Barack Obama wants 600,000 new government jobs out of the "stimulus" plan:

The president-elect says he wants to "create three million new jobs" -- this is a change from a few weeks ago, when he said he wanted the plan to create OR SAVE two million jobs.

He says the "No. 1 goal of my plan ... is to create three million new jobs, more than 80 percent of them in the private sector.”

If you do the math: 20 percent of three million means 600,000 new government employees.

Dan Mitchell from the Cato Institute warns against more government jobs during an economic downturn:

Government workers are grossly overpaid. There are several reasons why it costs so much for the government to "create" a job, including the inherent inefficiency of the public sector. But the dominant factor is probably the excessive compensation packages for bureaucrats. According to Bureau of Economic Analysis data, the average employee for the federal government now gets paid nearly twice as much as workers in the productive sector of the economy.

The Wall Street Journal calls it Club Fed, where the average civilian federal worker nets $106,579 in wages, and presumably benefits, while the average private sector employee brings in $53,289, including benefits.

You can read more about the comparisons between government and private sector wages here and here.