Number of federal employees
1970: 2.8 million
2024: 3.0 million
US Population
1970: 203 million
2024: 340 million
All they do is lie. Federal employees make life better for all, and all they’ve ever seen is shrinking resources and more workload.
Fuck Republicans and fuck everyone who votes for this shit.
American lives will get worse, and unfortunately the morons who vote for this are too fucking stupid to connect dots and realize how nice their lives are with what government does for them.
Since Reagan’s neoliberal policies, Republicans have created a vicious cycle of: government inefficient so reduce funding -> not enough resources to hire good talent and provide services -> government inefficient so reduce funding.
IRS is the perfect example where they can only afford to go after the mid-income, while the wealthy get to openly dodge taxes.
All this while promoting the idea that the private sector can do it better, which has led to increasing inequality in resource access, and has only contributed to more money in the pockets of executives and those same Republicans.
We need someone like FDR again to expand government programs and show how good a well run government can be for everyone. Current Democratic leadership’s half assed policies only help to reduce their favorability because neither the left nor the right is happy.
Just to look at that a different way, 1970 = 1 fed employee for every 72.5 citizens, 2024 = 1 fed employee for every 113.3 citizens. Add on top of that a budget that likely has not increased proportionally, and the strain gets even greater. So it sounds like our government is able to operate half as effectively as it was in the 70s, and they think that is too much.
operate half as effectively
I think you mean double effective. Seeing as each fed needs to cater for double the populace.
We mean the same thing I believe. I phrased it thinking of how on a per citizen basis they now only have half a fed workers time they used to, while your phrasing comes at it from the employee has to do twice as much with the same resources.
I’ll concede I probably was not clear in the way I intended and I appreciate you reframing my thoughts for me. 😅
No you’re right. Now that I’ve slept on it I see your point. When looking from the population perspective there are half as many fed agents available so they are half as effective (increased wait times, reduction of services etc).
We have succeeded in getting each other to see it though the other person’s perspective, so this has turned into a better comment chain than probably 90% of political posts! 😁
What fresh hell is this humanity of people getting along and coming to understandings?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
They may not be more effective, how many consultants, contractors etc. are on the payroll since then?
A lot of time with these budget cuts some politician will come in and fire a bunch of people or a department, realize they actually do need that work done and then hire a contractor or a consultancy company to do the same work often for more . So the amount of people directly working for the federal government may be down but the amount of people who are working for the government through some middle man goes up to compensate.
There’s usually a significant increase in contractor use after various reductions in force.
