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The US grew a lot in the past 40 years.
The US population expanded by about 100 million people
One of them was Vivek Ramaswamy, who was born in 1985 and is one of two wealthy men tasked by President-elect Donald Trump with shrinking the size of the federal government.
Government spending skyrocketed
The US spent around $900 billion in 1984 ($2.7 trillion in 2024 dollars), compared with more than $7 trillion in 2024. Some of that money goes via contracts to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who is working with Ramaswamy on the Department of Government Efficiency, a new nongovernmental commission.
The national debt has more than exploded
It went from less than $1.6 trillion in 1984 ($4.8 trillion in 2024 dollars) to more than $35.5 trillion today, which should concern every American and is plenty of reason to make any effort to control federal spending a serious and bipartisan push.
Cut federal workers?
The current effort, run by Ramaswamy and Musk, has made a show of eyeing the size of the federal workforce. One percolating idea, according to CNN’s reporting, is that they could recommend firing every federal worker hired in the last year.
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.
A closer look at available data shows a variation of a few hundred thousand workers – which seems large but is not a grand expansion of the federal workforce.
Close to 3 million federal civilian workers for decades
There were about 2.96 million civilians, including postal workers, getting full-time paychecks from the federal government at the end of 1984, before Ramaswamy was born, and there are a hair over 3 million working for the federal government today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The official tally from the Office of Personnel Management is a smidge lower, at about 2.87 million, including postal workers.
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.
Hundreds of thousands in, hundreds of thousands out every year
Of people who come into and go out of the federal workforce each year, there were hundreds of thousands of civilian employees (not counting postal workers) – about 250,000 to just over 300,000 – newly hired by the federal government in each of the past three years. Those are largely offset by the hundreds of thousands of civilian employees who leave the civil service each year.
Peter Morrissey is the senior director of talent and strategy at The Volcker Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for improvements to public service and commissioned a 2017 study to determine the true size of government.
“When you think about the long sweep of it, the number of public servants – people with a .gov email who work for the federal government – has been basically static as the responsibility sets have grown and grown and grown and grown and grown,” he told me. “They serve more people, and they do more stuff.”
Rising costs of social programs like Social Security and Medicare, along with rising costs of material goods, have helped drive government spending.
“People are an absolutely essential part, but in terms of the cost structure, are a comparatively small part,” he said.
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.
Most federal workers are not in the DC area
Another thing to know about the federal workforce is that while its largest concentration is in the Washington, DC, metro area, the vast majority, 80%, is spread around the country in every state, but with concentrations in California, Texas, Colorado, Alabama and other states.
Concentrating on improving government might not mean shrinking it, according to Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, which advocates for smarter government.
“What we keep trying to pivot the conversation to is say, let’s make sure we’re fixing government in a way that doesn’t hurt service delivery and doesn’t hurt the American public in terms of getting the things from agencies that they depend on,” she said.
‘Giant holding company’
The government does indeed do many things. Elaine Kamarck is founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, and she helped spearhead an effort to reduce the size of government during the Clinton administration.
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.
Once funded, agencies never go away
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 real deep state
On the one hand, the use of contractors and grant employees has risen as those workers, who don’t get a paycheck directly from the government but still do government work, have shouldered more of the burden.
John DiIulio, who worked in both the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, wrote recently that the intersecting system of companies and local officials clamoring for federal dollars represents their own form of a deep state, and deconstructing it will be, he wrote, way harder than rocket science. Here’s an excerpt of what DiIulio wrote:
Musk, who has built companies on government contracts and subsidies, may be able to offer some insight into how the system works.
How many people actually work for the government, including contractors?
That review of “The True Size of Government” conducted for The Volcker Alliance by researcher Paul Light determined that in 1984, there were more than 6.9 million people working as civilians for the federal government when including contractors and grant employees. Add in the military and postal workers and the figure jumped to 9.8 million.
Intervening years saw a drawdown in the military after the Cold War and then a buildup during the Global War on terror. The study concluded with data from 2015, when there was a total of 9.1 million workers, or 7.3 million without the military or postal service.
Certainly the figure of contract and grant employees must have grown along with major spending bills in the past few years – with the infrastructure bill, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act, which earmarked billions to transition the US to a greener economy. 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.
Everyone I talked to for this story agrees there is plenty of room for bipartisanship in a government efficiency effort to modernize the workforce and improve the way the federal government functions. Both Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Musk have talked about the need to control Pentagon spending, for instance. One complication for Musk will be that his firm SpaceX, in particular, is the recipient of billions in contracts.
