September 12, 2012

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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