The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has begun looking for places to cut staff, identifying redundant positions and any programs within the agency not explicitly required by law, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Agency leadership has begun selecting allied employees to take over certain positions and sidelining those deemed by the administration as unfit. Some employees who say they have been pushed aside have already started looking for employment outside the agency.

The agency has also notified staff of an upcoming meeting where officials will work to identify positions not expressly mandated by law for possible elimination. 

While there are some positions at the FDIC mandated explicitly by statute — such as the FDIC board of directors, the inspector general and bank examiners — experts say a significant proportion of the FDIC workforce lack a strict statutory basis. Exactly which roles would be considered mandated by statute would likely be a matter of legal interpretation. 

The new details come in the wake of a massive scaling back of government operations in the opening weeks of the second Trump administration, with the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency — led by billionaire entrepreneur and close Trump ally Elon Musk — leading the charge. DOGE was created by a Trump executive order and charged with combing through the federal government to identify and eliminate wasteful spending and “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

The Trump administration has already drastically reduced international funding through the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, imposing a sweeping funding freeze on most of the agency’s global programs, effectively shutting them down. A federal judge issued an order freezing elements of the administration’s actions at USAID pending oral argument in a lawsuit filed on behalf of agency employees. 

DOGE employees have also gained access to Treasury systems that process government payments, reportedly making changes to the source code upon which the system operates. Russell Vought, who was confirmed by the Senate to run the Office of Management and Budget last week, was also tapped as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, telling employees to stop all work. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who had previously held the position of interim CFPB director, had already instructed CFPB employees to cease all rulemaking activities and enforcement actions.

The FDIC declined to comment on the details of the internal review or DOGE’s direct efforts, if any, that are occurring at the agency. A spokesperson said — as has been reported previously — the only staffers who they could confirm have been laid off are those in the Office of Minority and Women’s inclusion, pursuant to Trump’s executive order cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at agencies.

Anxiety among FDIC staff about the extent to which the Trump administration would attempt to restructure the agency has been building for weeks, sources say. 

Advisors to then-President-elect Donald Trump have been reportedly exploring options to reduce or eliminate key bank regulators, including the FDIC, since as early as December. In interviews with potential nominees for regulatory bodies, Trump’s team apparently discussed the possibility of merging the FDIC with other agencies, such as the Treasury Department, and restructuring the financial regulatory framework. Any such recombination of federal agencies would have to be enacted by Congress, according to legal experts.