DOGE's False Foundational Premise
The widely circulated "truth" that our government is way too large isn't true at all.
“Three million employees!” That’s the battle cry of Elon and Felon47 and the DOGEbags. Their battle cry is intended to perpetuate the myth that our federal government is not only bloated but full of people who are entirely dispensable.
Elon and company have been slashing and burning the structures of our government without compunction, randomly shrinking staffing, often entirely oblivious to the vital functions that the employees fulfill. They’re equally oblivious to the consequences those cuts will have on the rest of America.
It’s effective propaganda for the people they’ve been grooming for the last decade or so to be suspicious of government, but that builds on an existing foundation of mistruths. The Republican Party has actually been singing this song for several decades. Remember St. Reagan’s nine most terrifying words in the English language? “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Implicit in this fear mongering is that we could do without the functions that many of these federal employees provide and that we’re way out of line with the way that other countries run their governments. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Most developed countries have governments that are a larger percentage of the population, and those governments often provide goods and services far greater than those afforded to U.S. citizens, resulting in a better overall quality of life.
I’ve put together an informal statistical analysis of the United States as compared with other countries, both large and small. The results are in the table that follows.
(You can sort the table by various criteria by clicking on the column headings at the top of the table. It’s best viewed on a desktop or laptop computer; on a phone, you’ll need to use the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the table to see all the columns.)
Some observations:
In the U.S., a country of 340 million+ people, less than one percent of the population keeps the entire government running. Even without comparing the U.S. to other countries, that seems like a modest investment. For every person in the government, 99+ people get interstate highways to drive on, remarkably safe air travel, energy transmission, health and medical research, care for our veterans, food and drug safety — the list goes on and on.
Of the countries other than the U.S. with less than 1% of their populations working in their national governments, there are three countries that are currently operating as autocracies — Russia, Argentina, and Hungary.
The U.S. is among the countries with the highest percentage of the population in the workforce — greater than 50%. This throws a monkey wrench into the decades-old Republican talking point about the preponderance of lazy welfare recipients.
In most cases, it can be argued that the countries with a higher proportion of their citizenry working in national governments are also the countries that provide the most services to their citizens. (Venezuela, with the highest percentage of employees in the national government, is a notable exception.)
If Felon47 is successful in annexing Greenland, you can be certain that the >7% of national employees will be shrunk. Get ready for a spike in unemployment, Greenlanders.
In my next post, I’ll enumerate some of the critical functions our federal employees provide that Elon and the DOGEbags are either blissfully unaware of or are intentionally ignoring.