Imagine the people needed to fill a football stadium, multiple times over. Since Trump returned to office, the federal payroll has been cut by an amount roughly equivalent to the entire global workforce of Apple — TWICE. Depending on which government employment series you use, the reduction is between roughly 271,000 and 336,000 workers. Apple employs about 166,000 people worldwide. Think about that for a moment. You could eliminate the equivalent of two companies the size of Apple from the federal payroll, and for most Americans, daily life simply continued.

So I have a very simple question: what were all these people doing? The federal government still employs more than TWO MILLION civilian workers. OPM's latest data show about 2.02 million federal civilian employees remaining as of July. Government did not disappear. Social Security checks did not suddenly stop because Washington had fewer diversity coordinators, administrators, consultants, managers, analysts, and layers of bureaucracy.

This is how bureaucracy grows. Government creates a program. The program requires employees. The employees require managers. The managers require administrators. Then somebody needs to evaluate the administrators, somebody needs to write the regulations, somebody needs to ensure compliance with the regulations, and somebody else needs to prepare reports explaining why the department needs a larger budget next year. There is virtually no natural mechanism forcing government to become more productive because government does not operate under the same discipline as the private sector.