I almost had the Emergency Blogging System do this post because the news is that dire. The House Budget Republicans compared and contrasted the growth of the federal payrolls to the shrinkage of the private-sector payrolls. I’ll give you the meat of the piece (the emphasis is in the original):
While private-sector employment has continued declining, government has expanded. Federal jobs have increased by 43,000 since the start of the year, 25,000 of which followed enactment of the ARRA. But this figure vastly understates the government’s employment growth, because it includes the workforce reduction at the Postal Service. If the USPS is excluded, Federal employment has increased by more than 65,000.
By next year, Federal employment will have risen by 15.6 percent since 2006, the period of Democratic control of Congress – an increase of about 286,000 full-time equivalents [FTEs], according to administration figures (see Table 1 and Table 2 in the appendix of this document). The growth of non-defense agencies has been larger, at 20.5 percent. Even if the Defense and Commerce Departments are excluded – the latter to account for the large force of temporary hires for next year’s census – Federal civilian employment will have expanded by nearly 12 percent since 2006. The vast majority of this growth – 102,800 positions – will occur in 2009 and 2010; and this does not include the additional Federal employees who will be needed as a result of cap-and-trade legislation, the planned government takeover of health care, financial regulation, and other components of the President’s agenda.
In other words, while the economy has been shrinking, the government has expanded in absolute terms. Since the beginning of the recession, the economy has lost 7 million jobs, while the Federal Government has added 75,000 jobs.
A bonus item from the “Change in Civilian Federal Employment” table on the last page – the only agencies (other than the USPS) that will see a decrease in employment rolls in 2009-2010 will be the Department of Agriculture (800 FTEs, or 0.8% of the workforce) and the Small Business Administration (also 800 FTEs, but 20% of the workforce). Somehow I don’t think that’s a coincidence given Obama’s hostility toward farmers and small business owners.
