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February 28, 2025 | 12:00am
There has been a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth in the United States these days as Trump and Elon Musk mounted their drive to cut the size of the Federal government workforce. There has been no official count of how many federal workers lost their jobs but New York Magazine estimates 30,000 have been fired so far and 75,000 have accepted an offer to resign and will be paid their salaries until Sept. 30. The layoff is part of Trump’s and Musk’s plan to supposedly save the government $2 trillion.
The number of federal workers has risen fairly steadily for decades, by a little over one percent each year. Citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Pew Research reports that as of November 2024, the federal government employed just over three million people, not counting roughly 1.3 million active-duty military personnel, who aren’t typically considered “employees.”
The size of their government has been good fodder for political debate. According to Pew Research, a majority (56 percent) say the government is “almost always wasteful and inefficient,” while 46 percent say it often does a better job than people give it credit for. Half of Americans or 49 percent say they’d prefer a smaller government that provides fewer services, while 48 percent say they’d prefer a larger government that provides more services, according to a survey conducted in April 2024.
I asked Google AI for comparative data for the Philippines. Google came back with what it calls recent data, showing the Philippine government employs approximately 1.6 million career civil servants, with an additional number of non-career and contractual staff; out of this total, the police force (PNP) has around 228,000 personnel, while the military (AFP) has roughly 150,000 active-duty personnel.
I asked for the number of teachers and Google came back with “DepEd data shows that the number of teachers dropped from 879,793 at the end of 2022 to 858,318 by Dec. 31, 2023, a decrease of 21,475. Additionally, teaching-related personnel, including education supervisors, principals, head teachers and guidance counselors, declined from 63,610 to 54,827.”
I get it that the US and Philippine numbers are not comparable. In the US, teachers are paid by the states rather than the Federal government. We include the military in our count but the US military is not included in the usual Federal employee count and that’s over a million.
What matters to Filipino taxpayers is how much is spent on salaries and benefits of government employees. Google AI says that in 2024, 29.4 percent of the Philippine national budget was allocated to personnel services, which include salaries and other compensation for government employees. This was an increase of 14.7 percent from 2023. Given that we have a more than P6 trillion national budget for 2025, that means around P2 trillion of taxpayer money pays salaries and benefits of government officials and employees.
The question now is, are they worth P2 trillion?
It is obvious we are not getting our money’s worth in terms of efficient and corruption free public services. It is obvious that our government staffing is bloated. We can probably fire half of all government employees other than teachers and not feel any difference.
Much as I am generally shocked by what Trump and Musk are doing in wreaking havoc with American institutions, I can empathize with the feeling of many Americans who are cheering the massacre of Federal jobs. Maybe what’s wrong is the way they are doing it. Perhaps the DOGE team of Musk should just be more careful and not fire the Federal employees in charge of minding their nuclear arms arsenal as they did… or the scientists working on bird flu… or FAA staff responsible for air traffic control.
In the Philippines, past attempts to “right size” the bureaucracy have not produced palpable results. Our bureaucracy is large and getting larger because it is considered the employer of last resort by our political leaders. They use government employment to win supporters. And we also have “ghost” employees as well as those who only report during pay days. The rising cost of running our government is unsustainable given that our economy is seriously lagging behind our Asean peers.
Then Duterte created a serious problem when he bloated the retirement benefits of police and military personnel in an attempt to buy their loyalty. In 2023, spending for the military and police’s non-contributory pension program amounted to P128.66 billion, or 2.4 percent of the budget. Rep. Joey Salceda, who has been working on a plan to fix the problem commented that “we must balance the needs of military and uniformed personnel with the sustainability of the MUP pension system. Fiscal sustainability is also national security.”
But if we really want to cut excess fat, we ought to consider abolishing the Senate and reducing the number of congressmen to about 100. Former NEDA Secretary Romy Neri, who also served as Budget Secretary, was telling me that we can save, by his estimate, at least P1 trillion right away, maybe more, by doing away with Congress. If we have a constitutional convention, it should make holding a congressional seat an honor and a public service (like serving in a jury) that need not be compensated the way we are doing now. Let’s see how many will volunteer under such terms.
I can understand the citizen uproar over a bloated bureaucracy that is powering Trump and Musk. We are courting something similar especially with our national debt, now at P16 trillion, approaches P20 trillion with a continuing upward trajectory. Milking the taxpayers for more new taxes makes this an explosive problem. Our politicians can’t steal from the Treasury forever. But they will try, and we must stop them.
Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco
