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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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Number of federal employees
1970: 2.8 million
2024: 3.0 million
US Population
1970: 203 million
2024: 340 million
All they do is lie. Federal employees make life better for all, and all they've ever seen is shrinking resources and more workload.
Fuck Republicans and fuck everyone who votes for this shit.
American lives will get worse, and unfortunately the morons who vote for this are too fucking stupid to connect dots and realize how nice their lives are with what government does for them.
Just to look at that a different way, 1970 = 1 fed employee for every 72.5 citizens, 2024 = 1 fed employee for every 113.3 citizens. Add on top of that a budget that likely has not increased proportionally, and the strain gets even greater. So it sounds like our government is able to operate half as effectively as it was in the 70s, and they think that is too much.
They may not be more effective, how many consultants, contractors etc. are on the payroll since then?
A lot of time with these budget cuts some politician will come in and fire a bunch of people or a department, realize they actually do need that work done and then hire a contractor or a consultancy company to do the same work often for more . So the amount of people directly working for the federal government may be down but the amount of people who are working for the government through some middle man goes up to compensate.
Good point about contractors and civilian labor. That's a whole topic on its own. Some argue in favor of the flexibility and financial aspects of having private industry provide some services, and there is truth to that. It's much of the basis as the idea of "running the government like a business."
I personally feel many of the goals of the government have a hard time coexisting with something designed to function like a business. Some things need to be done that will never be profitable, and I think it is an important distinction that people are working directly for the citizenry, not for who holds their contract.
Nobody likes paying bills, aka taxes, even if they're receiving benefit from it, but the goal should often be to just ensure we are getting our money's worth of services more than if we should eliminate them or given control over to private parties.