Federal Work Force

This article published in the Washington Post, seems to be in contradiction to Sen Coburn's remarks on the Senate floor in December.

While this reporter may be reporting the facts as fed to him by the Obama regime, their numbers do not tell the full story of how big, big government is getting. Omitted are the 660,000 Department of Defense workers and the 755,000 Postal workers.

Coburn stated the Federal work force is 3,000,000. This article would lead you to believe it's 1,430,000 civilian workers. The Dept of Defense workers are civilian as well, the 660,000 doesn't include any military personnel. If you add the 80,000 census workers now we have 2,170,000 add in the postal workers 755,000 and this number is 2,925,000. Again Coburn stated the average cost (salary+benefits) for a federal worker is $113,000 a year That's $330.5 Billion just in payroll. We should all be screaming about his issue, when our nation is awash in deficits. Taxing the rich, which will be passed on to the not rich, is no answer. Cutting costs is. Saul Alinsky teachings are being enacted, while a smiling alligator named Obama watches his popularity numbers rise, among the stupid and duplicitous.

The State work force is 19,000,000 people. How much money are the states going to ask of the federal government for their budget bailouts in 2010, 2011 and beyond?

The time to take an axe to the government size is now, not 2020.

Steve
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Washington Post
By Stephen Dinan

The era of big government has returned with a vengeance, in the form of the largest federal work force in modern history.

The Obama administration says the government will grow to 2.15 million employees this year, topping 2 million for the first time since President Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over" and joined forces with a Republican-led Congress in the 1990s to pare back the federal work force.

Most of the increases are on the civilian side, which will grow by 153,000 workers, to 1.43 million people, in fiscal 2010.

The expansion could provide more ammunition to those arguing that the government is trying to do too much under President Obama.

"I'm shocked that the 'tea party' hasn't focused on it yet, and the Obama administration only has a thin sliver of time to deal more directly with it, I believe," said Paul C. Light, who studies the federal bureaucracy as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at New York University. "When you talk about big government, you're talking about a big employer."

The new figures are contained in the budget that Mr. Obama sent Monday to Congress.

Mr. Obama says the civilian work force will drop by 80,000 next year, mostly because of a reduction in U.S. census workers added in 2010 but then dropped in 2011 after the national population count is finished. That still leaves 1.35 million civilian federal employees on the payroll in 2011.

From 1981 through 2008, the civilian work force remained at about 1.1 million to 1.2 million, with a low of 1.07 million in 1986 and a high of more than 1.2 million in 1993 and in 2008. In 2009, the number jumped to 1.28 million.

Including both the civilian and defense sectors, the federal government will employ 2.15 million people in 2010 and 2.11 million in 2011, excluding Postal Service workers.

The administration says 79 percent of the increases in recent years are from departments related to the war on terrorism: Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, State and Veterans Affairs.