They Did Not Shrink the Government
Retired Civil Servants Expose the #MiddlemanClass
THE MIDDLEMAN CLASS
They promised to end waste, fraud and abuse in Washington. They made it worse.
They moved it where you can't see it.
Government reform has been a shell game. A rigged one. And you keep losing.
Retired civil servants like me have watched it for years. Politicians brag about record savings. Then the budget goes UP. Every time. Every single time.
They cut the cheapest, most basic work the government does. They brag. Then they pour more money than ever into the most bloated part. Again. And again. And again.
Last year Washington cut the people who inspect the chicken, beef and eggs in your fridge. The inspection service lost 775 employees. That same year, complaints about bad meat, poultry and eggs jumped nearly 40 percent.
And that same year, Washington spent more on contractors than ever before. Fewer inspectors. More contractors. Worse food.
Contractors cost MORE. A lot more. The watchdog group POGO compared 35 occupational classifications covering more than 550 service activities. It compared contractor billing rates with the full compensation of federal employees performing comparable work, including federal benefits. Across those 35 jobs, contractors cost 83 percent more on average. Nearly double. The federal worker was cheaper in 33 of 35 jobs. In one job, the contractor cost almost FIVE times as much.
Five times.
POGO published that comparison in 2011, long before DOGE, which matters because the Middleman Class did not begin with DOGE. This system has been building for decades.
In 2025, Washington bragged about the largest federal workforce cut in history. More than 350,000 workers, gone. Smaller government! They threw a party.
That same year, Washington spent more on contractors than any year in American history. $833.8 billion. An all-time record, up $50 billion in twelve months.
Two records. Same year. The biggest cut to the people who work for you, and the biggest payday ever for the middlemen.
One hand held up the pink slips for the cameras. The other hand wrote the biggest checks ever written.
Here's the lie underneath it. Contractors are part of the federal workforce in every way that matters to the taxpayer: they do government work, inside government programs, paid with your tax dollars. Washington simply does not count them as federal employees. That is the trick.
The difference is the for-profit middleman attached to every one of them, and that middleman is very often a political donor. Nobody in DC calls them what they are: the shadow federal workforce.
So why would anyone pay a middleman so much? Follow the money.
An inspector's paycheck goes home to a family. An inspector doesn't hire lobbyists. An inspector doesn't write campaign checks.
A contractor does.
So they fire the worker. Then they buy a contract. The contractor takes its profit, sends a piece back to Washington in lobbyists and campaign checks, and they call it savings.
Savings!
Meet the middlemen. Leidos. You've probably never heard of it. You pay for it anyway. 87 percent of its money comes from the government. Last year it pulled in $17.2 billion. In the year of the DOGE firings, its CEO called the company's performance exceptional.
Exceptional. For them.
Booz Allen Hamilton. 98 percent of its money comes from the government. It doesn't build tanks. It doesn't build planes. It sells people. The same work civil servants do, at nearly double the price.
They stand in the middle and take a cut. That's the middleman class.
Everybody knows about the September spending spree. Everybody. Every year Washington races to burn its money before September 30. Last September the Pentagon spent $93 billion in one month. A record. More than half of it in the last five days. Almost $7 million on lobster.
Lobster.
That was the easiest fix in Washington. A child could find it. DOGE didn't touch it.
Why not? Because DOGE was busy. Busy cutting the people who work for you. Busy growing the middleman class. And busy protecting its boss. Elon Musk ran DOGE. When he walked in, federal regulators had at least 32 open investigations into Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and his other companies. Then DOGE went after those agencies.
The lobster? Untouched. The red tape? Untouched. The investigations into his own companies? Stalled. That's protecting your own.
The people who could explain this best are the ones who work inside government, but the Hatch Act limits what federal employees can say about campaigns and politics. And last year, when more than 170 EPA employees signed a letter criticizing agency policy, the agency put about 140 of them on leave. Then it fired some of them.
So it's retirees like me saying it instead. I spent twenty years in federal budget offices.
HERE'S THE FIX. We wrote it. It's called the Scalpel Act.
1. Bring the work home. If a contractor sits between you and work civil servants already know how to do, we cut that layer out. The job comes home at about half the price, and the worker already doing it can apply to keep it.
2. End the September spree. Managers who save money get rewarded. What they save goes back to the Treasury to fund Social Security and Veterans.
3. Burn the red tape. The 2,000-page purchasing rulebook gets replaced with a short one built on competition.
4. Free the workers. Inspectors, nurses and scientists get their time back from the paperwork pile.
The target: Federal Employees believe savings could exceed $1Trillion dollars over 3 years, greater than DOGE savings, and the result would be improving the governments ability to attract the best workers, not weakening it.
DOGE took a chainsaw to the people who work to protect you. We're taking a scalpel to the people who profit off you.
Here's how we get it passed.
Congress listens to one thing: money moving. Right now the only money they see comes from the Middleman Class.
So let's show them ours.
Our goal: $10,000 in five days, from people who want THIS reform.
When we hit it, every member of Congress hears the same message: thousands of Americans just paid to cut out the middleman. I worked in Washington for twenty years. Believe me, they notice when regular people start sending money.
You don't have to live in Florida. The Middleman Class takes its cut from every state in America. Your $16 counts the same from Ohio, Texas or Maine.
👉 CHIP IN $16. VOTE FOR THE FIX. →
$16 for District 16.
Here's where your $16 goes. The Scalpel Act now has a candidate.
Kelly Kirschner is supporting its approach in his run for Congress in Florida's 16th District. When he read it, he recognized the shell game right away. Why? Because he's running against it.
His opponent is Sydney Gruters. Her husband is Joe Gruters, chairman of the Republican National Committee. As a state senator, Joe Gruters sponsored the law creating new commercial insurance clearinghouses inside Citizens, the state insurance company Floridians turn to when private coverage becomes unavailable or unaffordable. The law requires qualifying commercial policies, including condo association coverage, to pass through that clearinghouse process before Citizens can bind or renew them. A company co-founded by billionaire Republican megadonor Patrick Ryan helped drive the clearinghouse proposal. Florida's own insurance commissioner raised deep concerns. It passed anyway. And this September, state regulators said Citizens had failed to provide the information required for approval and that they were unable to approve the clearinghouse program at that time.
Same shell game. Run from the top of the RNC.
When Kelly walks into Congress, he carries every one of your donations in with him. I'm a retired budget official asking strangers for sixteen dollars. I'm doing it because Kelly read our plan and said yes.
👉 STOP THE SHELL GAME. CHIP IN $16 →
Then do these four things right now. They take 30 seconds:
👍 Like this post. It tells the algorithm to show it to more people.
💬 Comment "SCALPEL." Better yet, name the middleman taking a cut out of YOUR life: the ticket fee, the broker, the insurance company.
🔁 Share it with one friend who works hard and pays full price.
✍️ Federal worker or retiree? Tell us your job, your pay, and what the contractor billed for the same work. Use #IWasTheJob.
We spent years trying to get someone in Washington to read this plan. Kelly read it. They've played the shell game on you for forty years. Now you know where the money went.
Let's go get it back.
Cheryl Kelley
Retired federal budget official and author of the Scalpel Act
#TheMiddlemanClass #IWasTheJob