America: A Growing Population And A Shrinking Government

The population of the United States has been growing for some time, and isn’t likely to stop doing so anytime soon. Just between 1984 and 2015, there was a 36% increase in the total population of the country¹–an increase that accounts for an extra 84 million people! That’s a much bigger family of Americans for the government to manage, and, conceivably, a lot more work to do.

You might expect that–given the increasing population size–the government would be rushing to staff-up to meet the challenge of servicing more people in an increasingly complex system. But that is one place where expectation and reality diverge. Over the same time period (1984 to 2015), the amount of non-military, non-post-office federal employees actually went down by about 2%–from 2,083,000, to 2,042,000².

One way the government reconciles this growing discrepancy is through contracting out more work to the private sector. During the same period of time, the government contractor workforce increased from 4,900,000 to 5,285,000, or about 8%. Combining federal employees together with government contractors and grantees brings the combined total growth of the non-military, non-postal government workforce to about 5%, which lags well behind the 36% population increase over the same amount of time.

One corollary suggested by the trends above is that an increasing amount of the work done by the government is done by contractors instead of federal employees. Some have argued that this is because the private sector can perform work more cheaply and effectively than the public sector can, but this claim is suspect, according to a recent report by The Project On Government Oversight (POGO). In their recent report, POGO concluded, “the federal government approves service contract billing rates–deemed fair and reasonable–that pay contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.”³.

All of that is to say that the U.S government is now in a situation where its constituency is getting larger, while its workforce is getting smaller, and it is increasingly expected to pay the private sector a premium for the work it no longer has the staff to handle itself. As the government becomes increasingly reliant on private-sector contractors and grantees to complete its work, the way these contracts are structured and managed will come to have a larger and larger impact on public quality of life and well-being. In a series of upcoming articles, we will be looking at how the government currently manages and executes these contracts, and we'll explore possible areas of improvement.