Justin Fox, Columnist

Think Government Is Big? You Shoulda Seen It in 1984

There are fewer employees, and spending as a share of the economy is down.

February 4, 2019 at 5:00 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Illustration: George Wylesol for Bloomberg Businessweek

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This article is part of the February 11, 2019 issue of businessweek.

The federal government had 2.8 million civilian employees in January. That number includes the 800,000 or so people who weren’t getting paid because of the partial government shutdown, plus 606,900 postal workers. It doesn’t include 1.3 million active-duty military or those employed via government contracts and grants, estimated to be 5.2 million full-time-equivalent positions in 2017 by Paul Light of the NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

That adds up to about 9.3 million people who get their paychecks—when they get them—directly or indirectly from the federal government. That sounds like a lot, but it represents a much smaller share of the U.S. workforce than it used to. The chart below shows only civilian federal workers, but Light’s estimates, which go back to 1984, don’t change the overall trajectory other than to show a big rise in contract employment during the 2000s that has since mostly reversed. In 1984 there were almost 9.8 million federal workers of all stripes.