There are over 18k podiatrists working in USA... more practicing podiatrists than nearly any MD specialty besides the head-to-toe and primary care ones (FP, ER, OB, gen surg, rad, anesthesia, psych, etc):
Number of People per Active Physician by Specialty, 2021 (click 'Total Active Physicians' to sort by number)
There more DPMs practicing than ENTs, derm, plastics, uro, Endo, GI, ophtho, PM&R, and many others.
Podiatry's current grad classes are
far exceeding the classes of ~35yrs ago (replacing rate of retiring DPMs with many more). We have opened 4 schools in the past 20 years (only opened 3 in the 100 years before that).
We will soon overtake orthos (all types) and probably gen surgeons after that with the new podiatry schools ramping up their class sizes. That makes very little sense, given they treat the entire body and far more pathologies than DPMs do.
What we are doing that may be
most concerning is replacing C&C docs with DPM "surgeon" grads. The job market is going to get very tough there for "surgeon" podiatry jobs (it already is), and RNs or midlevels will likely take most of the RFC work in offices, hospitals, nursing homes, wherever. By the time podiatry "leadership" realizes there is not a need for 600 or 700+ "foot and ankle surgeon" grads per year, that fallback RFC work will be somewhat dried up. Even pus bus DPM jobs will be hard for new grads to sniff due to backlog of DPMs who graduated in prior years vying for such spots.
Now and always, best defense is to work hard, get good grades and options, get a good residency.
There will always be good jobs or owner opportunities out there, but the avg DPM's financial ROI is going to continue to go down, though... no two ways about that. Simply look to pharmacy, chiro, optometry to see what saturation does. Increasing podiatry tuition, increasing numbers of graduating DPMs - particularly "surgeon" types - to go along with USA population growth flatline (soon to be negative, like any other first world country) are just not hard to figure out.