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FreedomRankings

Data

Federal government data

How big the federal government is, what it spends, and who it employs — assembled from the government's own published figures, with every number traced back to the exact file it came from.

Source data last read . Five official datasets, re-read on a schedule and checked against their own internal totals before anything is published.

Executive branch staff

2.28 million

Civilian FTE, FY 2025

Total federal outlays

$7.01 trillion

FY 2025

Federal jobs

2.67 million

August 2026

IRS collections

$5.31 trillion

Gross, FY 2025

Most published writing about the size of government picks one number and runs with it. The trouble is that there is no single number — the government publishes several counts of its own employees that disagree with each other by design, and several measures of its own spending that answer different questions.

These pages report each measure separately, say what it counts and what it leaves out, and link the exact file every figure came from. Nothing here is estimated or interpolated. When a source publishes a projection, it is drawn dashed and labelled as one. When two sources disagree, both are shown rather than averaged.

Every agency

One page per federal budget unit, each with its full spending history back to 1962 — 26 of them, ordered by what they spent in FY 2025.

Outlays in FY 2025, from OMB Historical Table 4.1. Four rows in that table are accounting residuals rather than agencies — allowances, undistributed offsetting receipts, and two “other independent agencies” lines — and have no page here, because a page about an accounting residual would be a page about nothing.

How these figures are checked

The risk with government spreadsheets is not that a download fails. It is that a publisher reshapes a table, the importer keeps working on the new layout, and plausible-looking wrong numbers arrive with a fresh timestamp beside them. So each dataset has to prove itself against its own internal arithmetic before any of it is written:

  • The agency rows in the outlay table, plus its two adjustment lines, must reproduce the table’s own printed total for every year from 1962 onward.
  • The department columns in the staffing table must sum to its printed civilian total, and defence plus civilian to its printed grand total.
  • All 51 state employment series must return data, and their sum must land within a few percent of the national series — the check that catches a wrong state identifier, which is the one error here that would look entirely believable on the page.
  • The IRS’s published cost of collecting $100 must reconcile with its own operating costs and collections, which pins those two columns to each other and to their units.

If any of those fail, that dataset is refused and the previous good data stays in place. A stale figure with an honest date on it is better than a fresh one that is wrong.

Sources and methods

Every figure on this page comes from one of the datasets below and nowhere else. Nothing is estimated, interpolated or carried over from a previous edition. Where two sources measure something similar, they are reported separately rather than combined, because they are not measuring the same thing.

  • Historical Table 16.1 — Total Executive Branch Civilian Full-Time Equivalent Employees

    Office of Management and Budget

    Covers
    FY 1981–2027
    Last read
    September 6, 2026

    Full-time equivalents, not headcount: one FTE is 2,080 paid hours, so two half-time employees count as one. Excludes the Postal Service, the uniformed military, the legislative and judicial branches, and contractors.

    Exact file we readPublisher’s page

  • Historical Table 4.1 — Outlays by Agency

    Office of Management and Budget

    Covers
    FY 1962–2031
    Last read
    September 6, 2026

    Outlays are money actually paid out in a fiscal year, in millions of current (nominal) dollars — not appropriations, and not adjusted for inflation. Some rows are net of offsetting receipts and can be negative.

    Exact file we readPublisher’s page

  • Agency budgetary resources, obligations and outlays

    USAspending.gov (Department of the Treasury)

    Covers
    FY 2026, reported to date
    Last read
    September 6, 2026

    Reported by agencies under the DATA Act and updated within the fiscal year, so a current-year figure is partial by definition. Budgetary resources include unobligated balances carried in from prior years, which is why they exceed the year’s appropriation.

    Exact file we readPublisher’s page

  • Current Employment Statistics — Federal government employment

    Bureau of Labor Statistics

    Covers
    2017–2026, monthly
    Last read
    September 6, 2026

    A monthly count of filled jobs on federal payrolls during the pay period including the 12th of the month, in thousands. Includes the Postal Service, excludes the uniformed military. Not seasonally adjusted at state level; the two most recent months are preliminary and get revised.

    Exact file we readPublisher’s page

  • IRS Data Book, Tables 6-2 and 6-3 — collections, costs and personnel

    Internal Revenue Service

    Covers
    FY 1996–2025
    Last read
    September 6, 2026

    Fiscal-year figures from the IRS Chief Financial Officer. Money is in thousands of current dollars. "FTE realized" and "employees in pay status at fiscal year end" are two different counts and routinely differ by tens of thousands.

    Exact file we readPublisher’s page

Found something wrong? Our corrections log records every fix we have made, and we would rather hear about an error than have it stand.