President Joe Biden is ending his term with a record number of government workers on taxpayer-funded payrolls, new jobs data reveals.
The number of state, federal and local government employees has risen to new highs during Biden’s presidency, totaling about 23.5 million as of December, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data updated with the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs data released Friday. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the U.S. first broke the record of total government jobs in February 2024, despite overall unemployment ticking up the same month.
“The percentage of the total workforce that is employed by the government has been steadily increasing for two and a half years, including in the December [BLS] report,” Richard Stern, a federal budget expert at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This indicates that once Biden’s economic policies could take effect, they started to strangle the private sector and transfer resources to local, state, and federal governments.”
In November 2024, the federal government employed just over 3 million people, or 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of BLS data. Meanwhile, around 19.58 million people were working for state and local governments in the U.S. in 2023, according to Statista. In December, the U.S. added 33,000 government jobs, compared to an average of 37,000 government jobs added per month in 2024, the BLS reported on Friday.
Federal employment peaked in May 1990 at 3.4 million, USAFacts reported. Biden has overseen a nearly 6% growth of the permanent federal workforce since he took office, according to Government Executive.
“Instead of employing more people in industries that service our communities and families, Biden’s policies have serviced the regulatory and bureaucratic sectors,” Stern said. “This, combined with the decline in real median wages under Biden, indicates that job opportunities are declining and that Biden’s policies have severely weakened the job market.”
The U.S. unemployment rate was 4.1% in December, up from 3.8% in December 2023, the BLS reported Friday. This marks a significant increase from a low of 3.4% in January 2023. (RELATED: Another Major American Brand Slowly Backs Away From DEI)
Although the total number of nonfarm payroll jobs increased by 256,000 in December, beating economists’ expectations, the amount of taxpayer-funded jobs is cause for concern, EJ Antoni, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF.
“In 2024, more than half of all jobs added were paid for by taxpayer dollars, an unsustainable rate of increase,” Antoni told the DCNF. “An economy needs many private sector jobs to sustain a single publicly financed job through tax revenue. It’s important to remember that direct government hiring are not the only new jobs being paid for by taxpayers. When the government gives a grant to a school or a hospital and that money is used to hire a teacher or a nurse, then that new job is still being financed by taxpayers. Meanwhile, the productive private sector continues degrading, with manufacturing having lost almost 100,000 jobs in 2024, plus another 100,000 jobs that will be revised away in next month’s report when the annual revision is incorporated into the jobs data. Additionally, the number of people reporting that they were employed by the government surged [by] 438,000 in 2024, which is depressing the unemployment rate without increasing the number of people engaged in productive private sector activity.”
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Many Americans have faced intense financial pressures during Biden’s sole term amid stubbornly-high inflation and high consumer costs. While inflation has fallen since its peak of 9.1% in June 2022, rates remain well above the Federal Reserve’s target range. The consumer price index, a broad measure of the cost of everyday goods, increased 2.7% in November from a year earlier, the BLS reported.
There has also been a massive increase in federal spending during Biden’s time in office and the U.S. national debt has continued to rise under the Biden-Harris administration, alongside rising inflation. As of Friday, the U.S. national debt was $36.15 trillion, while the national deficit was $624 billion.
Many unemployed Americans have been struggling to find job opportunities under the Biden-Harris administration. Some workers have also had to adopt a second source of income to make ends meet, as a MarketWatch survey released in August 2024 found that 54% of Americans said they had taken on a side hustle in the last year to “supplement their primary source of income.”
“The Biden regime has prioritized the expansion of government at the expense of strangling the economy,” Stern told the DCNF. “Every dollar taken by the government to fund its operations is a dollar stolen from a hard-working American. They have placed the unelected bureaucrat at the height of economic power and have ignored the typical American middle-class family. Biden pursued policies that raised taxes, flooded the economy with onerous and disastrous regulations, and dramatically increased the cost of living for all Americans.”
The White House has repeatedly praised economic growth and jobs creation throughout Biden’s term. Republican Missouri Rep. Jason Smith, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, released a statement in July following the release of the BLS’ June 2024 jobs report, stating that “Bidenomics continues to put the interests of big government over workers and families.”
The economy was the top issue for voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Some American workers are seemingly anticipating President-elect Donald Trump’s impending return to office, as a Resume Genius survey released in December found that about two-thirds of Americans were optimistic about the incoming Trump administration’s impact on their careers.
“Job creation smashed expectations in December, as employers finished the hiring season strong, optimistic about the end of Bidenomics and the return of the Trump bump,” Alfredo Ortiz, CEO of the Job Creators Network (JCN), said Friday in a press release. “JCN’s small business polling shows a record surge of optimism and hiring among small business job creators who are confident in the Trump agenda of deregulation, tax cuts, energy dominance, and low inflation. Now it’s time for incoming Republicans to reward this confidence by quickly passing pro-growth legislation, centered on an extension and expansion of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, as quickly as possible. Doing so will continue this labor market and economic momentum. But, for now, it’s New Year in America again.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
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