Federal Jobs Don’t Threaten the Economy, But Trump’s Tariffs Do
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As a candidate, Trump repeatedly promised to reverse
inflation.
“Under my plan,” he said in October, “inflation will vanish completely.” “Prices
will come down, and they’ll come down fast, with everything,” pledged Trump in August. “When I win, I
will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.”
Day One has come and gone, but the cost of living has only
risen. Food prices are now projected to go up by 3.4 percent in 2025.
Trump also promised to fix everything supposedly wrong with
America by imposing tariffs on goods we buy from abroad. His false premise:
that foreign countries would pay the
tariffs. But tariffs are simply a tax importers pay the federal government.
The companies that import food, clothes, shoes, auto parts,
and everything else we buy aren’t about to reduce their profits. They’ll pass
the cost on to consumers by charging higher prices. Trump’s new tariffs will add $1,200 to the cost of living
for the typical U.S. household.
Now Trump is no longer promising a rapid turnaround. He’s
saying Americans will suffer “some pain” from his trade wars and that a recession can’t be ruled out. But instead
of admitting that he was wrong about inflation and tariffs, he’s blaming
federal employees and programs.
Administration officials assert that America must be “detoxed” of excessive federal spending.
Hence we need Elon Musk to slash our supposedly “bloated” federal workforce and
“addiction” to federal spending.
Are we “addicted” to Social Security and Medicare?
Do we need “detoxing” because we expect our government to employ enough air traffic controllers to prevent crashes? To keep manufacturers from peddling ineffective or unsafe drugs? To stop banks from cheating, predict where hurricanes will land, and do all the other things a government should do to protect us? Nonsense.
The federal workforce that does these jobs isn’t “bloated”
either.
Before Musk’s DOGE kids rushed in and began closing Social
Security offices and axing tens of thousands of workers, our federal government
had 3 million employees. That number hasn’t grown in decades. We had 3 million
federal workers back in 1985, 40 years ago. We had 3 million 55 years
ago, in 1970.
Meanwhile the population served by the federal government
has ballooned. In 1970 we were 203 million people. Now there are 340 million of
us.
Wasteful? Inefficient? The same number of federal workers
are delivering services to many more Americans and providing
additional programs that didn’t exist in 1970 or were just getting started —
like Medicare, Medicaid, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau.
Looked at another way, federal workers as a proportion of
the entire American workforce have been steadily shrinking. In 1952, 5.2 percent of
American employees worked for the federal government. Today, that’s only 1.9
percent.
In other words, our supposedly “bloated” federal government
has actually become far more efficient, not less.
Why do Trump and Musk want to destroy a lean and efficient
federal government? In short, because it regulates business and seeks to
protect the public from being preyed on by giant corporations and their
super-rich owners.
Our government must not be crippled so Elon Musk can violate laws, unsafely launch rockets, and prematurely unleash driverless
vehicles — or so Trump can evade responsibility for his tariff disaster.
Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney,
longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi
Reckoning. His writing can also be found on his
Substack, Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman. This
op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
