Sunday, April 19, 2015

Historical Federal Workforce


Googling payroll of the Federal government turned up a link to a table of Total Government Employment Since 1962 from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Shows Executive branch civilians, Uniformed military personnel, Legislative and Judicial branch personnel, and a Totals column.

That Google search also turned up this hit


which I didn't bother to click. The era of big government has returned with a vengeance, in the form of the largest federal work force in modern history, it says. I had already seen the table of Federal employment numbers: 5.4 million employees in 1962, 4.2 million in 2013.

So I grabbed the Federal employment numbers and stuck 'em in a spreadsheet. Then I went to FRED and got the numbers for Total US Population, and stuck that in there too. Then I made a graph of Total Federal Employment as a percent of Total US Population:

Graph #1: Federal Employment, Trending Down since before the VietNam War, is now below 1.5%

1 comment:

netbacker said...

Is there a way to get stats on Federal contractors being employed to replace federal workers? If you look at big Federal Orgs like NSA, TSA and even the military, many of those employed are private contractors.