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The United States has grown significantly over the past 40 years.
One of them is Vivek Ramaswamy, born in 1985, one of two wealthy men ordered by President-elect Donald Trump to downsize the federal government.
The United States spent about $900 billion in 1984 ($2.7 trillion in 2024 dollars), but by 2024 it would have cost more than $7 trillion. Some of that money will go through a contract to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who works with Ramaswamy in a government department. Efficiency, a new non-governmental commission.
The increase from less than $1.6 trillion in 1984 ($4.8 trillion in 2024 dollars) to more than $35.5 trillion today is something that every American should be concerned about. , is reason enough to pursue serious and bipartisan efforts to rein in federal spending.
The current efforts led by Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk demonstrate a focus on the size of the federal workforce. CNN reports that one idea that’s percolating is that it could recommend that all federal employees hired in the last year be fired.
Over the past 40 years, as population, spending, and debt have exploded, the size of the federal workforce has, in some ways shocking, remained largely unchanged; It confuses the common assumption that it must have been done. .
“The number of federal employees has skyrocketed over the past four years, especially the number of employees who are working from home or not even reporting to work,” Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told CNN’s Pamela Brown on Thursday. is rapidly increasing,” he said. View.
A closer look at the available data shows that the number of employees fluctuates by hundreds of thousands of people, which seems large but is not a significant expansion of the federal workforce.
At the end of 1984, before Ramaswamy was born, about 2.96 million civilians, including postal workers, were receiving full-time pay from the federal government, and now more than 3 million people are working for the federal government, according to the agency. He is said to be working. of labor statistics. The Office of Personnel Management’s official tally is slightly lower, at about 2.87 million, including postal workers.
In fact, the number of full-time federal employees has remained relatively unchanged since the 1960s, within a few hundred thousand civilians.
The size of the federal workforce did not change appreciably, even though the size of the military and the Pentagon were reduced under the George H.W. Bush administration and the federal workforce was cut by hundreds of thousands under the Clinton administration. It remained within the range. For decades, there are 3 million workers.
Hundreds of thousands of people come in and hundreds of thousands go out every year
Of the people who enter and exit the federal workforce each year, hundreds of thousands of new civilian employees (not including postal workers) have been hired by the federal government over the past three years, about 250,000 to just over 300,000. . These are roughly offset by the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who retire each year.
Peter Morrissey, senior director of talent and strategy at the Volcker Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for improved public services, commissioned a 2017 study to determine the true size of government.
“If you think about what’s been going on for a long time, the number of civil servants, the number of people with .gov emails working in the federal government, has remained essentially unchanged even as their responsibilities have grown larger and larger.” he said to me. “They’re serving more people and doing more.”
Rising costs of social programs such as Social Security and Medicare, as well as rising costs of goods, are pushing up government spending.
“Talent is absolutely essential, but it’s a relatively small part from a cost structure perspective,” he said.
Some government agencies that Republicans have said they want to close, such as the Department of Education, the smallest of the Cabinet-level agencies, have relatively few employees. According to OPM, the company has approximately 4,400 employees. The largest federal agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, employ hundreds of thousands of people.
Another thing to know about federal employees is that while the largest concentration of federal employees is in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, the majority (80%) are spread across every state in the country, including California, Texas, , Colorado, Alabama and other states.
Focusing on improving government doesn’t mean shrinking government, said Jenny Mattingly, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, which advocates for smarter government.
“We’re trying to change the direction of the conversation in a way that doesn’t negatively impact service delivery and doesn’t hurt the American people in terms of getting things from the government agencies that they rely on. “It’s about fixing government in a way that’s right,” she said.
The government is certainly doing a lot of things. Elaine Kamarck is the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution and helped spearhead efforts to reduce the size of government during the Clinton administration.
She told me that it’s important to see the U.S. government not as a monolith, but as “essentially a giant holding company.”
“We do everything from training pilots to fly advanced aircraft to tracking Cryptosporidium in hamburger meat to cutting retirees’ checks,” she said.
Firing only recent hires, as Musk and Ramaswamy have suggested, not only scares away future hires, but also threatens the bipartisan infrastructure law passed under the Biden administration. There will also be the additional impact of firing people hired for certain roles, such as enforcement. .
But Comer said people hired for specific roles or programs once funded tend to stick around.
“The current problem in government is a problem that has existed for decades…creating government programs and creating government agencies, even if they become outdated or inefficient. But it never goes away,” Comer told Brown on CNN.
Meanwhile, the use of contractors and subsidy workers has increased, as workers who do government work, even though they do not receive a direct salary from the government, are shouldering more of the burden.
John DiIlio, who worked in both the Barack Obama and George W. Dismantling it would be, he wrote. Much harder than rocket science. Here is an excerpt of what DiIulio wrote:
The real deep state folks are fueling federal deficit spending nonstop on everything from Medicare to missiles. They deliberately steer funding through a maze of federal programs. They use federal tax dollars to employ millions of people in the private sector. They are behind the “waste, fraud and abuse” that everyone blames on “bureaucracies” who are mostly just administrators of grants and contracts, with a workforce that has not grown since the 1960s.
Mr. Musk, who has built his company on government contracts and subsidies, may be able to offer some insight into how the system works.
The True Size of Government study conducted by researcher Paul Wright for the Volcker Alliance found that in 1984, more than 6.9 million civilians worked in the federal government, including contractors and grant workers. It turned out that he was working as a. Adding military personnel and postal workers, the number jumped to 9.8 million.
Meanwhile, the military was downsized after the Cold War and then built up during the global war on terror. The study concludes with data from 2015, when there were a total of 9.1 million people in the workforce, or 7.3 million people without the military or postal services.
Indeed, along with the big spending bills of the past few years, such as the infrastructure bill and the Anti-Inflation Act, which appropriated billions of dollars to move the United States toward a greener economy, the number of contract and grant employees has also increased. It must have increased. Comer said Musk and Ramaswamy will take a year and a half to make their recommendations and may recommend efforts to recover unspent funds.
Morrissey said that “there has been pressure for years not to increase employee numbers, and that usually leads to contract expansion,” but that contractors end up asking the government more There is also evidence that they are often forced to cover the costs of
Everyone I spoke to for this article agreed that there is plenty of room for bipartisan cooperation in government efficiency efforts to modernize the workforce and improve the functioning of the federal government. I am doing it. For example, Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mr. Musk have both discussed the need to control Pentagon spending. Part of the problem for Musk will be that his company SpaceX, in particular, receives multibillion-dollar contracts.
