WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he feels “very badly” for the thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs in recent weeks but that “many of them don’t work at all.”

Asked by NBC News if Trump feels responsible for so many people losing their jobs, he said, “Sure I do. I feel very badly … but many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”

“When we cut, we want to cut, but we want to cut the people that aren’t working or … not doing a good job,” he told reporters during an Oval Office meeting with the Prime Minister of Ireland Micheál Martin. “We’re keeping the best people.”

Trump referenced the drastic reduction in employees the administration is making to the Department of Education this week. “[Education Secretary] Linda McMahon is a real professional … very sophisticated business person, and she cut a large number, but she kept the best people, and we’ll see how it all works out. But our country was run very badly. I mean, whether it was that or contracts that were signed that was so bad, so obviously bad.”

The president said that billions of dollars of “fat and waste and fraud and abuse is being taken out” of the federal government.

“We have a dream. And you know what the dream is? We’re going to move the Department of Education, we’re going to move education into the states, so that the states, instead of bureaucrats working in Washington, so that the states can run education,” Trump said.

Backlash has grown in recent weeks over the scale of cuts, spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s biggest campaign donor, said earlier this week that DOGE is working in “pretty much” every federal department and plans to double in size.

The firings have impacted workers throughout the federal government — in both Washington, D.C. and across the country.

In addition to the Department of Education’s workforce being cut in half, all employees at the Department of Health and Human Services were offered voluntary buyouts last week and other more recent job cuts or cancellation of government contracts have taken place at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Last week, White House adviser Alina Habba made negative comments about federal employees, saying “I really don’t feel sorry for them,” Habba said. “They should get back to work for the American people, like President Trump and this administration.” During those same remarks, Habba said that military veterans affected by the DOGE-led layoffs may not be “fit to have a job at this moment.”