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> Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Uh...excluding the very recent cuts this year under Trump; the number o

> Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Uh...excluding the very recent cuts this year under Trump; the number of civilians in the US Federal work force has gone up fairly steadily. [0] We had 23.592 million civilian employees in Jan 2025. 21.779M in Jan 2021, after being largely stagnant overall the previous 10 years. That's a net change in excess of 1.8M employees under Biden. I do find it interesting that it appears that employee count was flat, or even down under Obama, but until COVID, there was a steady increase under Trump v1. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT

DeathArrow 1y ago
And beside government institutions there are lots of institutions at state and city level.
- dahart 1y ago
  Institutions at the state and city level are called “government”, and those are included in the data parent linked to.
dahart 1y ago
> the number of civilians in the US Federal work force has gone up fairly steadily. The graph you provided is not Federal government, it’s all US government which includes state & city, and other types of government employees. It should be expected this grows with population size, and to get a sense of whether it’s really shrinking or growing, you should divide by population. But in any case, this chart doesn’t backup your claim that Federal government is growing. The link to the Federal government was just underneath that graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001. US Federal government absolute size peaked in 1991 and has gone down slightly since then. If you divide this one by population, the decline would be a bit stronger and more obvious. The ~10 year spikes are census workers. Notice we can see the peak in 1991 with or without the census spikes.

DeathArrow 1y ago

And beside government institutions there are lots of institutions at state and city level.

dahart 1y ago
Institutions at the state and city level are called “government”, and those are included in the data parent linked to.

dahart 1y ago

> the number of civilians in the US Federal work force has gone up fairly steadily. The graph you provided is not Federal government, it’s all US government which includes state & city, and other types of government employees. It should be expected this grows with population size, and to get a sense of whether it’s really shrinking or growing, you should divide by population. But in any case, this chart doesn’t backup your claim that Federal government is growing. The link to the Federal government was just underneath that graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001. US Federal government absolute size peaked in 1991 and has gone down slightly since then. If you divide this one by population, the decline would be a bit stronger and more obvious. The ~10 year spikes are census workers. Notice we can see the peak in 1991 with or without the census spikes.