Watchdog says DC swamp has gotten bigger, richer and more secretive since 2020
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First on Fox: A new report from a government watchdog group poses the question: Why is Washington still unable to fund the basics of government, with nearly 800,000 federal bureaucrats earning six-figure salaries and average federal workforce salaries far outpacing its size?
Open The Books, a project of American Transparency, a nonpartisan, non-profit 501(c)3 charitable organization, closely tracks government spending and released an expansive report on Wednesday ahead of an imminent deal between Republicans and Democrats to reopen the government, showing that the swamp has gotten bigger, richer and more secretive since 2020.
The report, which analyzed all publicly disclosed federal salaries for fiscal year 2024, found a total of 2.9 million civil service employees with a total payroll of $270 billion, plus an additional 30% for benefits. While total headcount has increased by 5% since 2020, salaries have increased nearly five-fold.
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A chart from a new Open The Books report highlights how overlays are expanding at nearly five times the rate of the federal bureaucracy. (Open the books)
The current federal workforce costs American taxpayers $673,000 per minute, $40.4 million per hour, and just under $1 billion per day, according to Open The Books. This includes nearly 1,000 workers who earn more than the president’s salary of $400,000 per year, 31,452 non-War Department federal employees who earn more than any governor in all 50 states, and 793,537 people who earn $100,000 or more. The report notes that those earning $300,000 or more saw an 84% increase since 2020, while there was a similar 82% increase in those earning $200,000 or more.
During the Open The Book investigation, the watchdog group also found that the names of 383,000 federal employees at 56 different agencies were redacted, amounting to a total of $38.3 billion in wages. “You can’t have accountability without vision,” says Open The Books CEO John Hart.
“The Trump administration has a historic opportunity to bring much-needed transparency to the administrative state,” Hart said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “While federal employees do not add as much to the debt as safety net programs, defense, and general agency spending, they are an indicator of government growth.”
“Our investigators found too many redactions and blind spots that the Department of Justice should have already fixed. You can’t have accountability without vision. Taxpayers need a much clearer picture of the federal workforce than they have today.”
US Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, is working with Open The Books to fight for greater transparency. In a September letter to Scott Kubor, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Ernst said she identified “numerous examples” of full-time federal employees receiving two paychecks while working overtime for other agencies or government contractors, something normally prohibited by law. Ernest indicated that this was done without the consent or knowledge of the managers of these workers.
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Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa (center) speaks on Capitol Hill alongside Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, R-West Virginia; Steve Daines, R-Mont.; and John Thon, R.S.D (Reuters)
“From 2021 to 2024, a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) employee held multiple full-time government contractor positions, often costing taxpayers more than 24 hours of work in a single day,” Ernst said in her letter. “In addition to HUD, she was being paid by AmeriCorps and the National Institutes of Health. Since she worked remotely at all three jobs, she was able to hide her overlapping jobs and get away with paying taxpayers $225,866 for hours she never worked. She claimed she worked 26 hours on 13 out of 21 workdays in one month.”
Ernest also described a second example of a Peace Corps human resources official who was caught falsifying time cards submitted to various agencies, resulting in the employee double-billing taxpayers for tens of thousands of dollars. I showed several other examples in the letter as well.
“Until recently, other than death and taxes, the expanding bureaucracy in Washington was one of the few certainties in life,” Ernst said. “I am proud to partner with the Trump administration and DOGE to successfully downsize a bloated bureaucracy, but there is much more work to be done to make Washington more efficient.”
Ernst said one could “look no further” than Schumer’s “failed shutdown,” noting that taxpayers would be on the hook for more than $12 billion in back pay for 750,000 non-essential federal employees who have not worked for a month and a half.
The US Capitol Building in Washington, DC (Wayne McNamee/Getty Images)
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In October, Ernst introduced the Nonessential Workers Transparency Act, which aims to provide the public with an accurate accounting of how much back wages the government will be required to pay in the event of a shutdown.
The bill would require executive agencies to submit detailed reports to Congress within 30 days of the expiration of appropriations that must include the total number of employees and contractors employed by the agency at the time of closing, the total salaries paid by the agency during the previous fiscal year, the number of furloughs during the lapse and their annual salaries, the number of employees not furloughed and their total salaries, and a requirement that all such information be publicly posted on agency websites.
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2025-11-13 00:34:00
