‘Big Government’ Is Ever Growing,
on the Sly by George Will 2/25/17
The number of federal employees
hasn’t changed much in 50 years, but that fact masks how the government has actually grown relentlessly.
In 1960, when John Kennedy was
elected president, America’s population was 180 million and it had
approximately 1.8 million federal bureaucrats (not counting uniformed military
personnel and postal workers).
Fifty-seven years later, with
seven new Cabinet agencies, and myriad new sub-Cabinet agencies (e.g., the
Environmental Protection Agency), and a slew of matters on the federal policy
agenda that were virtually absent in 1960 (health-care insurance, primary- and
secondary-school quality, crime, drug abuse, campaign finance, gun control,
occupational safety, etc.), and with a population of 324 million, there are
only about 2 million federal bureaucrats.
So, since 1960, federal
spending, adjusted for inflation, has quintupled and federal undertakings have
multiplied like dandelions, but the federal civilian workforce has expanded
only negligibly, to approximately what it was when Dwight Eisenhower was
elected in 1952. Does this mean that “big government” is not really big? And
that by doing much more with not many more employees it has accomplished
prodigies of per-worker productivity?
John J. DiIulio Jr., of
the University of Pennsylvania and the Brookings Institution, says: Hardly. In
his 2014 book “Bring Back the Bureaucrats,” he argued that because the public
is, at least philosophically, against “big government,” government has
prudently become stealthy about how it becomes ever bigger.
In a new Brookings paper,
he demonstrates that government expands by indirection, using three kinds of
“administrative proxies” — state and local government, for-profit businesses,
and nonprofit organizations.
Since 1960, the number of
state- and local-government employees has tripled to more than 18 million, a
growth driven by federal money:
Between the early 1960s and early 2010s, the inflation-adjusted value
of federal grants for
the states increased more than tenfold. For example, the EPA has fewer than
20,000 employees, but 90 percent of EPA programs are completely administered by
thousands of state-government employees, largely funded by Washington.
A quarter of the federal
budget is administered by the fewer than 5,000 employees of the Centers
for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — and by the states, at least
half of whose administrative costs are paid by CMS. Various federal crime and
homeland security bills help fund local police departments. “By conservative
estimates,” Dilulio writes, “there are about 3 million state- and
local-government workers” — about 50 percent more than the number of federal
workers — “funded via federal grants and contracts.”
Then there are for-profit
contractors, used, Dilulio says, “by every federal department, bureau and
agency.” For almost a decade, the Defense Department’s full-time equivalent of
700,000 to 800,000 civilian workers were supplemented by the full-time
equivalent of 620,000 to 770,000 for-profit contract employees. “During the
first Gulf War in 1991,”
Dilulio says, “American
soldiers outnumbered private contractors in the region by about 60-to-1; but,
by 2006, there were nearly as many private contractors as soldiers in Iraq —
about 100,000 contract employees, not counting subcontractor employees, versus
140,000 troops.” Today, the government spends more (about $350 billion) on
defense contractors than on all official federal bureaucrats ($250 billion).
Finally, “employment in
the tax-exempt or independent sector more than doubled between 1977 and 2012 to
more than 11 million.” Approximately a third of the revenues to nonprofits
(e.g., Planned Parenthood) flow in one way or another from government. “If,” Dilulio
calculates, “only one-fifth of the 11 million nonprofit sector employees owe
their jobs to federal or intergovernmental grant, contract or fee funding,
that’s 2.2 million workers” — slightly more than the official federal
workforce.
Today’s government is
indeed big (3.5 times bigger than five and a half decades ago), but dispersed
to disguise its size. To which add the estimated
7.5 million for-profit contractors. Plus the conservative estimate of 3 million
federally funded employees of state and local governments. To this total of
more than 12 million, add the approximately 2 million actual federal employees.
This 14 million is about 10 million more than the estimated 4 million federal
employees and contractors during the Eisenhower administration.
So, today’s government is
indeed big (3.5 times bigger than five and a half decades ago), but dispersed
to disguise its size. This government is, Dilulio says, “both
debt-financed and proxy-administered.”
It spends more just on Medicare benefits than on the official federal civilian workforce, and this
is just a fraction of the de facto federal workforce.
Many Americans are rhetorically
conservative but behaviorally liberal. So, they are given government that is
not limited but overleveraged — debt-financed, meaning partially paid for by
future generations — and administered by proxies. The government/for-profit
contractor/non-profit complex consumes 40 percent of GDP. Just don’t upset
anyone by calling it “big government.”
Comments
George Will is a
“moderate Republican”, but despite his “liberal leanings” I think his analysis
is through and correct. I’ve seen other
articles where federal employment is 15 million, but George’s 14 million is
close enough for grenades and horseshoes.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment