I posted several days ago saying that I thought President Obama’s budget indicated that he had a vision for increasing the scope and reach of our federal government in our lives. A reader was critical of the post. One of his points was that federal government employment is at an all-time low with President Obama’s administration. I thought I would examine the trend in employment by the federal government. I used data from the Office of Personnel Management and the Bureau of Economic Analysis to investigate any trend in federal employment. One thing that I learned is total federal employment of civilians by the executive branch has been fairly constant since the 1960s. The following diagram shows total federal personnel as a ratio to real GDP. The timeseries has a definitive negative slope because as the economy has grown employment has not grown and therefore the ratio of the two has become smaller.

The numbers employed in the Obama administration are part of a longer-term trend which seems to have moderated over the past decade. This moderation is indicated by the flattening of the time series data beginning in about 2005. The number of federal employees is not contingent upon the size of our economy. Also of interest, the variation in employment overtime does not depend on employment by the executive branch, but rather the  variation in uniformed military personnel.

As you can see the slopes of the trend lines for total personnel and uniform military personnel are virtually identical while executive branch civilian employees tend to remain very constant. The decline in federal employment is due to fewer uniformed military personnel, not from any administration (either Democrat or Republican) taking demonstrative steps to reduce the level of federal employees. Executive branch employment has remained very constant since the 1960s while the number of uniform military personnel has been falling precipitously over the same time period.