President Ronald Reagan famously said “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Given that sentiment, I had thought that Reagan had shrunk the size of the federal government during his tenure. The 1997 Fact Book, published by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, has a table of federal employment totals from 1982 to 1996. In 1982, there were 2.8 million federal employees. By the end of Reagan’s presidency in 1988, there were 3.1 million employees.