These figures suggest that President Bill Clinton was correct when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he declared that the era of big government was over. But beneath this stable surface much has changed. In fact, the true size of the federal government, defined as the number of workers who produce goods and services on the federal government's behalf, wherever those jobs are located, has expanded considerably. Gone are the days when most of the goods and services consumed by government were produced in house. The true size of government a work force that encompasses an estimated 5.6 million jobs created under federal contracts, another 2.4 million jobs generated under grants, and 4.6 million jobs covered under mandates to state and local governments, as well as the formal civil service workers and the uni- formed military, totals almost 17 million workers.
Big government is alive and well, though undeniably smaller than it was just six years ago.
Gone too are the days when the president could command every last person in the organization, as public administration scholar Luther Gulick once described the job of the chief executive. The federal gov- ernment has become more elliptical. Increasingly, federal employees are supervising and procuring the work of nonfederal employees who are doing the delivering and producing. Part of this shift reflects a natural evolution as new technologies render some front-line jobs obsolete. The federal government, lacking clear guidelines for deciding which jobs should stay inside government and which should go, elimi- nated the jobs that were the easiest to abolish, namely, those with the highest attrition and the lowest political profile.