But for this to happen, several fundamental, practical things must take place. First, on Day 1 of his second term, Trump must fire via his Reduction in Force authority 200,000 federal employees, preferably at the GS-12 and 13 levels. Of course the federal employee unions, which should cease to exist, will sue for a stay. That case will likely wind its way through the courts for 18 months or so (unless the Supreme Court fast tracks it). But once it reaches the SCOTUS, the fundamental question to be asked is: can the head of the Executive Branch, the duly elected President of the US, hire or fire whoever he pleases as per the Constitution? Or do the extra Constitutional statutes and regulations protecting the civil servants supersede the Constitution? With this SCOTUS, the odds are they will side with the originalism of the Constitution and give the President the right to hire and fire whoever he pleases inside the Executive Branch, where most of the Administrative State resides.
Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress, just as Article III vests all judicial authority in the Court. The administrative state is a mechanism for circumventing both. In The Administrative Threat, the legal scholar Philip Hamburger describes this shadowy Leviathan as “a state within a state,” a sort of parallel legal and political structure populated by unelected bureaucrats. Binding citizens not through Congressionally enacted statutes but through the edicts of the managerial bureaucracy, the administrative state, said Hamburger, is “all about the evasion of governance through law, including an evasion of constitutional processes and procedural rights.” Accordingly, he concludes, the encroaching activity of the administrative state represents “the nation’s preeminent threat to civil liberties.”
(Lot of data at this link)
The United States federal government is a large organization. It also keeps detailed records of the people who work within this system of government. With that information, we can learn more about the individuals employed by Uncle Sam.
The data in this column is for 2,171,513 federal government employees who are considered General Schedule (GS) employees.
According to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which keeps, stores and tallies such information, the average federal employee salary (excluding benefits) is now $90,510. The average length of service of federal employees is 12.3 years.
And the granddaddy of all charts, the federal employment history from 1940 to 2024
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