President Obama’s new budget includes a table showing the number of executive branch civilian employees the administration expects to have in 2017. With that, we can compare the growth in federal government employment over eight years of Obama (2009 to 2017) to eight years of President George W. Bush (2001 to 2009).
Downsizing Blog
Pentagon Bureaucracy
Many articles in recent years have expressed concern about Pentagon bloat. Mackenzie Eaglen called for streamlining the Pentagon’s “army of bureaucrats.” Ray Mabus said“Twenty percent of the Pentagon budget, one dollar out of five, is spent on … the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the defense agencies … Pure overhead.”
President Obama’s FY2017 Budget
President Obama has released his budget for fiscal year 2017. The president’s spending and revenue proposals will be mainly dead on arrival on Capitol Hill, including his $3 trillion in proposed tax hikes.
Federal Workers Earning More Than $100,000
A new investigation by ABC7/WJLA reporter Chris Papst highlights data on the number of federal civilian workers earning more than $100,000 in annual wages.
Air Traffic Control: Ripe For Reform
Two decades ago, the Clinton administration proposed restructuring our air traffic control (ATC) system. The idea was to create a self-funded outfit separate from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The problem was that “The FAA has been a big, bungling bureaucracy,” noted the spokesman for the controllers’ union in 1994.
Air Traffic Control Reform
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration proposed restructuring our air traffic control (ATC) system, creating a self-funded organization outside of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The idea went nowhere in Congress at the time.
Time to Privatize the Postal Service
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is losing billions of dollars a year. The government company that delivers “snail mail” is losing out to email and other types of electronic communication. First-class mail volume fell from a peak of 104 billion pieces in 2000 to just 64 billion pieces by 2014.
The GOP Candidates and Military Spending
Quite a number of media fact-checkers tripped over Ted Cruz’s claim in last night’s debate that Barack Obama had “dramatically degraded our military,” and Marco Rubio’s related pledge to rebuild a U.S. military that is “being diminished.”
CBO Budget Report: Debt Disaster
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released new projections showing the debt disaster being manufactured in Washington. Federal borrowing from global capital markets is expected to soar from an outstanding $14 trillion this year to $24 trillion by 2026 under the baseline.
Unfair Postal Competition
With the rise of electronic communications, the volume of snail mail has fallen precipitously, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been losing billions of dollars. The 600,000-worker USPS is an unjustified legal monopoly that is heavily subsidized. It is a bureaucratic dinosaur that Congress should put on the way to extinction.