The federal government has grown much faster than federal employment because most of the people paid to do things by the federal government are not actual federal employees. Most federally funded workers are now contractors and grant-funded workers. This doesn’t even count the legions of state and local government employees whose jobs are partially funded by federal transfer payments to the states and locals.
Like so much of what’s coming out of the Trump administration, this talk about federal employment is mostly theater. This is demonstrated in how DOGE spokesmen tell us how hard it will be to fire federal employees with civil service protections. That is, the DOGE people are already explaining to us why they won’t be able to cut federal employment—probably so they have an excuse for why so little of the federal work force will actually go away over the next four years.
If Trump’s people have any interest in actually cutting the number of people who work for the federal government, they can simply start with cutting the millions of federal contract and grant workers who actually outnumber the total number of federal employees. Without federal contracts and federal grants, those employees go away. Wringing our hands about how many civil service workers there are is mostly a distraction when the real problem is federal spending.
The spending has been the problem from the start. If they weren’t spending like drunken sailors, we wouldn’t have deficits. Jackson knew this and did what was required to pay the federal debt off. We could do it too, if we had the will to cut back on the money the federal government gives out like confetti.
Of course, we, the people, have found out we can vote ourselves money out of the treasury to no end. That is also part of the problem. We must also get all of those “contract workers” cut out of the budget.