Here’s a timeline chart
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-federal-government/
Aside from immediately after FDR the federal government has been fairly steady at 3 million personnel. FDR tripled federal employees and its stuck like glue since.
What’s also interesting is the amount of DoD civilian employees has not changed since at least 1980 at around 800k employees, at the same time military personnel has dropped 39% in that same time period.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-military-a-demographic-overview/
I can’t imagine anything other than set government bloat that has made a consistent need for 3 million personnel.
The real question is what are they as a percentage of the population? Just the number 3 million sounds like a lot, but it was considerably worse in 1945 when the US population was only 133M compared to the population now of 340M.
That's 0.88% of the population currently employed by the feds, and looking at that chart it's not terribly far off of the 0.71% in 1940, prior to the massive expansion, which was probably due to WWII. There's a valid argument that the government is too big, but there isn't one that it's grown since World War II. We're basically back to pre-war per capita staffing levels.
Oh, and WTF is almost 1/3 of the federal workforce doing in DoD? It's even more if you include the VA.
Technology should have obsoleted a lot of those positions due to increased efficiency. I don't think fed size needs to increase linearly with population size, even without technological advancements.
True, a guy with an Excel spreadsheet can probably do the jobs of 4-5 workers from the 1940s just by sheer calculation speed. Data tables with hundreds of thousands of entries are crunched in a few seconds max.
A lot of obsolete positions probably won't go away; unless DOGE goes after them at least. I've heard stories of people printing out spreadsheets or Word documents, then scanning them back in from the same device, then putting it into a PDF or embedding it into Excel and sending it to their boss. And their boss is a geriatric so they think it's a normal, reasonable process.
It's a lot easier to pretend to be busy when you have to and use the scanner all the time, looking important with a stack of papers walking around.
However, that also would be counterbalanced by the increase in government roles. For instance, there were zero federal employees managing airport security in 1940 vs. the 58K working for TSA today. Now multiply that by all the other new programs we have. Which isn't to say I agree with the government doing these things, but simply an explanation for why technology wouldn't decrease the size of the workforce.
My point being that it's popular to point at the number of federal employees and say "look at all those lazy assholes doing nothing and sucking off the government teet", but the reality is that we have roughly the same percentage of people in the federal government doing a great many more things than their counterparts in 1940. Even more so when you consider that the Defense Department has absolutely grown, so proportionally the other agencies have shrunk but have more things to do than ever.
The size of the federal workforce is ultimately a red herring. The question should really be: "what are the things the federal government is doing that are unlawful, or we just don't want them to do?". If you eliminate those functions, the employees doing them will be eliminated as well.
None of them are necessary.
That’s where the fun of NGOs comes in, the forced expansion of administration in the local schools/government/ etc. they can always say “only 3 million” while we’re paying millions more to take government money and push the government’s agenda. Beast with a thousand heads and a thousand more subsidiaries.
Once again
FDR was a Democratic Socialist who briefly turned the US into a Democratic Socialist state.
The spending of government money was never supposed to really be past 10% even in war time.
The size of the total US military prior to WW2 was 400,000 active troops in all branches
You sure? I believed it was much smaller than that. Like less than 100k.
I'm pretty sure that might have been the US Army. I'm pretty sure that total Active Duty military personelle in all branches in 1940 was 400k.
It's the same story everywhere. More and more resources are spent on administration and management, to our great benefit of course.
Dod civ includes (I believe) r&d positions, which is where a lot of the work has shifted to. Eg machine learning, new weapons, crypto, etc.
Still probably too many, but the amount of soldiers coming in or leaving isn't exactly 1:1 with background personal. I want to say the last Stat I saw was for each front line combatant (I think this was across all branches, so fighter pilots, front line soldiers in the army/marines, etc) they had 17 people for logistics, maintenance, etc.
Is that number too high? Probably.
My squadron had around 30 helicopters. It was said that 1 hr of flight was 10 hrs of maintenance and was ideal conditions not Vietnam era machines. Thats also just scheduled maintenance. Which we had specials which were 7/14/28/56/91/364 day, you had phase inspections which were done after a certain number of flight hours. Those usually required to break the helicopters down and replace a lot of components. Added to that you had unscheduled maintenance which was the bulk of our work and could range from something simple like a component stopped working to intermittent in flight after 30 flying which is hard to duplicate on the ground. Also all aircraft need to fly at least once every 30 days or it requires more work and a functional check flight before it can be flown again. One last thing is that every down aircraft counts against our unit readiness which then is a negative against the CO who is looking to make full bird. In Iraq in 03 we flew 3000 hrs in 1 month. It was a lot of work to get those birds back up including a massive customs inspection to make sure there was not biological contaminants. So lots of pulling every panel and cleaning out dirt and debris… on a ship with limited water. All of that adds up given our shop had about 30-35 people.
There is a reason the bulk of the military is logistics and support. It’s not the 1800s where you just need a bunch of bodies to shoot in a line.
Oh, I understand. I'm just not sure we need 17 people for every one front line guy. I think we could probably cut that to 16 or 15, if we had better procurement and less bullshit
In addition to r&d, I've read that a lot of support positions that used to be staffed by enlisted have changed into DOD civilian jobs.
Could be. I hear bits, but I don't follow it closely. Too many things, not enough time in the day.