"Spending" appears to be debt etc. not federal workers.
Hold on a sec
In those 40 years of explosive population, spending and debt growth, the size of the federal workforce – this is actually kind of shocking – has stayed pretty much the same, confounding the popular presumption that the number of federal workers must have skyrocketed with federal spending.
“The number of federal employees have skyrocketed over the past four years, especially the number that are working from home and not even coming to work,” the House Oversight Committee chairman, Rep. James Comer, told CNN’s Pamela Brown on Thursday, expressing that view.
In fact, the number of full-time federal workers has been relatively static, within a few hundred thousand civilians, since the 1960s.
Even a drawdown of the size of the military and Pentagon during the George H.W. Bush administration and of the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands during the Clinton administration did not markedly change the size of the federal workforce, which has hovered within a few hundred thousand of 3 million workers for decades.
In some agencies that Republicans have said they want to shutter, there are relatively few employees – such as the smallest Cabinet-level agency, the Department of Education. It employs about 4,400 employees, according to OPM. The largest federal agencies, like Veterans Affairs and the Pentagon, employ hundreds of thousands of workers.
...She told me it’s important not to view the US government as one monolithic thing, but rather as “essentially a giant holding company.”
“It’s doing everything from training pilots to fly advanced aircraft to tracking down cryptosporidium in your hamburger meat to cutting checks for retired people,” she said.
Firing only the most recent hires, as may be suggested by Musk and Ramaswamy, would have the added impact of scaring away future hires, as well as displacing people hired for specific roles, such as to implement the bipartisan infrastructure law passed during the Biden administration.
But Comer said people hired for specific roles and programs funded once have a tendency to stick around.
“The problem now in government, it’s been the problem for decades … is that you create a government program or create a government agency, it never goes away, even when it becomes obsolete or inefficient,” Comer told Brown on CNN.
....the intersecting system of companies and local officials clamoring for federal dollars represents their own form of a deep state....
The citizens of the real deep state stoke nonstop federal deficit spending on everything from Medicare to missiles. They steer funding through intentionally maze-like federal programs. They use federal tax dollars to privately employ millions of people. They are behind the ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ that everyone typically blames on ‘bureaucrats’ who are mostly mere grant and contract managers in a workforce that has not grown since the 1960s.
....Comer said Musk and Ramaswamy, who will take a year and a half to make recommendations, could recommend trying to claw back unspent funds.
“There has been some pressure over years to not increase head count, and that usually leads to greater contracting,” Morrissey said, although there’s evidence that contractors frequently end up costing the government more money.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/14/politics ... index.html
