Close to 80,000 Government Jobs Lost in 2013

In the month of December the federal government jobs dropped by 2,000. This ended the year 2013 with a net loss of 79,000 federal jobs. These numbers were released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For the month of December, federal agencies lost 4,200 jobs. This excluded the United States Postal Service, which actually gained 2,200 employees. This helped offset the losses, dropping the net total down to 2,000.

Overall, the United States economy added only 74,000 jobs. This number was much lower than many experts were thinking would actually happen. Despite this news, the unemployment rate in United States dropped to 6.7 percent, but this is due in large part to more people exiting the work force.

Even though this news is not good, the job loss rate for the federal government has slowed down over the past couple of months. For the month of October, federal agencies dropped 12,000 jobs. The government also lost 94,000 jobs for the previous 12 months, which is a major difference to the 12 months for 2013. All of this data runs in line with the drop in the amount of employees who retired from federal service. Those numbers showed a downward trend in November and December of 2013.

As federal agencies await their budgets for fiscal year 2014, job hiring could increase very soon. This could also happen due to the repeal of sequester for the next two years because of the passage of the budget agreement. Hiring freezes at various federal agencies could be lifted, which have aided in the massive job losses.

There are a total of 4.3 million federal employees. This number includes workers at the United States Postal Service and the military. The number will probably decrease as troops are removed from Afghanistan and the Postal Service tries to find ways to drop its staffing levels.

There are some congressional Republicans who want to drop the number of government employees by using attrition. This means that no new workers will be hired to replace those that leave government for other jobs or for retirement.

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