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.
I apologize if this has been answered below (I looked but didn’t find the answer), and this might end up mattering: what is the last data point you or Kalshi will use? December 2025 or January 2026?
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.
I will follow Kalshi on this point but my reading of this quote is that it includes all months in 2025 (any single month satisfying the criterion resolves YES) but it would exclude the Jan 2026 data point (Dec 2025 last chance for resolution). And this refers to the time of the data points on the chart, not when the numbers are released.
If anyone thinks Kalshi means something different LMK—I will mirror them.
@Ziddletwix thanks for confirming. That’s how I understand it too but since it may be close I wanted to be extra sure. The last data point (December) will be released in January.
@bens this would be funny because on one hand... political motivation to show jobs going up... but on the other hand, motivation to show federal positions going down
@bens OK so the real question is what would be the funniest... this market resolving NO because the jobs data is being cooked, this market resolving YES because the jobs data is being cooked, or this market resolving NO because of massive federal hiring to conduct an interdecennial census. Lot of good options on the table.
@jb456 so my unofficial quick reaction is that the description says "Linked to this Kalshi question", so my default resolution will likely follow Kalshi's. but if there is sufficiently good reason to do otherwise, I would consider a different resolution. Kalshi is bound by different constraints, so if that forces them into a resolution that seems broadly worse, I won't follow (plus, Kalshi is unable to N/A, while Manifold has that option, even if I will try very hard to avoid such a resolution for such a large market).
to be concrete, if that seems like a serious concern, I should probably do some work looking into how people would expect kalshi to handle that edge case, & lay out some guidance for whether I think I would follow. (and if someone wants to do that legwork for me, i.e. predict "if BLS stops publishing in october and at that point cuts were <250k, how would Kalshi resolve?" and save me some time to look at their rules, feel free, I would certainly appreciate it).
free money to vote no, especially if you consider the new ICE hires. Not even mentioning their ugly breakup and the TACO factor.
@MachiNi there was a big spike on the kalshi market, i think most likely related to this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/08/11/fema-union-contracts-canceled.
So, I'm not saying that it's actually going to happen, but if there is an attempt at an inter-decennial census between now and the 2026 midterms, that is going to require quite a lot of hiring and it would probably start before the end of this year. Temporary federal hiring for a decennial census can be around 250k or more.
@jb456 this market resolving no because trump decided he wants to pack the house would be among the funniest possible outcomes
@jb456 what ended up happening with the buyout/furlough? Are there still a (potentially reasonably large) number of people who will officially leave Sept 30?
@Tyler31 I think so. Not 100% on the details of the survey, but I think it's based on how many people are on payroll. So those who have taken the buyout but are still being paid would presumably still be counted. According to WaPo (based on anonymous administration sources), the number who have taken the buyout is around 154k. It really comes down, imo, to the extent to which the people leaving (due to RIFs, retirement, buyout) are being replaced with new hires.
