Now we’re beginning to see how President Obama plans to “create or save 3 million jobs.” He’s just going to make government employees out of them.
Trying to get an accurate tally of all of the new government hires isn’t easy; in many cases they are simply part of the beefed-up funding for various departments and agencies.
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that promotes government employment, thinks the administration needs to add 200,000 new government jobs. Our bet is that the president’s well on his way to reach that goal—and more. The Wall Street Journal reports that:
- The president’s budget creates 33,600 new defense department jobs by 2015, while it envisions cutting many of its current contractors.
- The Department of labor gets 1,000 new jobs.
- There will be 107 new air traffic controllers and 36 aviation-safety experts.
- There will be 109 new bomb-detection officers.
Plus, we know that several agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the IRS, are getting big budget boosts so they can hire more people.
Now, some of these new jobs may be needed. With the recent food importation problems and the Democrats’ quest to import foreign prescription drugs (and their price controls), the FDA might well need additional resources.
But we think the budget is more about “growing government” than “good government.”
Remember last January when then-President Elect Obama addressed the problem of the growing number of unemployed, he said his goal was to have more than 80 percent of those 3 million new or saved jobs in the private sector.
Well, do the math for the remaining 20 percent. That’s about 600,000 new federal employees. Just to give you an idea how big that is, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the largest federal employee union—and it has 600,000 workers.
And we transition from a country in which Barack Obama is not just our president but our employer.