Progress on the Federal Workforce

The size of the federal workforce, thanks to President Trump’s efforts to shrink the leviathan, is smaller than it has been since the 1960s. The dwindling number of Beltway bureaucrats is good news for taxpayers, but there’s a long way to go. After all, as of August, Uncle Sam has some 2.7 million employees on the payroll. That level was last seen in August 1966, just as LBJ was ramping up the scope of the federal government under the Great Society. Yet with Mr. Trump, and his budget chief Russell Vought, vowing to ramp up the efficiency, and scale back the size, of the bureaucracy, what’s to bar a drop in the number of federal employees to less than 2 million, the level last seen in July 1950? Better yet, modern technology would seem to make it possible to achieve a federal workforce of fewer than 1 million employees — a level last seen in America in April 1940. The decline in the federal workforce under Mr. Trump is being touted by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as a signal of a healthier economy. Since January 2025, when Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Bessent reports, the private sector has created a million new jobs. By contrast, the federal workforce has fallen by hundreds of thousands, freeing up resources — and expanding the labor pool — for private enterprise. The shrinking number of federales, these columns have asserted, marks “a signal of progress” for Mr. Trump’s ambitions to “clean up the Beltway bureaucracy,” even if there were some lingering questions about whether the “job cuts will pass muster at the Supreme Court.” Congress, under the rubric of civil service protections, has attempted to shield many federal bureaucrats from summary firing by the president, fueling the rise of the Deep State.On that legal front, federal employee unions are hailing a legal settlement last week with the White House over whether the president can lay off staff during government shutdowns. “The administration tried to turn a shutdown into an excuse to fire the public servants who kept this country running without a paycheck on payday, and we refused to let it stand,” says the head of American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley.That kind of rhetoric suggests the challenge ahead if Mr. Trump aims to keep tightening the belt of the taxpayer-funded federal workforce. The unionization of the bureaucracy makes it harder to bring the workforce into line with the needs of the nation — and fiscal reality. That is in part why FDR rejected the idea of public sector unions. “The process of collective bargaining,” FDR said, “cannot be transplanted into the public service.” Yet JFK in 1962 allowed, via executive order, federal employees to unionize. It’s no coincidence that the size of the federal bureaucracy expanded, and remained at elevated levels, in the years following JFK’s order — later codified by Congress. An entrenched unionized public workforce — at the local, state, and federal levels — poses an economic and political hurdle for those who aspire to achieve a healthy balance between the public and private sectors. The power of government unions was summed up by a former New York City union boss, Victor Gotbaum. He grasped that unionized public employees “have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.” It makes sense, then, that Mr. Trump’s ambitions to curb the power of the Deep State are intertwined with his efforts to rein in the power of public employee unions. Mr. Trump’s progress could pave the way for more cutbacks in the federal workforce.

Progress on the Federal Workforce

Progress on the Federal Workforce

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