[timr]

I'm not terrified. Just to put some perspective on this, per Pew [1], the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000. As of 2024, it was at 2.4M people. The federal workforce is dramatically bigger than it was even a few years ago [2].

Moreover, the vast majority of federal workers don't have anything to do with the kind of consumer-facing services that people think of when they think "government". More than half of all federal employees comprise: the Defense departments (Army, Navy, DoD, etc.), the Department of Homeland Security and the VA [3].

The federal workforce continues to get bigger and bigger, there's absolutely no practical incentive to stop it, and congress has abjectly failed to do its job in controlling the budget.

To be clear, this is not the right way to reduce the size of the federal government, but I'm not "terrified" of losing 100k employees in a government of this size. We need more cutting, not less.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...

[ndiddy]

If you zoom out (https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...), the size of the federal workforce has been at around 2.7-3 million people since the late 1960s, while the US population has gone from ~198 million in 1967 to ~343 million in 2025. We've gone from 14.39 federal employees per 1,000 people in 1967 to 8.78 federal employees per 1,000 people in 2024. Given that many of these employees do things like maintain infrastructure, regulate goods and services, and provide healthcare, you would expect the federal workforce to scale with the population.

> The federal workforce continues to get bigger and bigger, there's absolutely no practical incentive to stop it, and congress has abjectly failed to do its job in controlling the budget.

Most of the budget increase (~80-85% depending on whose projections you look at) comes from entitlements (social security, medicare/medicaid) and interest payments on the federal debt rather than any new spending. Of course interest payments are caused by past irresponsible spending, but it's hard to avoid debt if whenever the "party of fiscal responsibility" is in power, it does loud and flashy budget cuts that don't meaningfully reduce federal spending, followed by massive tax cuts to juice the economy. This is basically the equivalent of quitting your job and buying a ton of stuff on a credit card because you won $1000 on a scratch-off.

[timr]

> the size of the federal workforce has been at around 2.7-3 million people since the late 1960s, while the US population has gone from ~198 million in 1967 to ~343 million in 2025. We've gone from 14.39 federal employees per 1,000 people in 1967 to 8.78 federal employees per 1,000 people in 2024.

Again, so what? The entire premise that government should scale with population is questionable. These comparisons with US population are facile.

Again, most of the employees are with Defense, VA and Homeland Security, none of which "should" scale with US population. I could go down the list and identify many other areas that likewise do not obviously scale with population (e.g. Agriculture, Interior, State, NASA, etc.) but this entire line of argument is pedantic. It's obvious to anyone who has dealt with the government that it is a bloated bureaucracy.

We completely agree that the budget problem is, at root, entitlements, but that doesn't mean that the government workforce is anywhere near an optimal level. I remain unterrified of a cut to 100,000 workers.

[AnnikaL]

Why shouldn't Agriculture scale with population? Presumably a larger population involves more food being sold in the US (and grown in the US if the share of exports/imports remains the same).

[grumbelbart]

> the federal workforce excluding the postal service (which has actually shrunk, as a semi-private employer) has grown by about 1% per year since 2000

That's less than it seems though, given that the US population has grown with over 0.7% per year for most of those years.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

[timr]

> That's less than it seems though, given that the US population has grown with over 0.7% per year for most of those years.

So what? Why does government have to grow proportionally with the size of the population? This is not a given in any other organization.

[SR2Z]

You generally expect the size of an organization to scale with the scope of its activities, especially if its activities include "healthcare" and "building roads."

[timr]

"Scope of activities", maybe, but there's no inherent reason that has to be equal the rate of growth in the population. You'd hope that government becomes more efficient over time.

Private organizations have profit constraints, and they're constantly striving to become more efficient, cut what doesn't work, and so on. Government has no such constraint.

[ryandrake]

To compare, Walmart employs over 2M workers, and as efficient as they are, they still need to scale with the size of their business scope. Whether it's a linear scale or a log scale, they need more and more people as they do more and more.

The fact that the same order of magnitude number of people can administer an entire country as the number of people that it takes to administer a bunch of stores is actually remarkable.

[SR2Z]

The government has become more efficient over time and its size as a percentage of the population has reduced as the population has grown.

Government does have a constraint like that - it has to remain solvent. A government as powerful as the United States has many tricks it can use to do that, but at some point even it cannot do anything it wants.

[throw0101c]

> Why does government have to grow proportionally with the size of the population?

It does not, and did not:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001

[timr]

I'm responding to the parent's implicit assertion that the government should somehow naturally grow with the size of the population.

Arguing that it historically has not done so only makes my point. Nor is it an argument that government should not be smaller today.

[nullocator]

Why do we need more cutting? Why does the size of the federal government need to decrease? Please list the ways in which I and my community will benefit from a federal government with less personnel.