‘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”.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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