Scholar Shines Light on America's `Shadow Government'

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 1, 1999 | by Sean Paige

"The era of big government is over," President Clinton famously declared in his 1996 State of the Union speech, claiming that the reinvented, 1.9 million-member federal workforce hadn't been as "small" since the Kennedy administration. But according to Paul C. Light, a scholar at Washington's Brookings Institution, who is deflating the boast in a new book, The True Size of Government, the veracity of Clinton's claim, like so many others made by this commander in chief, depends on what the meaning of "is" is.

If by "is" the president referred strictly to the civilian, nonpostal federal workforce, his statement may have been refreshingly tree. But if by "government" he meant the millions more individuals who are working for the federal government indirectly -- part of the flurry of private contractors that flock to big government like seagulls to a tuna boat -- not to mention state or local officials who make a living enforcing the fed's regulatory mandates and agenda, the 2 million spotlighted by Clinton make up only the tip of the iceberg. In all, Light believes that nearly 17 million Americans owe their livelihoods more or less directly to the federal government, meaning that "Clinton would have been much more accurate to say that the era of big government has continued pretty much unabated."

How does Light come up with the number? He does it partly by doing away with the gimmick the administration uses of subtracting from the federal workforce the 1.5 million uniformed military personnel and 850,000 people who work for the U.S. Postal Service. That brings the actual total to 4.3 million full-time workers in 1996 -- which doesn't count 884,000 members of the military reserves or thousands more part-time federal workers. Add to that total the 5.6 million jobs dependent on $200 billion in government contracts, the 2.4 million jobs connected to $55 billion in federal grants and the 4.7 million workers Light believes are required to enforce federal mandates, and even a graduate from the public schools will see the actual size of his "shadow government" taking shape.

"That creates a truth-in-advertising problem," Light recently wrote in Government Executive, an online magazine for government managers, which undermines the honesty of any debate about the proper size and role of the federal government. In fact, a closer look at the numbers reveals that virtually all of Clinton's claimed cuts came from the military. "Remove Defense from the totals," Light writes, "and the civilian [federal] workforce grew by nearly half between 1960 and 1996, increasing from 760,000 employees to 1.9 million."