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Americans LOVE public programs and HATE to pay for them: How big should Government be? [1]

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Date: 2025-03-15

Here is the Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF): Americans LOVE the public programs that help make their lives better; and Americans HATE to pay for them.

Polls and studies have shown this to be true. But it doesn’t take a scientific analysis to prove it. Talk to your neighbors, watch a TikTok thing, listen to a podcast and you will hear this. You may even feel this way yourself.

Underneath this unrealistic sentiment is that without society pooling collective funds to spread the cost amongst all of us, it would be impossible to have passable roads, electricity or telecommunications in rural areas, rescue and rebuilding after natural disasters, or protection of the clean air and water that we all take for granted. That’s where the costs come in. Not only do the programs themselves have to be funded, there has to be an infrastructure to collect the funds and then to ensure that the funds are protected from embezzlement and then spent fairly and in the manner the taxpayers anticipated. After all, whose money is it? The Government IS the people. The MONEY BELONGS to THE PEOPLE.

How many people should it take to operate the Government? How many labor hours? What are the boundaries on what the Government should regulate? What services should it provide? How much of the work should be performed by civilian employees and how much by hired contractor employees?

These questions have been debated for decades. They have been studied and reported on by think tanks, journalists, agencies within the Government, independent agencies and others. Out of the data and the analyses of the data, there are a few facts worth mentioning.

The Volcker Alliance, in its report on the True Size of Government (September 29, 2017), noted that the country is just about evenly divided in opinions about whether the Government should do more or do less, should be bigger or should be smaller.

How big has the Government actually been in the last 35 to 40 years? Pew Research’s Drew Desilver reported some statistics in a piece published on January 7, 2025. In November 2024, excluding the U.S. Postal Service, there were about 2.4 million civilian employees (also known as civil service employees). In March 2024, FedScope, part of the Office of Personnel Management, reported about 2.4 million civilians. That number does not include Congressional staffers, intelligence agency employees or Presidential employees. [As an aside, each Congressional Representative is entitled to have 18 staffers.]. In November 2000, the civilian headcount was 1.8 million. Pew Research reports that about half of civilian workers earn between $50,000 and $110,000 per year.

On March 5, 2025, USA Today, citing a report from the Brookings Institute, reported that civilian employees account for about 6 percent of spending. In 1984 the federal workforce was about 2.1 million employees. In 2023, the federal workforce also about 2.1 million employees. However, between 1980 and 2010, the U.S. population grew by more than one-third: from 227 million to 307 million.

For years, the refrain from the leadership to Government employees was to “do more with less.” (I know because I was a civilian employee for over 30 years in both civilian and military agencies). That meant providing the same level of service to the public but with fewer resources. Less staff, continually more antiquated technological resources, less training, and so on.

Along the way, federal workplaces were being filled with contractor employees. The work of the Government was being shifted to business. The good and bad, pros and cons, potential nefarious motivations for this shift has been cussed and discussed over time. The Volcker report notes that, at least since the 1950s, when presidents talk of the size of Government, they fail to address the contractors and grantees that are also being paid to conduct the work of Government. As the report notes, in his first round in the Oval Office, Donald Trump “ignored the true size of the blended workforce during the 2016 campaign when he promised to freeze federal hiring as part of an attack on the “ ‘corruption and special interest collusion in Washington.’ ” Further, “he never mentioned the contract or grant workforce as part of his pledge to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington.”

For sure, we know that civilian employees take an oath, when they are hired, to protect the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. There is a commitment to be a good steward of the taxpayers’ dollars. In contrast we also know that contractor employees are loyal to their employers who pay them. Of those companies, the large businesses are loyal to the investors and shareholders. The loyalty is not to stewardship of the public purse.

The size of the contractor workforce is more volatile than the civilian employee force; and the reporting of the numbers of contractors is not as transparent as the on the civil service. However, the Volcker Alliance reports that there were just under 5.3 million contractors and grantees in 2015, and just over 2 million civil service employees.

In its 2011 report, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) stated that when you add overhead and other burdens to contractor labor rates, contractor labor costs about twice as much civilian labor. Studies conducted by the Congressional Research Service and General Accountability Office (formerly known as the General Accounting Office) have resulted in similar conclusions regarding the cost comparisons between contractor and civilian labor forces.

The work of the Government is to provide services to the public that improve our society and help us in the pursuits of life, liberty and happiness. While there may be differences in what that means to an individual, there are commonalities and those are what is the Government’s job to provide. Government is not a business. It is a public trust. And, by its nature, there will be inefficiencies in overseeing that public trust to ensure fairness and equality.

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