The government is controlled by the government, not voters. The government has incentives to stay the course. Every single government employee wants to keep their job, managers want to keep their teams/projects/products. The government downsizing itself amounts to hundreds of thousands of individuals collectively deciding to act against their own interests on behalf of some abstract notion of what’s best for hypothesized future citizens. Not going to happen. Workers are workers. The government is first and foremost a workforce.
I didn’t connect the dots, sorry. Say a government agency needs to be better, like DoT for instance. How will you make DoT better? Every president puts a new leader in, buttgieg has some authority, but most DoT staff have been there forever. He can bring in some of his own people, maybe “manage out” (bully till they resign) those who don’t adopt his agenda or conflict with the people he brought in. But for the most part, DoT is going to keep doing what it does, same managers managing the people, doing the same work, protected from firing by American labor laws, and so how do you “make it better” without firing a lot of people, or moving them around, all at once?
