I received the following note from one of my "advisers". I am on the Board of Directors of an industry organization and this person answers economic questions. One of the questions posed to him by one of our members was "What will happen to government spending, especially the use of contractors, after the elections?"  Here is his assessment:

I entered the federal market in 1966 when annual contracting expenditures were only a few billion; they are now around $450 billion. We have been through five Republican and three Democratic administrations. Would you say the spending trend is up and the political party in power doesn't really matter?

Democrats tend to rail against outsourcing but love to grow the size of government. Republicans claim they want to reduce the size of government, but it ends up growing anyway - and they do love outsourcing to contractors.

So what happens if Hillary gets in? Continued growth in the long term; the same thing that happened when Bill was in office. Hillary would probably pontificate against the extensive use of contractors a bit in the beginning. But that's what Democrats do and the impact will probably not go much beyond a sound bite or a minor downward ripple in the beginning. What would Barack do? Probably about the same thing as Hillary but with a little less noise. What would McCain do? More of the same, following in the footsteps of the Bush Administration.

I have worked in the DC area for many years, too (not quite as long as this man), and the only dip I saw in government spending was for the first year after Bill Clinton took office. That dip wasn't planned. Rather, it was because he didn't have a group of Secretaries and Undersecretaries lined up to take over.  Recall, we actually had a government shutdown during that year. That was partially due to him not having people in place to defend the budgets on the Hill. My point here is that government grows under a Democrat administration and under a Republican administration, so don't let that rhetoric be your reason for voting for one individual over another.