President Donald Trump’s White House staff is much smaller and is costing taxpayers 29% less in the first year of his second term than did Joe Biden’s administration in his last year in the Oval Office in 2024, according to data compiled by the non-profit government transparency watchdog Open the Books (OTB).

Trump “spent just $44.1 million paying 404 employees in 2025, making it the least costly payroll since at least 2009when adjusting for inflation,” OTB said in a July 8 report. “The new dollar total is also a 29 percent reduction from the White House payroll in 2024, when Joe Biden spent $62.2 million.

“The [Biden] White House employed 565 people that year, the most since Richard Nixon was President. In total, [the] White House payroll cost taxpayers $230.1 million during the four years Biden was in office, or an average of $57.5 million per year. President Obama never spent less than $51 million on the White House payroll during his eight years in office.”

Trump is also spending less on his White House staff so far in his second term than he did in his first four years in office.

“Trump’s White House spent a total of $198.6 million on payroll during the four years of his first term, or an average of $49.7 million per year. The smallest annual figure was the $46.4 million he spent in 2018. When he left office in 2020, his White House was spending $50.5 million on payroll,” OTB said.

Trump’s smaller staff does not appear, however, to be hampering his efforts to make good on his many campaign promises from the 2024 campaign, perhaps most notably in his pledge to close the U.S. border with Mexico and stop the flood of illegal immigrants entering the country as a result of Biden’s policies.

An October 2024 report by the House Committee on Homeland Security said the four-year total of illegal immigrant “encounters” recorded by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) through the end of Fiscal Year 2024 reached 10.8 million, including 2.9 million in the fourth year. That computes to an average of 7,397 illegal immigrants entering the U.S. every single day under Biden.

The report also pointed out that nearly 400 illegal immigrants carried on the federal government’s terrorist watchlists entered the country during the same period, as well as more than 60,000 Chinese nationals, including many with known ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

By comparison, Trump, backed by a smaller and less expensive White House staff, has directed a massive federal effort that — in less than six months — stopped the flow of illegal immigrants into the country and launched a campaign to identify, find, and deport illegal immigrants, especially the thousands of whom that have criminal records for crimes committed either in their home countries or here in the U.S.

The Trump White House staff has not been bashful about heralding the Chief Executive’s successes on the issues of controlling immigration and securing the U.S. southern border with Mexico and northern border with Canada.

“Border Patrol encountered just 6,070 illegal immigrants at the southern border in June — another record-setting low (15% lower than the previous record set in March) that underscores the effectiveness of President Donald J. Trump’s robust border enforcement policies and aggressive deportation measures,” the White House declared in a July 2 statement. “It’s a stark contrast to the Biden Administration, when approximately 10,000 unvetted migrants were illegally crossing the southern border every day at the peak of the invasion — most of whom were released into the country with little or no oversight,” the Trump White House statement claimed.

Trump’s deportations were estimated to be about 200,000 through the end of May, suggesting the annual total for 2025 could reach between 400,000 and 500,000. But that would still put Trump behind President Barack Obama, who earned the sobriquet of “Deporter-in-Chief” during his two terms as president.

Citing figures compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, USA Today reported Obama’s total deportations far exceeded those of Trump during the latter’s first term in office.

“Throughout eight years in office, the Obama administration logged more than 3.1 million ICE deportations, according to Syracuse’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The peak was fiscal year 2012, when more than 407,000 people were removed. By comparison, the first Trump administration maxed out at deporting 269,000 people in 2019, according to the same TRAC data set. Across four years, the Trump administration recorded fewer than 932,000 deportations.”

In a June 15 Truth Social post, Trump encouraged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to reach for “the largest mass deportation operation of illegal aliens in history.”

Even with the smaller total number of staffers and reduced compensation budget, the Trump White House staff is well-paid in 2025, according to the OTB report: “The average staffer makes $109,117. Nearly 54% of the employees in the White House make at least $100,000, which is comparable to the 52% of employees who made six figures in Biden’s administration in 2024.”