Posted on 06/06/2006 6:43:20 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
The May employment report, with a headline jobs-growth figure of 75,000, at best drew mixed reactions from Wall Street and the financial press. Deeper within the data, however, an important and positive development deserves to be noted: Total federal government employment under President George W. Bush continues to decline.
Since Bush took office in January 2001, government jobs have dropped by 51,000 — nearly 2 percent. That may not look like much, but it is a continuation of a trend that represents a small victory for fiscal conservatives and economic libertarians — those who support limited government and the philosophical principle of a smaller federal labor force.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, since its founding by Congress in 1884, has at times refined its methodology for measuring nonfarm employment. The most recent improvement occurred in 2003 when the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) replaced the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system. The federal employment time series “was revised slightly in scope and definition due to a change in source data and estimation methods.” The federal job decline now appears in both seasonally adjusted and non-seasonally adjusted BLS data.
The data show that total federal employment peaked under President George H.W. Bush at 3.4 million in May 1990. That number, as measured by the BLS, fell to 3 million by the time Bush the Elder left office. President Bill Clinton continued the trend while president, and is one of two Democrats (the other was Harry S. Truman) in the postwar era who presided over a decline in total federal employment. Government jobs also dropped under Republicans Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gerald R. Ford.
As of the latest jobs report, total federal employment under George W. Bush was 2.7 million in May 2006. That represents a loss of more than one in every five federal employees since 1990.
A few governors have also made sincere efforts to reduce government employment in their states. California state employment under Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for instance, has been flat. Non-seasonally adjusted data reveal that it was 475,600 in November 2003 and 474,800 in April 2006 — the most recent month for which data is available.
Unfortunately, the proverbial “gravy train with biscuit wheels” — as they say in the rural South — is still rolling down the road in other states. Growth in state government employment is a bipartisan phenomenon with Republican, as well as Democratic, governors presiding over bloated state labor forces that keep expanding. The policy decisions of governors have helped total state government employment to swell from 4.2 million in May 1990 to 5 million as of last month. Total local government employment increased from 10.8 million to 14.1 million in the same period.
Still, the biscuit wheels on the federal gravy train are smaller thanks to the policies of our three most recent presidents. If the states can get the message that less can be more when government jobs move to the private sector, a small but important trend will become a significantly positive event.
Indeed, when it comes to the relationship between less and more, less government always equals more freedom.
Does this count troop reductions from 1991 to 2000?
Do these figures account for all the additional TSA employees at airports?
Maybe for your list?
That was my thought.
Not only that, but look at all the government functions that have been outsourced to private companies. IMO you still have to look at federal spending as a percentage of GDP.
I just finished a contract with the Federal government, and if you think the job reductions have been impressive so far just watch the next 10 years. I would wager that fully 75 percent of the government employees I came in contact with were 50 or older. You are going to see waves of retirements in the next 10 years, and the government will have to rely on outsourcing firms to take up the slack.
And how are such companies paid? Tax dollars. I do agree there are greater efficiencies to outsourcing, but that does not change the fact that the government is still spending money to do those functions. So if you couple military reductions and outsourcing, it may seem that the government is shrinking, but it is not.
In the average year, only about 400 Federal employees are fired for cause. Read this figure sometime ago and was stunned.
Oh no doubt about it. The government is playing the same shell game that business does. They outsource functions, either laying off the staff or converting them to employees of the outsourcing company, and then can say, "See how large our headcount reductions were?" The government is already big into this, and it will only grow as their in-house workforce retires and isn't replaced.
Remember when Clinton cut the military and told the country (with a straight face) that he is cutting the size of government...!
Same here. A drop of 51M in fed workers since President Bush got elected may be nothing more than fed workers leaving the workforce for the private sector or retirement. 51M fewer federal jobs since 2001? No big deal here.
Not suprising. I worked for the DOD as a first job out of school and the most important thing for the lifers was reaching tenure so they could coast.
Yes, they do.
Anyone have the data for which jobs were lost amidst growth in some other areas of government?
Having worked for the Feds the last five years, I'd argue that's an overestimation. You have to be genuinely stupid to be fired for cause.
I do not consider Bush to be fiscally conservative. He's not the least fiscally conservative President we've had. I think he's better than Clinton was, and better than Gore or Kerry would have been.
He was the least bad of the choices we had in this particular aspect. I hope we do better in 08.
The US has not had a fiscally conservative President since Lyndon Johnson. We won't until the 2018 bankruptcy of Medicare.
It is far better to have these jobs outsourced to private companies then it is to have these jobs performed by goevernment employees. But you are right that spending is WAY TOO HIGH!
They do that so they can actually fire someone who does a bad job.
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