ABSTRACT
Monitoring the size and composition of those workforces is an important feature of government budgeting and management. Information on employment supplements data on spending as a measure of the size and scope of government. Employment totals help officials enforce employment caps that they sometimes impose on agencies. Changes in employment levels can also serve as a measure of the progress of reforms designed to make government work better and to reduce costs. Some budgets contain summary reports that list employment for the government as a whole. Others break down and distribute such information throughout a budget by program, function, or some other factor. In either case, governments vary in how they choose to array data and how they count employees.
