As the recent government shutdown demonstrated, there’s a lot of fat that can be cut in the personnel department.  This is no fault of the personnel, but the fact is, we don’t need that many in Federal employ.

Here are a couple more items on that score.

The Department of Agriculture is fairly typical of most agencies in its sometimes incongruous responsibilities and huge some say too huge workforce.  It employs roughly 99,000 people to service the roughly 1.4 million Americans employed in farming.

That’s 14 farmers for every DA employee.

And this on the states being absolved, more and more, of their responsibilities by the Federal government:

“Ronald Reagan had a yellow book test,” said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste.  “If something could be found in the Yellow Book, it should be done by the private sector.  Unfortunately, the administration now is taking the opposite view, claiming many services are inherently governmental, and therefore not subject to competition.”

Which feeds back into the bloat in Departments like the DA and those listed on the other side of the first link above.