February 16, 2025
Week Four: No Rest for the Grifters
By Clarice Feldman
In the 1960s when my husband and I first worked in Washington, D.C., according to the Office of Personnel Management, there were about 1,808,000 (which includes military; non-Department of Defense was 761,000) federal employees. At the start of President Trump’s second term there were 2.3 million, of which about 775,000 were military and Department of Defense employees. This astonishing bloat in the federal bureaucracy is even more inexplicable when you consider that in this same period so many of the jobs being performed by these people have been made strikingly more efficient with the creation and improvement of computers and the internet, requiring fewer personnel to accomplish more.
A rough estimate is that about 10% or 275,000 federal employees are no longer on the payroll. 75,000 took the payout option and there were about 200,000 probationary employees who were laid off. There may be more as agencies are lopping off components. It’s possible not every probationary employee was riffed, but I think this is a fair estimate.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/week_four_no_rest_for_the_grifters.html
