Article from Reason by Eric Boehm.

Across nearly every federal department and agency, staffing levels fell during the first year of the Trump administration as empty positions went unfilled, budgets were cut, and de facto hiring freezes were implemented.

All told, the government shed about 16,000 jobs between January and September, according to an analysis by The Washington Post,citing data from the Office of Personnel Management. That stands in stark contrast to the first nine months of the Obama administration, when the federal workforce grew by 68,000. It’s the first time the federal workforce has declined in the first year of a new administration since it fell by about 70,000 under Bill Clinton in 1993.

But it’s still a leviathan. The Post story overstates the extent of the cuts by claiming—in the very first paragraph—that the reductions “could eventually bring the workforce down to levels not seen in decades.”

That’s technically true, but it will take a long time for that “eventually” to kick in. The federal workforce included 1.94 million employees at the end of September, according to the Post. That’s well above the approximately 1.8 million employed by the federal government before the Obama administration started staffing up. Getting back to pre-Obama levels of federal workers would require cutting another 16,000 jobs every year for the next nine years.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons