The U.S. Department of Transportation has shed a net 3,528 of its full-time employees since President Trump took office, internal DOT documents show. This represents a 6.1 percent reduction in the total DOT workforce.

However, there is a significant difference between the situation at the Federal Aviation Administration and the rest of the Department. The FAA is only down 1,200 people (a 2.6 percent reduction). But the remainder of the department, whose collective workforce is dwarfed by the FAA, saw a reduction of 2,238 employees, or a 20.9 percent reduction in total headcount.

As the table above shows, the FAA originally has a gross 8.1 percent attrition rate, with 3,774 job reductions, but this was largely offset by 2,574 new hires (mostly new air traffic controllers). But the 191 new hires at the rest of the Department were a drop in the bucket compared with the 2,519 gross employee reductions.

The gross departures are split roughly 50-50 into those stemming from the Deferred Resignation Program (DRP), alias the “fork in the road,” and those who left for other reasons. Not all of the DRP departures were resignations – 1,729 were retirements, while 1,565 were resignations. And another 829 DOT employees will be separating under DRP in the post-September 30 period.

Outside of the DRP, the documents we saw do not distinguish between non-DRP voluntary resignations and retirements, deaths, transfers to other government work, or layoffs.

And, while we know or were able to deduce the gross number of total reductions by modal administration, we do not have a breakdown of how the 191 new hires outside the FAA were distributed between modes. So we do not have net staffing reductions for all of the modes.

But in gross terms, the staffing reductions hit some modes harder than others:

• FTA: -35.7% (-282 positions)
• NHTSA: -28.5 percent (-226 positions)
• FHWA: -27.5 percent (-834 positions)
• OST: -24.6 percent (-491 positions)
• FRA: -19.1 percent (-231 positions)
• PHMSA: -18.6 percent (-124 positions)
• FMCSA: -17.4 percent (-221 positions)

Mode-by-mode details of the gross reductions (before the 2,574 add-backs at FAA and the collective 191 add-backs everywhere else) are below.

*There may be small rounding errors in the “Est.” columns – we had to divide know January 20 headcounts by one-decimal-point-rounded total attrition rates to get reduced October 23 headcounts.