President Joe Biden is concluding his term with a record number of government workers on taxpayer-funded payrolls, according to newly released jobs data. The total number of state, federal, and local government employees reached approximately 23.5 million as of December, based on Federal Reserve Economic Data updated with the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released Friday. The Biden-Harris administration first broke the record for total government jobs in February 2024, despite an uptick in overall unemployment during the same period, the Daily Caller reported.
“The percentage of the total workforce that is employed by the government has been steadily increasing for two and a half years, including in the December [BLS] report,” Richard Stern, a federal budget expert at The Heritage Foundation, told the outlet. “This indicates that once Biden’s economic policies could take effect, they started to strangle the private sector and transfer resources to local, state, and federal governments.”
In November 2024, the federal government employed just over 3 million people, accounting for 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of BLS data. Meanwhile, approximately 19.58 million individuals worked for state and local governments in 2023, according to Statista. In December, the U.S. added 33,000 government jobs, slightly below the 2024 monthly average of 37,000, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday.
Federal employment peaked at 3.4 million in May 1990, according to USAFacts. Under Biden’s administration, the permanent federal workforce has grown by nearly 6% since he took office, as reported by Government Executive. “Instead of employing more people in industries that service our communities and families, Biden’s policies have serviced the regulatory and bureaucratic sectors,” Stern said. “This, combined with the decline in real median wages under Biden, indicates that job opportunities are declining and that Biden’s policies have severely weakened the job market.”
The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 4.1% in December, up from 3.8% in December 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released Friday. This marks a notable increase from the 3.4% low recorded in January 2023. While the total number of nonfarm payroll jobs grew by 256,000 in December, exceeding economists’ expectations, the increase in taxpayer-funded jobs is a cause for concern, EJ Antoni, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF).
“In 2024, more than half of all jobs added were paid for by taxpayer dollars, an unsustainable rate of increase,” Antoni told the DCNF. “An economy needs many private sector jobs to sustain a single publicly financed job through tax revenue. It’s important to remember that direct government hiring are not the only new jobs being paid for by taxpayers. When the government gives a grant to a school or a hospital and that money is used to hire a teacher or a nurse, then that new job is still being financed by taxpayers.
“Meanwhile, the productive private sector continues degrading, with manufacturing having lost almost 100,000 jobs in 2024, plus another 100,000 jobs that will be revised away in next month’s report when the annual revision is incorporated into the jobs data,” Antoni continued. “Additionally, the number of people reporting that they were employed by the government surged [by] 438,000 in 2024, which is depressing the unemployment rate without increasing the number of people engaged in productive private sector activity.”
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