As any Republican will tell you, the federal government is an enormous beast that grows bigger by the year, feasting upon our precious freedoms for sustenance as it expands into every corner of our lives-and it gets particularly bad when the Democrats are in charge. While there are a number of ways we could measure the size of government, for today's charts we're going to look at the number of federal employees. You may be surprised to learn that not only hasn't the number grown much during recent Democratic administrations, it actually peaked during the administration of one George H. W. Bush, at the tail end of an increase that occurred during the Reagan years. This first graph shows the raw number of federal employees (data are from the Office of Personnel Management):
But this is a little misleading, since over that half-century the population of the United States increased by 68 percent. How about if we look at the number of federal employees as a function of the population? That paints a rather distinct picture:
Yes, it's true: as a proportion of the population, the federal workforce has been shrinking for decades, and it is now smaller than it has been at any point in recent history. Make of that what you will.
