The federal government is the smallest it’s been since 1966.
The country is fine.
That’s the news in the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. About 2.7 million civilian federal workers. Down from roughly 3 million when President Trump took office.
More than 300,000 jobs, gone. About 11% of the whole.
Most of it happened in year one. Then the number held.
Think about 1966. LBJ was building the Great Society. Washington was learning to answer every problem with a new office. The country had fewer than 200 million people then. Now it has more than 330 million.
Per citizen, today’s federal workforce is leaner than it was when the Beatles were still touring.
Remember the warnings? Checks wouldn’t arrive. Planes wouldn’t fly. The machinery would seize.
The checks arrived. The planes flew.
Some of it hurt. People lost jobs, and families had to start over. That’s real, and it deserves to be said.
But the republic didn’t need the 300,001st federal employee.
Now some history.
Reagan, the hero of small government, cut about 106,000 jobs in his first year and a half. That’s 3.6%.
Clinton and Gore cut 327,000. Good for them. It took six years.
This took about eighteen months.
The cuts hit where Washington had wandered furthest. USAID was nearly emptied. Education shrank. So did Agriculture and HUD.
The direction is clear. Washington does less, and states, towns, and citizens do more.
Here’s the bigger point. Bureaucracies don’t grow because voters ask them to. They grow because nobody stops them.
Every president promises discipline. The payroll creeps up anyway.
At the Biden-era hiring pace, there would be about 386,000 more federal workers today.
This time, somebody stopped it.
