The State of Texas employed the equivalent of almost 266 thousand full-time employees in 2003. This figure included approximately 242 thousand full-time employees and another 70 thousand part-time employees, whose total hours paid equaled 24 thousand full-time equivalent (FTE) employees.

This means that in 2002 some 312 thousand people worked for the state, with most of those, almost a quarter of a million people, working full-time. These figures do not even count the number of other people who work for the state through outsourced or contracted services. Reliable figures on the number of private sector personnel employed by the state are difficult to find, but among the road builders and other construction services, office maintenance workers, business consultants, information technology workers, communications personnel, and others, the numbers must add tens of thousands of FTEs whose jobs are derived from the state.

The 312 thousand people working directly for the state government, plus the tens of thousands of FTEs in the private sector only begin to capture the extent of public sector employment in Texas. Local governments (counties and cities) in the state employed almost 1 million FTEs (987 thousand to be more precise), including 918 thousand full-time employees and another 157 thousand part-time employees, for a total of 1,075,000 people on local government payrolls in one form or other. Again, this number does not count the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of FTEs of private sector employment generated by local governments.

Adding these figures together yields a figure of almost 1.25 million full-time equivalent jobs in state and local government combined, plus at least another 100 thousand FTEs in the private sector dedicated to public sector work. Just the FTEs working directly for state and local government represent some 5.75 percent of all Texans - more than one in every twenty - according to census data. The percentage would be somewhere around ten percent if it were based only working-age adults.

Large as these numbers seem, payroll costs represent only a fraction, though still a substantial sum, of total state expenditures. The annual payroll for state employees for fiscal year 2003 was approximately $10.6 billion, out of total state expenditures of $60.27 billion, making state payroll about 17.6 percent of total state spending. (Parallel to the numbers above, this does not include labor costs for those employed in the private sector working on state contracts.)

So the reach of state government is long and wide, even in a state whose dominant culture is decidedly distrustful of government, and where political candidates often gain applause by arguing that less government is better government. Of course, while many Texans want small government in the abstract, all of us also want more of those programs that we recognize as directly benefiting us. If we are students or have kids in school, we want more money and personnel for education. If we drive automobiles (and who doesn't in Texas), we want more money for highways and bridges. If we are worried about crime we want more police, prosecutors and prisons. So while big government is a bogeyman in the abstract, the issue becomes much less a matter of principle and more a matter of who wins and who loses when it comes to actually cutting government. Most people are willing to receive the valuable goods and services that government can provide while inviting others to lose services in the name of small government.