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It's just the bare facts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This WP article has a graph -- basically, at its height (the New Deal/WWII) the federal workforce was about 7% of the workforce and have been going downward since then to about 2% today.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/12/federal-w...

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IMO that's a poor measurement of "government size". Not that I have a better one though. But it doesn't account for technology or scaling.

I also like expenditures as % GDP. It was generally far below 5% federally during non-war periods between civil war and ww1, and for most that time no income tax for regular workers. We also had pretty solid growth in that period, pretty close to that of the post WW2 boom.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GjNDwxtXwAAYvL5?format=png&name=...

It indicates that reducing headcount is almost certainly a poor way to "increase efficiency."

Thanks, interesting. I wonder how much of that is the progression of women entering the workforce. It's quite a specific metric to use.

I suspect a fair bit of it is the elimination of Federal make-work programs established during the New Deal.

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