"One of the two will be fired"... "Fear of Layoffs" U.S. officials

With the prospect of a second Donald Trump administration wielding the blade of dismissal against the 2.3 million U.S. federal officials, attention is also focused on what areas the anxious are mainly doing.

According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on the 17th local time, about 70% of the general public officials working for the U.S. federal government belong to the U.S. military or security-related agencies as of March this year.

According to relevant statistics from the Federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (486,522 people), which operates hundreds of hospitals and clinics for veterans.

The Ministry of Homeland Security (222,539), the Army (221,037), the Navy (216,537), the Air Force (168,505), the Ministry of National Defense (156,803), the Ministry of Justice (116,614), the Ministry of Finance (108,869), and the Ministry of Agriculture (92,72).

The ministries with the fewest general jobs were the U.S. Department of Education, with only 4,425.

However, the WSJ added that only civilian employees, not active-duty soldiers or reservists, are counted.

According to the Federal Office of Personnel Management, the annual salary of these ordinary civil servants was $213 billion (about 296.3 trillion won) as of April this year.

By field, the median annual salary for general workers belonging to the Ministry of Education was the highest at $118,410 (about 160 million won), and the median annual salary for general workers belonging to the Ministry of Finance, which has a high percentage of office workers, was the lowest at $59,557 (about 80 million won).

The median annual salary for all rank-and-file officials in the federal government was $97,24 (about 130 million won).

In terms of the number of people by job type, doctors, nurses, and public health workers alone accounted for the largest number of workers in the medical field at about 15%, while administrative and office workers were also close to 15% of the total.

The WSJ wrote, "Ordinary officials work a wide range of jobs, from nurses at veterans hospitals to rangers at Yellowstone National Park, federal prison guards, and 19 employees at the Radioactive Waste Technology Review Board (NWTRB), with more than 80% working outside of Washington, DC."

President-elect Trump has signaled a massive job cut for them in the name of streamlining the bloated government.

Some say that general public officials with guaranteed status will be reclassified into political positions and fired, and the vacancy will be filled with loyalists.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is set to head the new "Government Efficiency Department" and lead the federal government restructuring, may be joking, but "more than half of government employees will have to be fired," the WSJ noted.

Trump, who said he would leave the government's efficiency department to Musk and Indian entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, said they would complete the federal restructuring within a year and a half.

Musk laid off 80% of his existing employees when he acquired Social Media X in 2022.

He said he would cut $2 trillion (about 2,800 trillion won) by eradicating waste from government spending at Trump's campaign site last month.

Currently, the annual budget expenditure of the U.S. federal government is approximately $6.8 trillion (about 9,460 trillion won).