What proportion of our government is elected?

An acquaintance of mine questioned my claim in yesterday’s post that 99.99+% of the Federal government is unelected. Here are the figures:

In the executive branch, only the president and vice-president are elected officials. That’s two. In Congress there are 100 Senators and 435 House members, for another 535 elected officials, or a grand total of 537 elected officials in the Federal government.

As of 2006, there were about 1.9 million unelected civil servants working in the Federal government, not counting the Postal workers or the Armed Forces. If one counts all the employees working for government-funded contractors and organizations that receive government grants, the total is about 14.6 million employees. But lets just stick to those 1.9 million directly employed by the Federal government.

So about 0.00028% of the Federal government is subject to voter recall.

But let’s be even more generous. There are 2000-3000 political appointees, and although they aren’t directly elected, one could argue that they are recalled when their patron is recalled. And the President and Vice-President probably each have a dozen senior staff who help shape policy, and who go when their boss goes. And members of Congress have an average of 3-4 senior staff each who help shape policy, and who go when their boss goes. So let’s include all these “indirectly elected” people, for a total of around 5500 “elected or indirectly elected” federal employees.

Even under that much more generous interpretation only about 0.0029% of the Federal government is subject to voter recall. I’m sure the framers of the Constitution would be appalled!

I rest my case.