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In Michel Crozier's book, La crise de l'intelligence, he states that during John F. Kennedy's presidency about 100,000 government jobs were terminated.

Is this figure accurate?
Where can I find any resources that would document the actual reductions?

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    It could be that there's a specific cut the author was thinking about, but as EdoDodo shows below the net effect of everything was still an increase. These kinds of figures when related to US Presidents are quite often politically motivated half-truths. Kudos to you for sniffing out the excrement and looking into it. I wish more of my countrymen were capable of that feat.
    – T.E.D.
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 15:05

1 Answer 1

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The official statistics on the number of federal employees (excluding army and postal service) between 1960 and 2005 are available at http://www.opm.gov/feddata/html/ExecBranch.asp.

The data only shows the numbers at the end of each fiscal year (which at the time ended in June), so if we take Kennedy's presidency as lasting roughly from the start of 1961 (although his inauguration was on January 20, a few months before the start of the fiscal year) to the end of 1963 (although he was assassinated a few months after the end of the fiscal year, in November), the data shows that the number of federal workers went from 1,807,958 to 1,910,538 (which is an increase of roughly 100,000).

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    Kennedy allowed Federal workers to seek collective bargaining. Perhaps there was a replacement of politically appointed employees with civil service employees? Commented Feb 13, 2012 at 16:24

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