving layoffs and churn are commonplace among multinational corporations, it’s rare in the U.S. public sector. It’s been disruptive to government operations and the U.S. economy, not to mention the psychological toll it has taken on federal employees, both those who were cut and their families as well as the survivors.
Academy of Management Scholar Jaqueline “Jackie” Coyle-Shapiro of California State University, San Bernardino, and the London School of Economics said that she’s researched the amount and the diversity of changes happening in organizations and to what extent those changes trigger employees to look at their own psychological contract with their employer.
“When workers hear news that people are being laid off or their supervisor is leaving the organization, that focuses them on their own psychological contract and gets them to think about what they’re giving to and getting from the organization,” Coyle-Shapiro said.
“Because we are facing much more change in terms of organizations and our own work with the increasing reliance on AI, for example, that’s triggering employees to focus on what the give-and-take in their relationship with the organization is,” she said.
“Employees will pay attention to these triggers, and over the course of time, may experience psychological contract breach, where their employer is breaking a promise to them.”
Periodically culling employees has been common in the corporate world for decades, but it’s only recently that it has crossed over to the U.S. government, where skilled professionals often choose because of stability and good benefits.
In contrast, the primary message that the current presidential administration has communicated to government officials is that their jobs are not valued and certainly not secure.
“It also reflects the disposability of employees, that you can have a job one day and be told by text or email that you no longer have a job,” Coyle-Shapiro said. “What organizations need to pay attention to is procedural justice—what procedures are being put in place to decide who’s going to lose their job?
“With the speed at which employees are losing their jobs, it’s not clear that there are procedures in place that are transparent, where an employee has the opportunity to voice their concerns about the criteria, for example, that’s being used to decide who’s losing their job and who’s not losing their job,” she said.
“This kind of haphazard approach to cutting headcount fits very much into organizations that view employees as disposable.”
