America’s military readiness has been in steady decline ever since Barack Obama took the helm. Yet overall the federal government has grown at an insatiable rate. Obama created numerous government programs that are not only adding trillions of dollars to our national debt but also expanding the government’s already excessive influence on matters not granted its authority. A good illustration is seen in the number of federal regulators. There’s literally an army of them: 277,000 as of last year.

But that’s not an all-inclusive figure, either. CNS News explains that this figure “include[s] only regulatory agencies that explicitly restrict business transactions in the private sector. That means the 277,000 regulators they recorded in 2015 didn’t include anyone from the Internal Revenue Service, Social Security Administration, Defense Department, or the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — even though these agencies account for roughly one-third of all final rulemaking actions in a typical year.”

Even more disconcerting, consider this: Based on a 2014 “Profile of the Military Community” report, federal regulators now outnumber the Marine Corps (187,891 active duty members) and are closing in on the Air Force (312,453) and Navy (321,599). As we’ve seen, regulators can wreak a lot of economic havoc. And the fact the number of them compares to that of our military branches should scare everybody. Obama is building the wrong army.