Layoffs across the U.S. surged 205% in March when compared with a year earlier, with last month’s 275,240 job cuts fueled by widespread firings engineered by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
March’s layoffs represent the third-highest monthly total ever recorded, Challenger said. The two previous highest monthly totals were recorded in April 2020 and May 2020, when more than 671,000 and 397,000 job cuts, respectively, were recorded, due to the pandemic shuttering the U.S. economy, according to its data.
Last month’s cuts were led by losses in federal jobs, largely directed by DOGE, with more than 216,000 government employees fired from their jobs in March, Challenger said. While Musk has said he is rooting out waste and abuse, the steep job cuts to agencies such as the Social Security Administration and the IRS are causing delays in customer services for taxpayers, while also some other agencies are being entirely shuttered.
“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,” Andrew Challenger, senior vice president and workplace expert for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement.
The government’s monthly jobs report, which will be released on April 4 at 8:30 a.m. EST, is expected to show a slowdown in hiring, with economists forecasting that employers added 130,000 new hires in March, according to financial data company FactSet. That’s down from 151,00 new jobs in February.
The unemployment rate is expected to tick higher, rising to 4.2% in March from its 4.1% rate in February, according to FactSet’s polling of economists.
Since February, DOGE’s cuts have led to more than 280,000 layoffs of federal workers and contractors across 27 agencies, Challenger said. Another 4,429 job cuts have resulted from the Trump administration’s ending of contracts or cutting federal aid, with those job losses mostly at nonprofits and health organizations, it added.
Meanwhile, employers are also putting the brakes on plans to hire new workers, Challenger found.
Companies have announced plans to hire about 54,000 workers this year, a 16% decrease from a year earlier and representing the lowest hiring at the start of a year since 2012, its data shows.
