The Crackerjack Prize in the April Jobs Report

They say every cloud has a silver lining, but this is more of a "silver lining has a silver lining" kind of thing. The April jobs report came in better than expected, with a promising 115,000 new jobs reported, more than the 65,000 predicted. That's good news, but there's better news on the employment ticker: In April, the number of federal government employees shrank by 9,000. And that's just the tip of the taxpayer-funded iceberg. An editorial from Issues & Insights has the numbers.

When the federal government released its jobs report for April, even the die-hard Trump-hating media had to admit that the gain “beat expectations.” Economists had expected just 65,000, not the 115,000 reported.
But the jobs report is even better than advertised, because it included a loss of 9,000 federal workers.
That wasn’t how mainstream news outlets covered the report. They were busy on Friday, warning about “several red flags” and that “the solid-looking topline employment numbers mask underlying weakness in the labor market.”
Given these “experts” inability to forecast anything accurately, especially when President Donald Trump is in office, we will take those “red flags” with a substantial grain of salt.

Substantial is perhaps not enough salt, but it's those federal workers that we're concerned with, and April is just the latest.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in every month but one since Trump took office, the number of federal workers has declined. And the increase in February of this year was due to the Post Office hiring people. Not counting postal workers, nearly a thousand federal workers lost their jobs.
So far this year, the federal workforce has shrunk by 57,000 workers (nearly 59,000 if you exclude postal workers).
Since Trump took office, the federal workforce has been downsized by 345,000.
As a result, there are fewer people employed by the federal government today than at any time since 1966.

That right there is a good deal, and that's for sure and for certain. So, we are left to wonder, why is federal spending still through the roof? Well, that's the problem. The employees - the federal workforce - isn't really the problem, although too many of those jobs are low-hanging fruit for those seeking to curtail the government. No, the problem is this: Two-thirds of all federal spending is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, various welfare programs, education subsidies - in a word, entitlement programs.

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This problem, runaway entitlement spending, isn't something the executive branch can just wave a wand at and resolve. Yes, the Justice Department is going after fraud in these programs, including particularly Medicare, Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Yes, they may well recover billions of dollars. But it's the programs themselves that have to be revised, and that will take Congress to act.

Congress doesn't seem too anxious to take that on. Neither party seems inclined to take on the entitlements problem. And that, not federal employees, is the real cause of our runaway spending.

Still, an inability to get the big things wrong is no reason, though, to get the smaller things done. 345,000 federal employees who clearly were extraneous to requirements, that's still a fair piece of change of taxpayers' money that we aren't spending - or at least, we're not spending it on lounging federal employees. That, once again, is what we might call "a good start."

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.

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