Budget for an entity costs far, far, far more than just salaries alone. Also, all in cost on a salaried employee is usually 2-3x their actual salary cost… this isn’t 100k people. It’s roughly 35k people (per their own publicly available info) as well as presumably a large amount of actual physical costs. You gotta pay for offices, equipment, consumables, etc etc.

The US collected $5.23T in tax revenue in 2025, $2.1T is individual income tax [0]. GDP is estimated at around $30T.

Spending on social security is about $680B, medicare is $480B, defense is at $410B [1].

Microsoft's valuation is approx. $2.8T [2], Google $3.8T [3], Amazon $2.3T [4], Facebook $1.6T [5] (Linux supply side is valued at approx. $8.8T).

The FBI employs roughly 38k people with about $10B in funding [7]. The CIA employs roughly 22k people with about $15B (?) in funding [8].

So, from that perspective, $10B is roughly .5% of yearly tax revenue (and about how much the FBI/CIA are funded) and estimated 50k people is about the size of the FBI and CIA combined.

[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/key-statistics/

[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/key-statistics/

[4] https://companiesmarketcap.com/amazon/marketcap/

[5] https://companiesmarketcap.com/meta-platforms/marketcap/

[6] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigatio...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency

No matter how beautiful architecture is it's still not natural beauty.

I do agree there's plenty of places in other countries that have natural beauty, but the US has a combination of very large natural spaces, kept in a mostly natural state (not over developed), and does a decent job maintaining it. This is relatively rare (although the US is not the only one).

The US Forest Service has nothing to do with the amount of ads and billboards in US cities.