Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been making a lot of noise about all the federal employees it plans to fire. The DOGE people have framed total federal employment as something of a proxy for the total size of the federal government.  Cutting the federal workforce is all well and good, but in reality, the size of the federal payrolls doesn't really tell us much about the growth of the federal government.

Federal employment has been flat for decades. If the total number of federal workers was a good proxy for federal power, we'd be forced to conclude that the federal government has gotten smaller and weaker over the past thirty years. Obviously, that's not remotely true given that federal spending has increased at breakneck speed. Since 1950s, federal spending has increased by more than ten-fold while federal employment has not even doubled.