Federal payroll costs taxpayers almost $1 billion – a DAY!
Topline: The federal workforce costs the American taxpayer $673,000 per minute, $40.4 million per hour, and just under $1 billion per day. That’s according to federal payroll records analyzed by Open the Books for a new report, “Mapping the Swamp,” in which it identified 2.9 million federal employees who earned $270 billion in pay in FY 2024.
With an estimated 30% additional cost for benefits, the total expense reaches $351 billion, or almost $1 billion per day.
Key facts: Open The Books’ records include 1.5 million executive agency workers, 761,624 Department of Defense civilian employees and 638,007 U.S. Postal Service workers.
The statistics do not include the 1.3 million active members of the military, whose salaries are exempt from requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. Some other agencies including the Internal Revenue Service and intelligence agencies also refused to release their payroll.
The federal payroll expense has increased by 25% since 2020, even though staff headcount only increased by 5%. Since 1998, payroll is up 417% and headcount is up 45%.
There were 956 federal employees who outearned the president’s $400,000 salary in 2024. (The president donates his pay.) Most of them were medical officers at the Veterans Health Administration, though the four highest earners were doctors at the National Institutes of Health.
The average salary exceeded $100,000 in 117 of 127 executive agencies and in the White House. At the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities Exchange Commission, average pay was over $200,000. Obscure agencies like the Arctic Research Commission and Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board also were among the top 10 agencies with the highest average pay.
Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com.
Background: The payroll records the Office of Management and Budget sent to Open The Books contain 383,000 redacted names across 56 federal agencies. That makes it difficult to find the salary of certain controversial bureaucrats or identify employees that could be illegally working for multiple federal agencies, as has happened in the past.
The redactions have been increasing for years. In 2016, President Barack Obama’s administration redacted only 2,300 names. In 2022 under President Joe Biden, 350,860 names were redacted.
Summary: The current size of the administrative state would have seemed inconceivable just a few decades ago, as would — not coincidentally — our $38 trillion national debt.
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com