Federal Employees

[Bubba]

Given the projections that I've seen from a few researchers, there's an expectation that we'll have an unemployment rate of around 6 to 8% by August. How that'll work is beyond me, but the research is compelling. In any case, I'm sure that there'll be a discussion if we need to remove federal employees because we have too many people. I thought this was an interesting figure:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FoAeiRpXoAE ... me=900x900

Basically, this shows that Federal unemployment (in numbers) hasn't moved since the early 1970s...when we had a full blown war going on. Just to give you an idea:

1970 we had 200,000,000 US citizens
2023 we have 340,000,000 US citizens

For numbers sake, we have about 3 million Federal employees (we have a tad bit less than the early 1970s). That would give us the following numbers:

1970s we had 0.015 federal employee per American citizen
2023 we have 0.0088 federal employees per American citizen

Say what you want, but I think we've become more efficient...quite a bit more...

Having said that, I'm sure there could be changes made, but I think we're doing pretty well at present.

Source https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/U ... population

P.S. Macrotrends has tons of interesting information such as 100 years of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq, inflation and much more. Enjoy!

[evilanne]

Interesting but I'm not sure you can make any conclusions based on the total number of Federal employees because there are many functions that have been contracted out.
With A-76 & contracting out it has been a shell game with the number of employees over the years.

Just look at TSP (which didn't come into existence until the mid 80's). It's a great program but with the change in contractors, I certainly wouldn't say it is more efficient especially with this last change in contractors. According to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_R ... ment_Board they have roughly 270 employees. How many FTEs does the contractor have? The new contractor certainly was not prepared with an adequate number of employees for the transition.