@marick @khinsen Note also that the chart you’ve linked to is civilian employment. The DoD decline does not reflect a smaller army (there may have been, but that’s not this table), just fewer DoD civilian workers. I’m not sure why you’d want to break that out of civilian workforce and describe its reduction as masking an increase in other departments. 1/

@marick @khinsen The near constant overall size is not a coincidence. The trope that Federal employment is some kind of job program or waste has been live all this time, so the Federal civilian workforce has been effectively frozen even while the US population has grown by roughly 75%. 2/

@marick @khinsen As you say, contractors “don’t count” to the ideologues, so we’ve deemed a so-called “mixed workforce” a virtue despite high cost and the fact that it’s severely impaired state capacity as nothing is learned, every project is a new contract, started by overpriced consultants, effectively from scratch. As people like @Alon have carefully shown, consultantifying government hollows capability. 3/

@marick @khinsen @Alon I agree we should impose a strong “no gaming” rule, to all of our policy metrics. We should consider it a new rule of the game. /fin