The federal government is growing like kudzu. That’s the Japanese ivy plant that’s taking over roadsides all over the south and is even invading the north.
Kudzu does some good, holding the ground and so on, but the price is steep: It kills the other plants, trees and bushes by smothering them. It’s kind of pretty in the summer, like the topiary animals at Disney World, full of fanciful shapes. In the states that have cold winters, though, it leaves a tangled mess of dead trees and brown, twisted vines — a perfect symbol for big government’s strangling tendencies.
In Washington, D.C., there are hundreds of buildings with tens of thousands of offices that are filled with federal employees laboring under florescent lights and whose job is to manage America’s population of 316 million. There are so many of them lining the south side of Independence Avenue that we might as well rename it Dependence Street.
This is not new. We can argue about whether it began with Woodrow Wilson or with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but a strong case can be made that Washington’s kudzu-like growth began with the advent of air conditioning.
As you walk down the sidewalk staring up at these concrete and glass monoliths, you can’t help but wonder what the people in there are doing. They can’t all be playing Sudoku, but it might be better if they were. At least they’d leave the rest of us alone.
The executive branch alone has 2.8 million employees, including 600,000 postal workers. Surprisingly, only about 370,000 federal employees work in the Washington, D.C. area, plus lots of civilian contractors. The contractors have their own concrete and glass canyons rising in the Dulles corridor, whose computer-related companies now rival Silicon Valley’s. That giant, sucking sound you hear is money flowing from the rest of the country into Washington’s burgeoning suburbs.
The U.S. military employs 1.5 million, plus an army of contractors. Congress, with 535 senators and members, makes do with about 30,000 employees. The U.S. Supreme Court, which actually runs the entire country, manages with only around 500 employees.
According to one analysis, the federal government effectively employs about 15 million people, including contractors. Some federal employees work on things that benefit us all, such as securing the safety of our food, water, drugs and airplane landings, and serving veterans. Some work to secure the border. Some work entirely in the realm of income transfer, issuing checks and payments from taxpayers to other Americans and an unknown number of illegal aliens.