Who Are These Federal Workers Trump Wants to Fire?
The civilian workforce has barely grown in recent decades, is scattered across the country and accounts for a small fraction of US spending.
The US government is an insurance company with an army.
Photographer: Jay Mallin/Bloomberg
Federal workers are uncomfortably in the spotlight, with President-elect Donald Trump threatening to strip civil-service protections from tens of thousands of them and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chairman of Trump’s planned “Department of Government Efficiency,” having suggested that cutting a million federal jobs within a year is a reasonable target.
As with anything coming out of Trumpworld, it’s hard to know what to take literally, what to take seriously and what to dismiss as totally implausible. What’s clear from an examination of where things stand now is that, while federal spending has grown sharply and regulation is arguably in need of correction, there is no such long-run trend in federal employment, and firing lots of federal workers would not in itself result in much savings or deregulation.