Federal employment is at its lowest since the mid-1960s. Has the country fallen apart without the Washington bureaucracy holding it all together? Hardly.
Donald Trump was elected to accomplish a number of objectives. One of them was to cut, and hard, the federal administrative state. The mission has not been accomplished, but after a year, the federal workforce has fallen from more than 3 million to about 2.7 million, roughly where it was six decades ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Like a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it’s a good start. But cutting the federal leviathan by roughly a 10th — the largest peacetime downsizing ever, says the Cato Institute — is not enough. Even with the reduction in workers, the effort did not produce less spending.
So two things need to happen: The effort to cut the federal employment needs to continue, and spending has to be slashed.
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