DOGE Fired Federal Workers v. Clinton Admin. 1st term federal cuts

This is from an editorial a couple of days ago on a website Issues & Insights that spun off from Investors business Daily when they no longer wanted editorial material.  It was sent to me by MS (thanks!).

Interesting analysis and a short read if you hit the link below. I'm just going to excerpt a little comparison between DOGE and Clinton. I believe the separation agreement calls for eight months of salary and coverage for benefits for that length. If I am wrong please leave comment or email me.

Estimates about how many jobs have been cut so far differ. The press claims DOGE has eliminated around 100,000 federal jobs. Challenger, Gray & Christmas says 62,530 were let go in January and February. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded a net loss of only 6,700 federal jobs in February. Whatever the case, Donald Trump wants big numbers. The Department of Education already said it will chop its workforce in half. Veterans Affairs says it is targeting 80,000 workers.

Terrible, right?

Wrong. Consider the context missing from every one of these sky-is-falling stories:

This is just a haircut.

• There are 2.4 million federal workers, which means that eliminating even 200,000 is a tiny 8% trim. (Southwest Airlines recently announced a 15% cut in its workforce.)
• Under President Joe Biden, the non-military federal workforce grew by 140,000. DOGE hasn’t even managed to get the workforce back to where it was before Biden’s spending spree.

Job cuts of this magnitude aren’t unprecedented. Just the overheated coverage is.

• In Bill Clinton’s first term in office, he shed more than 330,000 federal workers. There were no protests and virtually no media coverage.