Obama's Plans Require a Lot More Hands

President Obama’s ambitious budget and stimulus plans will require the government to hire scores of new workers, the Washington Post reports. Analysts put the number between 100,000 and 250,000 spread among various agencies, the biggest expansion of the federal workforce since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society days. Some agencies are already planning hiring initiatives; Veterans Affairs, for example, expects to add 17,000 to the payroll.

The federal workforce has been in decline since Reagan, and many see this as an overdue boost. “We’ve had a government that has been starved,” said the president of the Partnership for Public service. But Republicans will likely complain Obama is expanding government. “What group of socialists got in the room and wrote this budget?” Newt Gingrich asked. (More federal employees stories.)