© 2013 Rick Adamson
By Rick Adamson 3.1.13
The Federal Government employs approximately 2,841,143[1] people as of 2010 excluding uniformed military personnel (about 1,500,000).[2] A review of the referenced charts will give you an idea of how many people work in each department. They will also give you an idea of what they are paid – an average of $73,908 excluding the postal service that only averages $53,304. These numbers do not include benefits which could easily equal the wages paid resulting in a doubling of the above figures.
It makes me wonder what in the world all these people do! You may note that homeland security personnel was zero before 9/11 but now has 183,455 employees. Note also, that there are more people working are the veteran’s administration than at the social security administration which seems a little odd to me.
A 2011 Government Accountability Office[3] report gave a sampling of what could be cut or consolidated. It identified 44 overlapping job training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 on teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100 billion-$200 billion. Nobody has taken the report seriously.
What we need is a good turnaround guy or gal to come in and eliminate waste and inefficiency. A good candidate would have been Mitt Romney. That is what the man did for a living. Too bad this administration has no experience in this area and, in fact, is not interested in cutting the size of Government.
For more information on this subject see the recent article entitled Hail Armageddon by Charles Krauthammer.
[1] https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8-ofA03F4YBOTUzZm5XSE93YjQ/edit?usp=sharing
[2] https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8-ofA03F4YBVkRZX0VSSVRSblU/edit?usp=sharing
[3] http://www.gao.gov/assets/320/315920.pdf
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