Government changes over time, and the need for workforce changes with it. The number of employees a government needs is a function of what the government does and provides. Anything else would be artificial constraint, or working backwards from assumption.
This is a non-sequitur. The raw numbers are irrelevant. What are those employees doing?
In abstract, I support a smaller government. In practice, Chesterton’s Fence is an important principle to remember.
For example, the TSA is largely security theater. It would be a real win and legitimate cost savings (unemployment numbers aside) to dismantle the TSA and go back to metal detectors and simpler X-ray machines run by private companies in airports.
On the other hand, getting rid of USAID diminishes America’s stature in the world. Where do you think our power comes from? It’s not solely due to our nuclear arsenal.
These people are destroying the US government’s capabilities and influence for bizarre ideological reasons that are largely grounded in equally bizarre fictional views of the world. It’s going to be _more_ costly, devastatingly so, to US citizens both financially and otherwise in the short and long term.
They could have reduced the size of the government strategically and they could even have done it using this same illegal DOGE technique, but it would have required care and thought, grounded in actual reality.
Depends on what Congress decides the federal government should be doing, which in turn depends on who people elect to Congress.
In general, the number should be sufficient to meet legal obligations with a bit of lag as it goes up or down as agencies and programs come and go or find their scope changing. If the departments cannot meet their legal obligations because they have too few people (consider if tax return processing takes a year), then staffing probably needs to increase. If most people are idle or grossly underutilized, and the work doesn't have a high seasonal variance like tax processing, then the department or agency should be reduced in size. If the work is seasonal and requires low expertise, then hiring can be seasonal too.
