One of Washington’s more combustible little secrets was exposed the other day by USA Today: Recession or not, federal employees have enjoyed a boom-time salary bonanza these past 18 months.

President Obama may wish to limit the pay of corporate executives, but no one is talking much about the extent to which federal employees prospered, while the national economy was cratering to the tune of 7.3 million jobs lost.

Maybe the folks who call Uncle Sam their boss merit every penny of every dollar they’re paid. Still, the following statistics make us pause. They’ve hit the gravy train while Americans are suffering. Consider, as USA Today has:

■ Over the course of the recession, the number of federal employees making $100,000 or more jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent of Uncle Sam’s workforce.

■ The highest paid to begin with are reaping the greatest benefit from these increases in pay. For instance, in the Defense Department — which, in 2008, instituted a very lucrative merit pay system in addition to rewarding its workers with an across-the-board pay raise — the number of civilian employees earning more than $150,000 annually increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009.

■ When the recession began, USA Today reported, the Transportation Department boasted but one employee with a salary of more than $170,000. Now, 18 months later, that figure stands at 1,690.

Small wonder that Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a first-term Republican lawmaker from Utah who serves on the House federal workforce subcommittee, could merely gasp when he heard these figures. “There’s no way to justify this to the American people,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”

It is: Americans have been compelled by the recession to cut back, to sacrifice, to make do with less — in many instances because they have been laid off temporarily or permanently. But has Washington tightened its belt, even if only by freezing salaires? Not in the least, apparently. The $1.1 trillion budget that landed on the president’s desk over the weekend includes a 2 percent raise for federal workers.

The feds’ excuse? Well, said Jessica Clement, government affairs director for the Federal Managers Association, to USA Today, the government employs highly skilled workers — scientists, physicians, lawyers — and pays them less than private-sector workers in comparable positions.

That may be true, but the bottom line, as USA Today discovered, is this: The growth in federal pay has increased the average public-sector worker’s salary to $71,206 a year. Remuneration for the average employee in the private sector? Just $40,331 annually.