Bureaucrats

Federal bureaucrats are career government employees who work in the cabinet level departments and independent agencies.

There are 15 Cabinet-level departments in the federal government today. There are more than 60 government agencies and 2,000 other sub units of the U.S. government. There are about 2.7 million employees in the executive branch. Nearly 30 percent of those work in the Postal Service and 33 percent work for the Department of Defense. The remaining workers are spread out among the rest of the governmental departments and agencies. Most government employees are part of the civil service. That means they take a test and are hired, at least in part, based on their test scores. Mid- and upper-level employees generally do not take a written test but are subject to strict qualification guidelines. The remaining 10 percent of the federal workforce is made up of person not covered by civil service system. These positions include appointive policy making positions, independent regulatory commissioners and low level non policy patronage positions. Nearly 3500 people are appointed by the president. These appointees are responsible for appointing high level policy making assistants who form the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy. Independent regulatory commissioners are also appointed by the president but they are independent of his direct political influence once they take office. The number of political appointees has grown.  Not all federal employees push paper. Some of the most highly skilled and efficient workers in the world work for the government, from biochemists working in the National Institutes for Health to computer programmers in the Census Bureau, zoologists at the National Zoo, forest rangers, statisticians, engineers, plumbers, lawyers and more. Federal employees are also a diverse lot basically representing the racial and ethnic composition of the population at large though women are less represented than men and often have lower-level positions under the proverbial “glass ceiling.”  Women make up 64 percent of the lowest GS levels but only 34 percent of the highest GS levels. Only 11 percent of federal workers work in Washington, D.C. The rest are scattered in regional, state, and local offices throughout the country.  Decentralization also helps distribute jobs and incomes across the county.

Many government jobs are hard to fill, especially the ones requiring high skill levels since government doesn't pay as well as business. One of the major concerns about federal workforce is the high rates of turnover in many of the most important positions.  The federal government also relies on hiring outside contractors for increasing numbers of jobs. This is a controversial practice that makes government look smaller than it is and may not always save the taxpayers’ dollars. This trend has been exacerbated during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where private military companies have played key roles along with other contractors. Many of these private contractors are former government employees who can make much more money working for private companies. It is estimated that $538 billion of the federal budget was spent on government contractors in 2008. The Obama administration has sought to reduce the numbers of contract employees.