On Wednesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “The Hill,” Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) said that while there has been a large increase in the number of federal government workers since 2017 and the levels can be reduced, part of the reason for the jump is that “in those years we had a major pandemic in this country and we on-boarded a lot of people by doing that. We’ve also had massive wildfires in California.”
Host Blake Burman asked, “I went back to 2017, which would go four years of the first Trump term and then four years of the Biden term, was there more job creation among the federal government or at the private level? The federal government was 2.1 million workers in 2017, 2.4 million in 2025. That’s up 10% in that term in eight years. In the private sector, it was 123 million in 2017, 135 million in 2025. That’s up 14%. It’s a pretty big number to grow the federal government, is it not?”
Lynch responded, “It is. But you factor in in those years we had a major pandemic in this country and we on-boarded a lot of people by doing that. We’ve also had massive wildfires in California. We brought people in on board [for] that as well. Look, yeah, should we back off and figure out — look, we can reduce the employee staffing.” But that should be done by assessing the value of individual employees.
Earlier, Lynch stated that the heads of departments would be better judges of who to keep and who to fire.
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