Just today, in his “press conference” if you can call it that, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, “Our intention is never to lie to you.”
But then, in the same press conference, he made a misleading claim about the Federal Workforce. Explaining Trump’s executive order to freeze federal government hiring, he said it would come after a “dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.” Really? Dramatic?
Directly from
Spicer says there’s been a “dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.” This is unequivocally false. pic.twitter.com/Gu8P2z9FZu
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) January 23, 2017
In historical terms, the total size of the federal workforce isn’t extraordinary at all. It was just a little below 2.8M when President Barack Obama took office in 2009, and it was regularly above 3.1M when President Ronald Reagan was in office in the late 1980s. But hey, reducing the workforce size even further, so it becomes even harder for the average citizen or corporation, for that matter, to do business with the government would only lend credence to their argument that “government is broken” now wouldn’t it, giving them more freedom to “reform” our current democracy (or constitutional republic, if you prefer that reference) into some wickedly immoral autocracy.
Every 10 years federal employment peaks temporarily for the Census. Keep in mind that 2020 is a “census year” and his last year in office (if he doesn’t manage to get himself impeached first) and he too will need to hire additional temporary workers who will conduct that census. Hopefully, he won’t have wiped out that function of government as well by that point in time.
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