[Stosh]

Active duty military personnel, 1980: about 2 million.

Active duty military personnel, 2011: about 1.5 million.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004598.html

So when you say the fed work-force has been cut substantially, much of that has been military - one of the few constitutional responsibilities the feds actually have.

As stated in your original post, that’s not made clear - the implication you’ve presented is that we’ve already been winnowing the bureaucracy.

There are two separate issues, and we should be careful not to conflate them: the military and the border patrol (actual federal responsibilities) don’t need further reductions. When folks in this thread are applauding purported resignations of federal employees, they’re not applauding military personnel who’ve decided not to re-up. And if someone’s trying to minimize the importance of cleaning out the bureaucracy by stating that federal positions have been been decreasing, the only portion of that decrease that most of us care about is that involving those bureaucrats. Lower numbers of soldiers - about a half-million fewer since Reagan - is of no comfort as a rationalization in opposition to those striving for a goal of lower numbers of slugs in HEW, EPA, and the like.

[expat_panama]

the military and the border patrol (actual federal responsibilities) don’t need further reductions... ...decrease that most of us care about is that involving those bureaucrats.

Most folks (especially on these threads) feel that way and nobody seems to think about other fed outfits like foreign intel (spies), air traffic control, T-men tracking down counterfeiting, the Security & Exchange Commission policing financial transactions --and then if we want those guys and the military and the border guards paid then we have to say that maybe the OPM's OK too...

It goes on and on until we finally are forced to agree that it's not all fed employees in general that were bashing but rather specific programs like NPR, the Nat. Endowment for the Arts. etc.