Since the 2010 elections, the federal workforce has frequently found itself at the center of the debate over government spending. The argument is often made that the number of federal workers has been growing unabated since President Obama came to office, resulting in a serious strain on the federal budget. As a result, members of both the House and Senate have recently introduced bills that call for a reduction in the federal workforce by 10% over 10 years through attrition (e.g., by allowing agencies to hire only one new employee for every three that retire).
Given the tremendous amount of attention directed to this issue, we wanted to look at what the data have to say. Specifically, this article addresses the following questions: (1) has the federal workforce expanded in the past 10+ years; (2) if so, has this expansion been equally distributed among all government agencies; and (3) moving away from a look at only the sheer numbers of federal workers, has the federal workforce grown as a percentage of the total civilian workforce?
In order to answer the first question, we turned to data from the Office of Personnel Management on the number of federal employees from 1998 to 2011. As the chart below shows, the number of federal employees has clearly been trending upward in recent years: from September 2007 to September 2011, the number of federal employees increased by 267,885, or 14.4%. While much of this expansion has taken place under President Obama, it began in the final year of the Bush presidency, with an increase from September 2007 to September 2008 of 4.1%.
Source: FedScope, Office of Personnel Management (http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/employment.asp)
But has this growth in staffing been equally distributed among all federal agencies? The following chart looks at the trends in cabinet-level staffing from September 1998 to September 2011, separated by agency:
Source: FedScope, Office of Personnel Management (http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/employment.asp)
By looking closer at the data, a number of things jump out. First, the Department of Defense is by far the largest employer among cabinet-level agencies, making up 40% of all federal employees. Second, the growth in the size of the federal workforce is concentrated in just a few agencies, with Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security seeing the largest increases in staffing. Other agencies, such as the departments of Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, and Treasury, have seen much slower growth in staffing levels; the Agriculture staff, for example, has seen a growth in staff of just 0.96% since 2007.
Finally, the last issue we wanted to address was how the size of the federal workforce compares to the entire civilian labor force. The next two charts use data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to look at federal employees as a percentage of the total civilian labor force. (To be consistent with the OPM data on the number of federal employees, we’ve taken the figures as of September of each year). The only difference between the two charts is the scale of the axes.
Sources: FedScope, Office of Personnel Management (http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/employment.asp); Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=wh&graph_name=LN_cpsbref1)
Sources: FedScope, Office of Personnel Management (http://www.fedscope.opm.gov/employment.asp); Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet?request_action=wh&graph_name=LN_cpsbref1)
Viewed from this perspective, the federal workforce has remained remarkably stagnant over the past decade: both in September 2001 and in September 2011, federal workers represented 1.26% of the total civilian labor force.
In sum, the data on recent trends in federal employment show that while the size of the federal workforce is growing, its proportion of the total civilian labor force is not. Federal employees have remained at or around 1.2% of the total labor force for at least a decade and, given the hiring freeze that has been in place in many agencies, are unlikely to grow much higher. Furthermore, the increases in staffing that we have seen are largely concentrated in just a few agencies. At the very least, this suggests that a one-size-fits-all approach to reducing the federal workforce could have disproportionate effects on some agencies more so than others.