Number of U.S. Federal Employees (1960-2026)

For the curious the huge spikes are temporarily employed census workers.

It’s like that one time Google decided that increasing the number of searches was a good measure of success… Only to realize people were searching more because Google was serving worse and worse search results.

Obviously minimizing the number of government employees = success.

Interesting that it hasn’t continued growing in proportion with the population

I’m kinda stumped on what the spikes could be…

Any ideas?