I saw some mention that there has been a sharp rise in federal civilian employment in 2023 and 2024. When I tracked down the numbers at the FRED website run by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, it looked like this:
Just to be clear, this is civilian employees only, and doesn’t count the 1.3 million or so in the armed forces. However, it does count about 600,000 postal workers, although the US Postal Service is a semi-autonomous agency. The spikes in federal employment every 10 years are temporary employment related to the decennial Census. If you squint a little, you can also see a pattern where government employment tends to rise in times of recession (shaded areas) or immediately after.
However, it also looks as if federal employment had settled at under 2.8 million workers during non-recession, non-Census periods in the late 1990s, the first decade of the 2000s, and from about 2013-2016. From this view, the increase of about 140,000 federal jobs from the start of 2023 to the present does look like a break with past patterns.
I know that the rise in federal employment since 2023 is not about additional post office workers. I’ve seen comments in the press that the higher federal employment relates to implementation of infrastructure and green energy grants. But I confess that I haven’t done the work of tracking the rise in federal employment in the last couple of years back to individual agencies. Someone who wants to spend the time digging around at the at the Office of Personel Management website could do so.
But if you focus on the 2.4 million non-postal but civilian employees, the breakdown across agencies looks like this, according to Drew Desilver at the Pew Research Organization (“What the data says about federal workers,” January 7, 2025). One example of a small-employment agency among the small boxes at the bottom right of the figure would be the US Department of Education, with fewer than 5,000 employees. But truly substantial cuts in federal employment would require truly substantial cuts from the big boxes.
I would not expect federal employment to be a constant share of the US workforce. After all, a substantial part of government work involves working with information, and the leaps and bounds of information technology should make it possible, in a broad sense, to accomplish similar tasks with fewer workers. Indeed, that seems to be the pattern over time. The figure below takes the number of federal employees and divides by total employees in the US economy. Back in the early 1990s, federal employees were almost 3% of the workforce. It’s now about 1.9% of the workforce–basically the same as before the federal employent spikes from the Census and the pandemic recession. Also, when you look at federal employment relative to total employment, the recent jump in federal jobs goes away; in other words, the last two years are a time when federal employment has been rising at about the same rate as total employment, but not faster.
Of course, these kinds of overall numbers don’t offer evidence that certain parts of the US government should have fewer workers, more workers, or the same number. The rise in federal employment in 2023-24 suggests that more attention might be paid to who was hired in what departments. The ratio of federal employment to total employment suggests that we have not seen (yet) seen a radical break with past federal employment patterns.
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