These 2 charts will show you just how big the government is

(Image credit: Washington Post)

published 31 March 2015

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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(Washington Post)

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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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.