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Depends on what you mean by 'purposefully crude'. Most government-waste-cutting enthusiasts have a dubious understanding of the causes of government inefficiency, have an ideological presupposition that government spending is a waste, and have never heard the term 'market failure'. The result tends to be that they approach the problem by driving a bulldozer through Chesterton's fence. My view is that "they have no idea what they're doing" is significantly more likely than deliberate clumsiness.
There's a side problem wherein the major drivers of government spending are politically untouchable but you need to grandstand about how you're making cuts so you attack the Everything Else bucket even though it tends to be short-sighted penny-wise behavior.
I am a big fan of Chesterton's fence but I don't think that it really applies here. The US government's wasteful spending on creating novel coronaviruses in countries with poor biolab security policies is in no way a tradition that we don't understand the reason for. These programs aren't fences, they're noxious externality generators that have caused an incredible amount of suffering and economic damage. Furthermore, we actually understand the reasons behind this spending to a great degree - to hand out wealth to people who know how to manipulate the machinery of the US government. This cutting of funding might be bad for the infrastructure of the deep state, but nobody objects to chemotherapy on the basis that you might hurt the tumor.
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Nowadays I'm writing my own grants for my research and talk enough with the other side to understand their reasoning and tbh the entire grant-based funding scheme has horrible, horrible structural incentives. To begin with, both sides have a strong incentive to bloat. You know what is more prestigious than managing 50k grants? It's managing 100k grants. On the grant writer side, if a grant is offering 25k but we only have a small project that needs 10k for some extra consumables, what do you think we'll do? Exactly, I say a pilot single cell RNAseq experiment for 4 of the samples adding up to 12k is totally a great idea and make the grant sound as if this was the plan from the start (and it sounds really prestigious since scRNA-seq is a reasonably new tech that the committee deciding the grant is likely to be impressed). This is most obvious in the fact that you're not just not rewarded for saving money, you're actively punished (if you didn't spend all the money you were granted, this makes people angry - they don't want it back - and it's significantly less likely to get your next grant). Second, as already alluded, it's all strongly optimized to sound new, exceptional and fancy. If people handle their own money, they want boring, reliable and necessary (which is imo severely missing in current science). Third, behind closed doors the money often gets shuffled around for other purposes, so the text of the project proposal does not even necessarily reflect the project on-the-ground very well anyway (this is worst for very large projects in which an easy overview of point-by-point financing for every little consumable, staff or outsourced services is just not feasible).
And I'm quite sure that I'm in a comparatively functional field - at least in principle we're investigating stuff like new treatments for cancer, which particular variants cause genetic diseases and similar. I have a colleague working with humanities people and not only are they explicitly identifying as activists fighting for disabled rights as opposed to, you know, scientists, they also try to bully her into stopping her research since investigating severe inborn disabilities is ableist. But the official projects they're part of all sound really nice and positive at first glance.
Also, the problem on cutting the other way around - looking for the X most-stupid-sounding projects - has been tried multiple times, in multiple countries, by different libertarian-inclined parties and it just doesn't work. If you try to go through all funding one-by-one and cut the most stupid sounding, you will first have to fight and justify a lot "but why this", then you're likely getting hit with a lawsuit that tries to prove that you did cut funding in some discriminatory way (which isn't unlikely because there's probably some equally stupid project that you didn't hit since you tried to be more targeted), and then after all the fighting you maybe saved 0.1% of the budget and might not even have hit the actually worst and most useless programs, because the descriptions are optimized to sound nice and the structures behind it are optimized to hide wasteful spending.
At this point I'm willing to turn it on the head: Cut as much as possible, then reinstitute only the absolutely necessary (ideally now not even grant-dependent anymore - if it's necessary it shouldn't be grant-dependent!), and then everyone has to prove again that whatever they're doing is actually a good ROI for society. If my research gets cut, that's probably worth it & I just go into industry.
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Speaking of fences - do you have any guesses how did the US survive with government spending per capita dramatically lower than now for the first couple hundred years of its history?
Big thing - most people didn't live long enough to get old, and the ones who did were supported by their children, or they weren't. We (across Western civilisation - this is profoundly not US-specific) have socialised the cost of elder care (including healthcare), and didn't realise at the time we did it how big the bill could get when everyone would survive to old age.
Medium thing - as spiritual coercion (the implied threat of donate to church-funded public services or go to hell) stopped working, we had to use a lot more temporal coercion to fund the sort of thing that used to be funded by churches and is now funded by the State. Also, the main relevant service is education, and at some point we made the (mostly correct) decision that education through high school should be universal, which dramatically raises the cost and makes charging parents impractical (because a substantial minority can't pay).
Medium thing - post sexual revolution, we normalised single motherhood. That requires a system of transfer payments to single mothers. (Child support is insufficient, because the percentage of a man's potential earning power that the child support infrastructure can extract is MUCH lower than the percentage that a wife and kids can extract in an intact marriage by relying on natural affection).
Small thing - more complex societies need more infrastructure, which costs money, and is often easier to fund through the state than privately, although libertarians have found rare historical examples of things like roads being funded privately.
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By not having 11 super carriers or providing an inflation adjusted pension to every citizen.
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Since I'm sure you're aware of the differences, at least at a high level, I will note that there's quite a bit of daylight between "the country would not survive" and "abolishing these programs would be a net negative". Especially given, as mentioned, that the major cost drivers are politically untouchable.
Ha, my bad, unnecessary rhetorical flair. Of course, this is a complex topic and big spending can be broken down and justified in any number of ways. I just had strong impression that you're from the team that says "no, it's okay to bulldoze over this fence, you just watch!", not the other one, so seeing you, in the context of this discussion, attempting to wield this weapon left me briefly disoriented.
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Even today after all the money is spent on defence, veteran benefits, SSI, medicare, other health progams (medicaid), income security (TANF, Section 8, WIC etc), and eduation. The remaining stuff that comes to mind when you think of government (basically all the bureaucracies, parks, etc) adds up to a bit over $100 billion so far this year or about 5.5% of 1.8 trillion spent so far this fiscal year.
What percentage of the deficit though?
So far fiscal 2025 YTD it's about 14%. The money goes to the big transfers. Last year Medicare, Social Security, Defense, Interest, Medicaid, Income Security and Veterans Benefits and housing were 80% of the budget and 430% of the deficit.
https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
Sure, OK -- but if you're trying to kill the deficit, grabbing whatever low-hanging portion of that 14% exists while you're figuring out what you can do about the big, popular things seems logical?
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National debt was much lower, so very little interest to pay; no social welfare programs; small army except in wartime; no horde of "alphabet agencies" interfering with everything.
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Did you also maybe believe that Milei would fail in Argentina or Twitter would collapse when Elon fired 80% of staff? The government workers I know tell me it’s a joke and few people work hard. (True of white collar private sector too)
Argentina is a basket case, so the chance of a positive outcome from pushing Argentina hard in roughly the right direction without thinking about the details is high. I would have given Milei a 20% chance of success if he applied a Trumpian chainsaw and a 50% chance of success if he spent a week thinking and cut the 10 most obviously stupid things.
America is the richest and most successful country in the world, and considerably better governed than average, so pushing hard in roughly the right direction is almost certain to make things worse unless you do the work to find out precisely what the right direction is. The 10 most obviously stupid things to cut aren't as stupid as they look, because the US system is functional enough that anything that obviously stupid either has already been cut or is hard to cut because the stupid is supported by a powerful constituency.
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No, but then, Argentina is not the US.
Twitter is a billionaire vanity project (or alternatively, an influence op). It is markedly worse as a service post Musk takeover and sacking 80% of the staff hasn't made it any less unprofitable.
The divisions of Twitter where 80% of the staff were sacked stopped functioning (temporarily in the case of HR and finance, permanently and deliberately in the case of content moderation, permanently and accidentally in the case of ad sales). The actual numbers haven't been published, but my read is that only about 25% of the core technical staff were sacked.
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I've never worked in government, but I've witnessed how bloat and apathy have rendered many workers borderline-useless in the private sector—where the profit motive demands efficiency. So I have to suppose that bloat is off the scales where no such motive exists.
The profit motive in the private sector largely doesn't apply to individual employees (or rather, doesn't demand efficiency), who are mostly incentivized to work just hard enough to not have to worry about being fired.
What the market really does is punish (too much) inefficiency. But that logic can't be applied to the government, because the government can't fail (at least, not in the way a mismanaged firm fails).
Per FRED, Federal staffing was approximately 2.3 million in 1955 and 3 million in 2025 (and has remained steadyish since the late 60s). The US population in 1955 was 160m; in 2025 it was 340m.
Fed staffing is a politically contentious issue and there is a lot of pressure to keep it low even as the country grows. Bloat largely comes in the form of contractors - since hiring adequate civil servants is politically impossible, contractors are used to make up the shortfall, and if you thing the Feds have bad incentives, wait until you meet the contractors. USG habitually overpays for services for the sake of keeping nominal headcount down.
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