Federal government workers are nothing like the overpaid and too-numerous lot that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and their attendant DOGE commission, say they are. In fact, federal workers have perhaps been among the groups of workers who’ve been least successful at advancing their interests over the past 40 years.
The reality of how federal workers are and have been treated should be a focal point for a defeated and disorganized left, whether among the moderates blaming the far left or among those who agree with Bernie Sanders that party leadership has lost touch with workers. The fight for federal workers is the first battle in the upcoming assault on the federal government. The left would be wise to use a full-throated defense of federal workers an opportunity to portray Donald Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy and the entire GOP as cruel and unconcerned with actual working people.
One notable aspect of the ongoing discussions of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is the dearth of actual federal workers amongst those discussing the matter. As an employee of the Bureau of Economic Analysis for over 15 years, ending in March 2022, I can tell you the situation has gotten steadily worse for decades. Federal workers are underpaid, mistreated and lack the voice in society to fight back. And they’ve proven to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
The federal workforce, as a share of the total U.S. population, has shrunk since 1982. In October 1982, there were 2.890 million federal workers. Forty-two years later, in October 2024, that figure totaled 3.001 million, a miserly increase of less than four percent. During that same period, the total U.S. population increased over 104 million, or about forty-five percent. Total local government employment grew from 9.430 million to 14.940 million over those forty-two years, an increase of nearly five million, while state government employment grew from 3.636 million to 5.514 million, an increase of about 1.9 million. Thus, state and local government employment basically kept up with forty-five percent population growth over those years, while federal employment barely grew at all.
Nor are federal workers overpaid. In fact, their pay has been eroding relative to private sector counterparts for the last three decades. The Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA) was passed in 1990 to increase federal worker pay to catch up to private-sector pay. Federal statue written from FEPCA guides for annual federal employee pay increases to be calculated as half of one percent less than the increase in the employment cost index (ECI), a measure of total worker compensation prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). However, according to the same statute, the president may ignore the ECI in cases of “national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare” and simply come up with a lower number. Since FEPCA was passed in 1990, every single Democratic and Republican president has done exactly that, with little comment from the mainstream press (which, to be fair, pays little attention to most aspects of worker pay or power.) So, for the pay raise in 2025, the ECI increase was 3.86%, but the pay raise decreed by the president will only be 2%.
After three-and-a-half decades of these arbitrary raises, federal worker pay is 24.72% behind what it is for comparable private-sector workers, according to a report from the Federal Salary Council, which uses BLS survey data to generate comprehensive comparison statistics.
Neither party takes up the mantle for federal worker rights. While Musk and Ramaswamy seem outright hostile to the idea of federal government employment, even Democrats like Barack Obama are willing to shiv federal workers when it suits them.
Obama embraced the language of austerity in November 2010, when he froze federal pay for two years, announcing, “Just as families and businesses around the nation have tightened their belts so must their government.” This analysis is wrong; a nation is not constrained to operate as a family or business does and cut in difficult times. In fact, economists now acknowledge that federal spending was too small coming out of the Great Recession. If Obama had had greater respect for federal workers as a constituency of the Democratic Party, he could have bent over backward to justify increasing federal pay as a pro-stimulus measure, as Republicans quicky embrace cutting taxes on businesses to fight recessions.
Obama additionally introduced an element of generational warfare in the federal service when, as part of two budget compromises with Republicans, he twice increased the required pension contributions of newer federal employees. All told this means that, while federal workers who started before 2013 pay 0.8 percent of their salary towards funding their pensions, employees hired in 2014 or later pay over five times that amount. This is a terrible idea for worker solidarity; newer workers may direct their frustrations at those paid more simply for having started earlier. It also reinforces the idea that boomers and other generations simply “pull up the ladder” on later generations rather than fighting for all workers.
Democrats often choose Cabinet secretaries with histories of opposing worker rights. BEA is an agency within the Department of Commerce; Obama’s longest-serving Secretary of Commerce was billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, whose family runs the Hyatt Hotel chain. Before becoming Commerce Secretary, her company turned on heat lamps above the heads of workers striking in a picket line outside a Hyatt hotel, in weather in which temperatures were already above 90 degrees. She also opposed efforts to raise teachers’ salaries with money from Chicago’s tax increment financing fund, preferring that $5.1 billion from that fund be used to finance a Hyatt-franchised hotel. Pritzker feuded with the head of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis – an actual leader for workers whose militancy invigorated unionized labor — for years, yet Obama still appointed Pritzker Commerce Secretary after her anti-worker behavior.
Or consider Joseph Biden’s Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who in 2011 as Rhode Island Treasurer cut state workers’ pensions after deciding to invest pension assets in hedge funds, an industry in which Raimondo spent most of her private sector career. How can federal workers think they’ll get a fair shake if even Democrats appoint people like this to be their bosses?
Of the 2.3 million federal workers tallied by FedScope Federal Workforce Database (which excludes Postal employees, intelligence agencies, and a few very small agencies), over 750,000 work for the Departments of Defense. Another half million work in the Veterans Administration and over 200,000 work for the Department of Homeland Security.
That leaves only about 800,000 for every other major function of the federal government, from tax collection to maintaining our national parks, to safeguarding our nuclear systems, administering Pell Grants, and prosecuting criminals.
Major and important duties are carried out by surprisingly small and shrinking staff. The Social Security Administration has fewer than 60,000 workers working to pay out about $1.4 trillion in annual benefits. If the U.S. federal government is an “insurance company with an army,” then this major insurance component operates tremendously efficiently. Administrative costs total only 0.5% of annual benefits, about a quarter of the percentage cost fifty years ago, and far cheaper than private retirement annuities.
For another example, the Food Safety and Inspection Service does the unglamorous job of inspecting meat, eggs, and other foods for consumer safety. Three workers even died of COVID doing their jobs during the pandemic’s initial onslaught. They have about 8,600 employees as of March 2024. That is down from September 2004, when it had about 10,200 employees, a decrease of about fifteen percent, even though the economy is nearly fifty percent larger. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans’ confidence in food safety has dropped by 23 points between 2006 and 2024. Why are Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy so confident there’s so much government waste and so many worthless employees?
While they don’t tell us how they know, they’re dismissive in their confidence. Ramaswamy laid out his plans for federal workers in a podcast: “If your Social Security Number ends in an odd number, you're out. If it ends in an even number, you're in. There's a 50% cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security Number starts in an even number, you're in. And if it starts with an odd number, you're out. Boom, that's a 75% reduction, then literally, sarcastically, okay.” He then backpedals slightly by saying that this is a “thought experiment, not a policy prescription.”
But do the people who inspect our food, send out our social security benefits, or calculate our economic statistics deserve this terrorizing “thought experiment”? And how much of Trump’s behavior initially tows the line between joking and threatening? Given how desperately the right wants to be offended, might it not be time for the left to be offended on behalf of actual workers?
Unlike state government workers and national civil servants in other countries, federal workers lack the ability to fight back through strikes. The Chicago Teachers Union strikes of 2012 showed that local government workers can challenge even Democratic politicians like Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor who backed neoliberal privatization efforts aimed at marginalizing public school teachers. These strikes sparked similar efforts in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, and laid the groundwork for political efforts that are still paying off. Brandon Johnson, a key organizer of those strikes, is now Chicago’s mayor. ()
The ability to strike changes the dynamic. BEA, where I worked for 15 years, produces estimates of gross domestic product and myriad other economic statistics, which underlie the work of Wall Street analysts, financial journalists, economic researchers and countless others. Many of these very people are interested in the ethical treatment of workers (at, say, their local grocery store or Starbucks), but since workers at BEA can’t strike, we couldn’t easily convey to our “customers” that we were being mistreated. The disciplinary policy at Commerce allows only one punishment for “violation of ‘no-strike’ affidavit”: removal.
Without a union or labor consciousness from society, federal workers are walking into a Kafkaesque nightmare of unclear policies and pretend standards in a second Trump administration.
A Democratic Party interested in workers should find it very easy and intuitive to fight against Musk and Ramaswamy on this issue. Musk has repeatedly tweeted variations of himself asking people, in the context of federal workers, “So… What would you say you do here?” a reference to "Office Space" that, given the storyline in that movie, implies the answer is “nothing” or “very little.” He treats his own workers with the same arrogance and dismissiveness. In 2022, while we were still recovering from the pandemic, Musk imperiously announced that telework wouldn’t be available any longer for Telsa workers and charged that those who wanted to telework should “pretend to work somewhere else.”
Can you imagine having any self-respect and continuing to work for this man? People (including, I’m sure, Tesla workers) made tremendous sacrifices over the pandemic, often only surviving because telework was an option, but he has no problem announcing in public that they were “pretending.” And even if he wants to behave rudely towards his own workers, we needn’t do so towards ours.
Yet Democrats have embraced Musk, with Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who’s cultivated a working-class mien, saying he “admires” the billionaire. That so many Democrats tolerate the degrading language that Musk and Ramaswamy use towards federal employees implies that they think being a federal employee is degrading, and Democrats’ treatment of federal workers these last two decades demonstrates the same.
The treatment of federal workers is the moral choice and responsibility of the citizenry en toto, and there’s nothing that says we must lower ourselves to the moral level of an Elon Musk, nothing that says we have to accept language like “little jobs” to describe all that federal workers do. Resisting the DOGE commission must be the next step in Democrats showing they’re a workers’ party, like they say they are.
