The best way to hide a cluttered closet is to keep the door closed. Thankfully for taxpayers, recent revelations exposed that leadership at the Defense Department buried a study they commissioned because it revealed an inconvenient truth that the Pentagon employs too many civilian workers.

As a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, which oversees the Defense Department’s budget, I have noticed an alarming trend in the hearings, testimonies and budget submissions – the civilian workforce at the Defense Department is enormous. After researching the historical trends of uniformed service members per civilian employee, I found that we were, and are, at the highest ratio of civilians per uniformed service member in history.