Vice President Gore likes to say that the federal government is now back to the size it was in President Kennedy’s Administration, but a look behind the curtain shows no such shrinkage. Real staff reductions are almost entirely confined to the Defense Department, for reasons having more to do with the de-invention of the Soviet Union than the reinvention of the government of the United States.Most of the civilian side of the government has expanded dramatically — especially if compared with the era of the Kennedy Administration, when there was no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Department of Housing and Urban Development, no Department of Education, no Department of Energy, no Department of Transportation and no Environmental Protection Agency, just to name a few things the government was content to ignore. Barron’s
Barron’s March 29, 1999 (http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB922491784617955647.htm)