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convolvatron

in FY2024 the entire budget for the Forest Service was $10.8B

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This isn't about the budget. It's about destroying the protection of the lands. That's the real prize.

1 day of military special operations?

So roughly the average annual budget of ICE, just one component of DHS, before their $80B OBBB cash injection

no idea how big or small that is, so here's my OoM analysis:

10B$ is equal to 100k people with 100k$ a year salaries

that's 2k such salaries per state, I guess half or more can be counted for buildings/traveling/equipment expenses

no idea what to do with "1k people per state" estimate tho

Budget for an entity costs far, far, far more than just salaries alone. Also, all in cost on a salaried employee is usually 2-3x their actual salary cost… this isn’t 100k people. It’s roughly 35k people (per their own publicly available info) as well as presumably a large amount of actual physical costs. You gotta pay for offices, equipment, consumables, etc etc.

> You gotta pay for offices, equipment, consumables, etc etc.

aka literally what I said in the next line :-)

35k is same Order-of-magnitude as the 50k I set. Still no idea what to do/compare with those numbers tho

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numbers in sister comment say FBI has same budget/headcount, so... 300m pop vs 35k agents is ~10k:1, and since area-wise ~1% is urban and ~10% is forests... each Forest Service employee gets to keep and eye on ~100k house lots worth of trees?

medium-sized city worth of forests per every man

The US collected $5.23T in tax revenue in 2025, $2.1T is individual income tax [0]. GDP is estimated at around $30T.

Spending on social security is about $680B, medicare is $480B, defense is at $410B [1].

Microsoft's valuation is approx. $2.8T [2], Google $3.8T [3], Amazon $2.3T [4], Facebook $1.6T [5] (Linux supply side is valued at approx. $8.8T).

The FBI employs roughly 38k people with about $10B in funding [7]. The CIA employs roughly 22k people with about $15B (?) in funding [8].

So, from that perspective, $10B is roughly .5% of yearly tax revenue (and about how much the FBI/CIA are funded) and estimated 50k people is about the size of the FBI and CIA combined.

[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/key-statistics/

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/key-statistics/

[4] https://companiesmarketcap.com/amazon/marketcap/

[5] https://companiesmarketcap.com/meta-platforms/marketcap/

[6] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigatio...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency

Now do the same calculations for the DOD

Have to pay for the pending war with Cuba somehow.

So less than 0.03% of the national debt?

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