Such political games with the bureaucracy are not the sole province of Republicans. The Clinton/Gore administration played a particularly cynical game in its reinvention efforts, repeatedly publicizing the shrinking federal payroll. The quarter- million federal positions eliminated by the reinvention movement were mostly supervisors, personnel specialists, budget analysts, accountants, auditors, and the like. These people primarily oversaw third-party operations, namely, the private contractors the government increasingly uses to carry out public programs and policies. Contract employees who indirectly do the public’s business vastly outnumber employees in the federal civil service, and reinvention shrank these numbers not at all. If anything, the cuts in the federal payroll made it much more difficult to hold third-party contractors accountable (Seidman 1998, 112–113).