One is the aging of our veterans population and the retirement of many veterans, now including some who served in Vietnam. As of last year veterans made up 27.4 percent of the total federal workforce, but in the past six years they have accounted for more than half of its retirements. The other reason is the downsizing of the federal government, which has seen the workforce reduced by about 13 percent since President Clinton took office. Now, look at the same figures for the first four years of the Clinton Administration, fiscal 1993 to fiscal 1996. Lets look at those figures another way.
Lets consider another statistic.
In fiscal 1995, 47.4 percent of the 25,002 men hired for full-time permanent federal jobs were veterans. Last year, in fiscal 1996, that figure increased to 48.8 percent. In other words, in the past two years, nearly half of all the men hired for full-time permanent federal jobs have been veterans. And that is at a time when about 26 percent of the men in America age 18 or older are veterans. But lets not exclude women.