The ongoing debate over the Trump administration’s plan to freeze federal hiring has thus far involved arguments and “alternative facts” from those on both sides of the question. This obscures certain hard truths about America’s “Big Government” and its real federal bureaucracy.  What follows is an (I hope brief and user-friendly but duly detailed) attempt to mediate that debate and spotlight certain deeply inconvenient truths about the character and quality of present-day American government and “we the people” to whom it is accountable.

1. What is “Big Government?”

As commonly used in America, “Big Government” refers to three features of the national or federal government headquartered in Washington, D.C.:

● How much it spends

● How much it does, and

● How many people it employs