Note that federal government employment excludes active duty military personnel (but includes civilian employees of the Department of Defense). It does not include the people working for the legislative branch nor the federal courts. Note also that the government employment does not include the workforce in the private sector working under government contracts. There are many times as many contract workers as actual federal employees. The spikes are for census years, when large numbers of people are hired to conduct the census.
I would note that a president in the first year of his first term heads a government with a budget negotiated by his predecessor. The graph shows, interestingly that under the administration of conservative Republican icon Ronald Reagan, the federal government bureaucracy increased as a percentage of the U.S. population. I has decreased in percentage of the population in the Obama administration after the first year. Perhaps Obama is not the big government Democrat some people think him to be.
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