ABSTRACT
Governments in the United States had over 22.3 million employees in 2017, representing about 15 percent of total non-farm employment that year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 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. Budgets may include any of a number of different types of information about a workforce. The award-winning budget of the city of Portland, Oregon, for example, includes a distribution by both activity and occupation for each agency of government. Where vacancies exist, though, head counts could understate the full size of the work-force funded by a budget.
