Friday, Jul. 3, 2020
Is the cost of another day off for federal workers meaningful relative to the national debt?
According to a 2017 calculation, the U.S. government pays its 1.97 million employees about $524 million a day. That sum represented about 0.013% of $4 trillion in spending in 2017, about .002%, or two one-thousandths of a percent, of the June 2020 national debt of $26.4 trillion.
Updated June 18, 2021: Congress approved Juneteenth as an eleventh federal holiday.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Sources
- FedSmith.com Cost of federal workforce
- The Balance Current government spending
- Treasury Direct Debt to the penny
- Reuters Biden to sign Juneteenth bill, creating holiday marking U.S. slavery’s end
About fact briefs
Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.
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Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.
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