Tip O’Neill famously observed that “all politics is local.” That’s for good reason: most of the popular things that government happen on the state and local level. Firefighters, teachers, hospitals and police provide services that, by and large, Americans rely upon. That’s why the Census numbers released today, which show the change in the number of workers employed by state and local governments from 2010 to 2011, paint such a dismal picture.
The Census finds that “in March 2011, there were 16.4 million full-time equivalent employees working in state and local governments in the U.S., down 1.4 percent from 2010.” It’s worth noting that the federal government only employs 2.15 million people.
The pain has been most severe for local governments. Local municipalities, with their 12 million full-time employees, shed 204,781 workers in 2011. The report also suggests that a few of those workers are being replaced by temporary employees, as part-time enrollment is up 22,770.
State governments are hardly better off. The report finds that states, which employ 4.4 million full-time workers, cut 0.4 percent of their staff from 2010 to 2011.
Who are the state and local employees being laid off?
According to estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau, the majority of these employees (8.9 million) worked in education, followed by those working in hospitals (964,381), police protection (923,951) and corrections (717,940).
Not exactly the overpaid state bureaucrats that austerity was intended to target. It’s amazing that we’ve sustained a recovery at all given sharply declining government payroll. If all politics is local, then politicians have a lot of explaining to do.