Very few governments will ever willfully simplify themselves. The trend is always for more complexity, more departments, more officials, more wars, more government employees. This happened with the Maya, the Romans, the Egyptians, and practically ever other fallen civilization. That's because a civilization gets used to solving problems in a certain way and when they start to get a negative marginal return on their investment, they keep trudging along and eventually the society collapses unless there's a new source of technological capability that can keep things moving along. Anyway, that's just Joseph A. Tainter's "Collapse Of Complex Societies" in a nutshell for ya'.

Definitely. U.S. General MacArthur and staff literally wrote the current Japanese "Peace" constitution, and forced the Emperor from Japanese politics.

That's the hypothesis of the economist Mancur Olson.