Federal Government Employees by Group, Military vs Civilian - 1962 to 2007

The other day I talked about how federal government and government employment in general has been on the decline recently.   I showed the trend for federal, state and local government jobs from the BLS data.   At the time I wasn't sure how much of the federal government employees were related to the military.  I figured at least some were given the big jumps in employment around the 40's and 60's.  

I found numbers for federal government employees broken down into some categories.   The more recent budgets only show numbers starting in 1981.   The 2009 budget figures have the data going back to 1962.  I wanted a longer history so I am using the 2009 budget data.

First here is the federal government employment split into different categories:

The 'Military' section is for uniformed military while the 'DoD' is for civilian employment within the Dept. of Defense.  

Here's another look at the same data that make it a little easier to see the number of employees and trends for each category :

As you can see there the size of our uniformed military is mostly the cause of decrease in total federal employment.   The other lines generally trend flat over the decades (more or less).   I'll also point out that from 1962 to 2007 the population of the U.S. increased about 60% from around about 189M to 304M.

Lastly I broke it into military & DoD versus all the other employees:

This graph more clearly illustrates the impact that total military related employment has had on the general trend in federal government employee total.

Here is a table with select years :

Year	Military	Leg/Jud	DoD	Exec	USPS	SUM
1962	2840	30	1070	827	589	5354
1965	2687	32	1034	867	595	5215
1970	3104	38	1219	983	741	6085
1975	2164	49	1042	1107	699	5061
1980	2090	55	960	1201	660	4965
1985	2190	58	1107	1145	756	5256
1990	2106	61	1034	1216	817	5234
1995	1555	62	802	1210	846	4475
2000	1426	63	651	1127	861	4129
2005	1436	65	649	1224	764	4138
2006	1432	63	653	1227	757	4133
2007	1427	63	651	1237	748	4127

Those numbers are in thousands.

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