January 12, 2009 7:49AM # Obama Backs Off Hiring 600,000 More Bureaucrats? By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE In his weekly radio address on January 4, President-elect Obama promised that his economic plan would “create three million new jobs, more than eighty percent of them in the private sector.” [Dan Mitchell pointed out](https://www.cato.org/2009/01/05/obama-wants-600000-more-bureaucrats/) that that suggested that he intended to hire 600,000 new bureaucrats. That point got some [attention](http://www.examiner.com/r-5090498~Obama_Wants_600_000_More_Bureaucrats___Government_and_Politics__.html), and apparently it actually made Obama and his supporters nervous. Because in [his January 11 radio address](http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/your_weekly_address/), he promised that *90 percent* of the jobs he creates or saves will be in the private sector. And interestingly, both the [*Washington Post*](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/10/AR2009011001999.html) and the [*New York Times*](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/us/politics/11radio.html) put that in the *first sentence* of their page-one stories on Sunday. This was the first sentence in the lead story in the Sunday *Post*: > Facing increased skepticism from both parties about the details of his economic stimulus proposal, President-elect Barack Obama and his team yesterday laid out new claims regarding the $775 billion package, saying that 90 percent of the jobs produced would be in the private sector, including hundreds of thousands in construction and manufacturing. Well, it’s good to know that the Obama team is now thinking about — or at least wants us to think they’re thinking about — creating private-sector jobs rather than just hiring more bureaucrats. Of course, we still have the problem that huge government spending programs [won’t actually create jobs](https://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9825). ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Tax and Budget Policy](https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-policy) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).