Largest
Ever Federal Government Hits 2.15 Million Employees
By Stephen Dinan
Tuesday,
February 2, 2010
The era of big government
has returned with a vengeance, in the form of the largest federal work force in
modern history.
The Obama administration
says the government will grow to 2.15 million employees this year, topping 2
million for the first time since President Clinton declared that "the era
of big government is over" and joined forces with a Republican-led
Congress in the 1990s to pare back the federal work force.
Most of the increases are on
the civilian side, which will grow by 153,000 workers, to 1.43 million people,
in fiscal 2010.
The expansion could provide
more ammunition to those arguing that the government is trying to do too much
under President Obama.
"I'm shocked that the
'tea party' hasn't focused on it yet, and the Obama administration only has a
thin sliver of time to deal more directly with it, I believe," said Paul
C. Light, who studies the federal bureaucracy as a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution and a professor at New York University. "When you
talk about big government, you're talking about a big employer."
The new figures are
contained in the budget that Mr. Obama sent Monday to Congress.
Mr. Obama says the civilian
work force will drop by 80,000 next year, mostly because of a reduction in
From 1981 through 2008, the
civilian work force remained at about 1.1 million to 1.2 million, with a low of
1.07 million in 1986 and a high of more than 1.2 million in 1993 and in 2008.
In 2009, the number jumped to 1.28 million.
Including both
the civilian and defense sectors, the federal government will employ
2.15 million people in 2010 and 2.11 million in 2011, excluding Postal Service
workers.
The administration says 79
percent of the increases in recent years are from departments related to the
war on terrorism: Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, State and Veterans
Affairs.