Congress and the president may provide the visible faces of Washington, but a set of charts from The Washington Post shows just how tiny a proportion of our government they actually represent. Most of the data comes from a 2012 book called Becoming a Candidate, which calculates that there are more than 500,000 elected officials at all levels of government nationwide:
That's just the tip of the iceberg, though: Unelected bureaucrats and members of the military far outnumber the government employees we voters select:
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And that 4.2 million is just federal employees. As for state- and local-level workers, as Philip Bump concludes at the Post, "we'll just assume that they constitute the rest of the American population."
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