5 things to know about federal workers and contractors who keep replacing them
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5 things to know about federal workers and contractors who keep replacing them
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In a White House  last month with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Elon Musk said his focus as an aide to the president was reducing the nation’s long-running problem of the government spending more than it receives each year.

“If we don’t solve the deficit, there won’t be money for medical care,” Musk said. “There won’t be money for Social Security. We either solve the deficit or all we’ll be doing is paying debt.”

President , sitting next to the tech mogul, said he thought Musk could find $1 trillion in savings, half of the $2 trillion Musk promised he'd find on the campaign trail, and about half of the nation’s $1.9 trillion deficit.

Trump and Musk’s current target is the thousands of employees who run the federal bureaucracy. They account for a smaller portion of the federal budget than many might expect, but the payroll includes a lot of people.

Here is a look at the numbers.

### 1. There are more than 2 million federal civilian employees

There were 2.3 million federal employees in September. That's the most recent public data from the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm. This workforce does not include members of the military or the U.S. Postal Service.

Before Trump started his term, the U.S. had more federal employees than either of the world’s largest private employers, Walmart and Amazon.

### 2. Federal employees are on 6% of the federal budget

The federal government will spend a little more than $400 billion paying its non-military executive branch employees this year, according to a copy of the federal budget. That’s out of a federal budget of about $7 trillion, meaning federal employees account for about 6% of spending.

Larger portions of federal spending go to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, national defense and paying down debt.



### 3. The number of federal employees remains about 2 million

The U.S. population has been growing, and so has the federal budget. But the approximate number of people employed by the federal government has stayed in place for decades.

There were 2.08 million workers in the federal civil service in 1984, compared with 2.1 million in 2023, according to a review by the . But from 1980 to 2010, the  grew by more than one-third, from 227 million to 309 million.

### 4. The federal government keeps adding contractors

The federal government brings in contractors and implements computer systems rather than hiring new employees, according to an analysis by Elaine Kamarck at the . But because of a lack of transparency around contractors, “we don’t really know how many people work for the government,” Kamarck writes.

Though it’s unclear how many contractors were on the job in 2024, the government spent $427 billion on contracted services that needs to be done by humans, according to USASpending.gov.



### 5. Federal employees only one-third of federal workforce

Employees of private companies working under government contracts now outnumber federal employees, and they have outnumbered employees by more than a 2-to-1 margin dating back to the 1980s.

Though there were just over 2 million federal employees in 2015, there were just under 5.3 million people working on contracts and grants, according to  by Paul Light, a professor at New York University.
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