Has any president or congress ever shrunk the size of government? Other than shrinking the military after a war, which we seemed to have stopped doing after WWII, has it ever happened in American history?
“The Federal Government Now Employs the Fewest People Since 1966”. (I don’t want to endorse a WSJ blog; this was just one of several Google hits for “how many federal employees?”
Some of the reduction in federal employment is due to right-wing pushing for out-sourcing, with the incorrect justification that it will reduce costs.
Eventually OP may need to clarify whether by “government” he means Federal or Federal+State+Local.
Very big items in the Federal budget are Social Security and Interest on Debt. Anti-government types are eager to include those big money items when claiming “government is too large” though the connection doesn’t make sense.
Another big item that’s classified as “Discretionary Non-military” is Veterans’ Benefits.
Can you be more specific about what ‘size of government’ means?
Total Government Employment Since 1962. It goes up and down all the time.
Military employment is half the size it was in the 1960s and has been fairly steady for the past 20 years.
To pick a year at random, in 1960, the U.S. population was 180 million. Now it is 319 million. Perhaps there should be 77% more government employees now than then. The CPI has increased by a factor of 8 since 1960. Perhaps the budget “should” be about 14 times as large now as it was in 1960. Things like Medicare were not available then.
The population is always going up and we’ve always had some inflation. Government should probably always be increasing even if no new services are provided.
Not as long as there are political points to be made.
Seriously: This isn’t going to be answered. It’s going to be debated. It’s going to be yelled about. The current cites focus on the number of people employed, but that’s obviously not the only way to measure this. Perhaps it should be total government budget. Or government budget adjusted for inflation (which is a topic in and of itself). Or government budget as a fraction of GDP.
And then there are contractors, and people who are only employed because of the government (to wit: everyone who lives and works in Washington, DC), and their dependents, and so on.
So the GQ answer is “Ask a better question”; or, “Walking Define Line Between GQ and GD”.
The number of federal employees (FTE - full time equivalent) has fluctuated around two million (give or take a few hundred thousand) since Roosevelt was in office in the 1940s. In the same period (1940-2010), the US population has increased from 132 million to 310 million, and the federal budget has increased from $117 billion to $3.43 trillion.
As Tripolar mentioned, you need to choose a definition for “size of government”.
For example, if you choose the definition to be “Federal Net Outlays”, then on a real (inflation-adjusted) basis, the significant year-over-year decreases that have occurred in the past century in the US:
- 1944 to 1948, reduction in national defense
- 2009 to present, reductions in commerce stimulus/programs, reductions in national defense
I did find this chart of per-capita Federal spending by year, but I can’t vouch for it’s accuracy (I’d have to go verify). But, if you want to use per-capita Federal spending as the measure, it looks like there’s been a lot of fluctation up and down there.
I’ll just note that in addition to the other major periods mentioned already in this thread, there was a demobilization after the Korean War.