Thread by @Heritage

To constrain the growth of central government, conservatives have fought to keep down the number of federal bureaucrats.

This strategy has failed.

Since the 1960s, the number of federal employees has remained constant at about 2 million—yet federal power has greatly expanded...

This phenomenon arises because Washington has outsourced many civil-service functions to contractors, nonprofit groups, and lower levels of government.

The true size of the federal government’s “blended workforce” is now somewhere between 7-9 million.

While conservatives focus on the long-term goal of rolling back regulations and reining in federal spending, they must also grapple with the dangers of handing over the public’s business to non-profits and private companies.

While private citizens can demand unclassified documents from federal agencies, they cannot make such requests of Deloitte or Raytheon. Their operations are far less transparent, even if their processes are much more efficient.

It’s not even clear which companies are receiving federal dollars.

According to a 2014 report by the Government Accountability Office, only 2-7% of grant and contract awards on the website contained information that was fully consistent with agency records.

Big government has to be confronted head-on.

Starving the beast does not work.

Just as cutting revenues led to runaway deficits rather than forcing the government to live within those straitened means, capping labor gave birth to the blended federal workforce.

The federal government has proven to be quite resourceful in terms of finding ways to meet the public’s demand for expensive programs and paternalistic protections.

Change will have to come from the bottom-up, not the other way around. washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jul/…