[jacob_harris]

It's very common for politicians to point to federal staffing levels as some sort of measure of waste and bloat, but those numbers have been increasingly deceptive since the era of Reagan. Essentially, government has grown in its budget and scope but staffing numbers have not matched that increase because many agencies have instead staffed projects and roles with contractors instead.

This is worst in all accounts: there is no accurate count of how many contractors work for the federal govt (vs. federal employees), they generally are more expensive to hire than staffers and they get trained up on the public's dime and then walk out the door to other projects meaning the agency doesn't benefit from their upskilling like they would if they were internal employees.

With 18F, USDS and digital services within agencies, the government had been trying to reverse its dependency on external contractors to ship code. DOGE eliminated many of those people – you could argue one of its goals was to make government more dependent on vendors and contractors. There is now a new Tech Force initiative, but it seems like it's mainly a way for companies like Palantir to embed junior staff within agencies to find new places to sell software.