Linked to this Kalshi question:
If there are more than 250000 federal employees no longer working relative to the January 2025 employee count before Jan 2026, then the market resolves to Yes. Outcome verified from FRED.
Note the resolution criteria—what matters is the change in the count of federal employees, not whether we can confirm Trump and/or Elon directly fired them. For reference, the specific chart Kalshi links to appears to be this one.
Market for 2026: /Ziddletwix/federal-employees-at-eoy-2026
1,000
3.00@traders Kalshi has resolved YES, so this resolves YES as well.
Linked to this Kalshi question
For context on their resolution, according to the FRED chart:
Jan 2025: 3015k
Nov 2025: 2744k
Total drop: 271k
I don't know if we should expect revisions to these numbers, but it would be unlikely to change the resolution—this question was explicitly linked to Kalshi, & they have resolved based on their own rules (quoted in this market), that do not account for potential future revisions. (I might reconsider if Kalshi tweaks its resolution, e.g., refunding traders or etc, but that is unlikely).
Real money markets were reasonably "off" on this one—Kalshi was at ~15% for the past few weeks. Unfortunately, there weren't more granular strikes available to confirm "how far off" the markets were (e.g., >100k was considered a lock, so there was some anticipation of the drop, but it's unclear how likely Kalshi thought >200k was). Polymarket uses the same source, but resolving based on the EOY total, and as of a few weeks ago had ~similar prices for the 100-150k, 150-200k, and 200k+ buckets (now 200k+ is at ~90%). So it seems like the expected drop was more like ~150k, with ~75k as the likely uncertainty in either direction, rather than the ~270k drop we observed.
There's no clean 2026 market that's available to clone, but if you want to continue to guess on trends from the same chart, I made a market with buckets for the Dec 2026 figure (binary would be nicer, but there's no simple external shock for an interesting framing):
@Ziddletwix looks like the government shutdown was quite the inflection point. The October numbers on that graph also would have been sufficient for a YES.
Dont know if there is any anticipated revision of the numbers such as if furloughed workers were counted as no longer employed but the same people return to the same jobs and retroactively added back into the metric.
Whooo very glad I sold at 7%. >2300 profit betting no.
New question... Will these numbers end up being revised? I don't trust this administration to release accurate nunbers, only numbers that say what they want them to say. Too many instances of pressure from the top to "find" the "right" numbers...
@SeekingEternity I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that these numbers are inaccurate. The drop from Sep to Oct was entirely explainable by the DRP numbers reported in ~April
@bens Oh, if I were to bet on it, I'd say that they probably will be revised a little bit but not dramatically, the same way the prior update to the chart was vs. the update before that. Not likely to affect the resolution. And if the numbers weren't in line with the story Trump is spinning then maybe they'd just not have gotten released, rather than being fudged. But it's hard to miss the degree to which this admin is willing to lie for the sake of their spin, and I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers end up changing somewhat more dramatically (or if the official numbers don't change but somebody leaks that they "changed the methodology" or something, to get the result).
@bens there’s every reason to believe the numbers may be inaccurate. They were already revised retroactively last month, we know the administration wants the jobs numbers to look a certain way, and its bookkeeping is generally atrocious.
@MachiNi okay, but these numbers were precisely in line with my estimates for the drop-off between Sep and Oct due to the DRP kicking in. And why would they particularly have fudged the numbers so that the steepest drop occurred precisely in line with the well-reported numbers on the amount of federal employees who took the buyout? I think ppl are assuming that the Trump admin wants there to be a certain narrative around firing federal employees, but if so, why have a large drop just in that one month?
@bens I don’t dispute that they cut roughly that number of jobs. I’m just responding to the notion that there’s no reason for the numbers to be inaccurate.
@MachiNi hmm, I mean, I don't think there's any particular reason to believe that these numbers were less accurate than you expect a typical set of jobs numbers to be, perhaps pricing in slightly higher urgency/uncertainty due to the shutdown and chaos in the BLS. I don't think there's reason to suspect tampering or systematic bias.
@bens Trump firing the BLS commissioner for a bad jobs report was one reason. It’s defeasible and may not apply here but it’s a reason.
@skibidist Just because he succeeded in cutting a bunch of people doesn't mean that wasn't a horrendous idea
@SimonWestlake no but in this case we'd more likely need to blame the people accepting the quitting bonus because nearly like 150,000+ people could've just said 'no' and continued their gainful employment
@No_uh At least one prominent members of this administration has talked about desiring to traumatize government workers. The administration is undoubtedly to blame for the vast majority of departures.
@brod Considering this market was mostly sub 50% and sub 20% pre-resolution, I wouldn't call this 'working'
