Job Killing Regulators?

While I have fully come to expect a misinformed view of reality from organizations with an agenda like Fox News I had assumed this was not be a tactic of my State Representatives. Recently Tim Walberg posted on his facebook page the following statement:

Since 08', 281,000 new regulators have been added, while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6%. Regulatory agencies have seen their combined budgets grow a healthy 16% since 2008, topping $54 billion.

The article linked below is quote is titled "Regulation Business, Jobs Booming Under Obama".

Ignoring for a moment that I was told that Tim Walberg does not have an agenda when it comes to regulations, it should be noted that the 2008 budget, which would include the hiring of new regulators, was put in place by George W. Bush, not President Obama. Attributing all of the increases to Obama is either willful neglect or intentionally misleading.

Obviously the goal of this facebook post is to rally people behind the idea of cutting regulations under that notion that regulations kill jobs. Unfortunately there is no context behind these numbers to support this idea.

Given this I wanted to give people an understanding of the actual numbers behind the increases in jobs and spending associated with government regulations.

First, I would like to point out that Mr. Walberg's first statement is factually inaccurate according to his own link. He says that "Since 08', 281,000 new regulators have been added". The reality is that there is only a total of around 281,000 regulators working for the Federal government and only 26,202 of those jobs have been added since 2008. Then again maybe this wasn't meant to be a factual statement.

Of those 26,202 jobs 63% of them (16,633) are Homeland Security Regulators. Is Mr. Walberg suggesting we should cut back on Homeland Security Regulators? Another 3,583 of the added regulators were in the area of Consumer Safety and Health. Vast majorities of the public happen to support stricter regulations for food safety, safety of pharmaceuticals, air and water pollution, and consumer product safety. I imagine that means that vast majorities are not against increased spending on Consumer Safety and Health regulators.

All told Economic Regulators, which I assume are the ones Mr. Walberg would consider to be some of the most "Job Killing", only make up just under 14% of the regulators on federal payrolls.

Even if you attribute the increases in regulators and subsequent spending from 2008 to Obama, as Mr. Walberg is doing, Obama has only increased regulatory employment by 3.3% and spending by 1.8% per year while under George W. Bush employment increased by an average of 5.7% per year and spending on regulators increased by 7.5% per year.

Additionally, while the article Tim Walberg is errantly quoting from shows that since 2008 federal regulatory spending has increased by 16%, that three year total increase would rank 5th all time in the single year increases in regulatory spending, following increases of 24.3% and 16.4% by George W. Bush in 2003 and 2002 and 20% and 19.6% by Richard Nixon in 1973 and 1971. To the extent that we have a spending problem regarding government regulators, it has been the problem of Republican Presidents.

Perhaps the bigger concern for tax payers should be that we have a Federal employee and his staff that don't take the time to fact check before broadcasting information to the world. Talk about a waste of tax payer dollars. But then again what do I know, I'm just a blogger and this information did require two different Internet searches ( here and here ).