Today, more than 100 federal agencies employ about 2.7 million civilian workers or roughly 2 percent of the total U.S. workforce in jobs representing more than 800 occupations. Those occupations generally require workers who have a broad complement of training, skills, and experience, and the federal government competes with other employers for individuals who possess the right mix of attributes. To better understand the characteristics of federal workers, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examined the attributes of a subset of the government's civilian workforce: the roughly 1.4 million salaried workers not including employees of the Postal Service who fill full-time permanent positions in the executive branch. Basically the government's whitecollar employees, that group represented slightly more than one-half of all civilian workers in December 2005. (In this report, the terms federal employees and civil servants refer only to the employees in that group.) The analysis builds on CBO's previous work on federal employment and pay.