An interesting thing I read -- which unfortunately I can't find the link to now, will try to add it -- is that back in the '60s the US government had 2.5 M empl

An interesting thing I read -- which unfortunately I can't find the link to now, will try to add it -- is that back in the '60s the US government had 2.5 M employees with a budget of ~$600B in today's dollars. Today's budget is 10x that, with about the same number of employees. The gov spending problem is not in how many people it employs, which is actually quite efficient all things considered (though certainly there is room to streamline and increase efficiency, and I'm all for that), but how many contracts it farms out to _private entities_ (95% of its expenses). The fact that the person wanting to purge gov expenses by cutting employees while receiving Billions in gov contracts is ... well, something you might expect to see in Russia, or Nigeria.