The True Size of the Federal Workforce

The folks at the online news publication Remapping Debate have come up with an interesting infographic around the question of whether the federal workforce is in a state of constant expansion.

They compared federal civilian employment for each year after the end of World War II with the population for the United States, and determined that the highest federal worker-to-civilian-population ratio was in 1978, when there were 1.2 million feds in a country with more than 222 million people.

By 2010, there were 1.36 million federal employees. That's an increase in absolute terms, but the U.S. population went up at an even higher rate, to more than 309 million. If the 1978 employment-to-population ratio had been maintained, the federal workforce would have topped 1.7 million employees last year.

Of course, one would expect that with higher productivity and more efficient application of technology to improve operations, the bureaucracy would be able to do more with fewer employees as time marches on. But government rarely gets credit for being more productive or efficient.