Illinois has among the lowest per-capita government employee count per that list and is in the middle of the pack for taxes. It's much easier to build housing i

Illinois has among the lowest per-capita government employee count per that list and is in the middle of the pack for taxes. It's much easier to build housing in Chicago than San Francisco... but aldermanic privilege is a thing. So not really a small-government state, and nobody claims it is. Texas is more commonly presented as an example of small government. They're still on the lower half of that employee list and have relatively low taxes, but the government aggressively gets in the way of consenting adults doing things. It's still illegal to gamble in Texas (excepting the state-run numbers racket, because objections mysteriously vanish when the government does it), or to buy alcohol or cars on Sunday, and the only state that has more restrictive gun laws without discretionary-issue of CCW permits is Nevada. Texas did repeal their certificate-of-need law for health care providers, so they're definitely doing something right, but government is not an exception to everything being bigger there. Assuming that FTE/population chart is what it says and doesn't include contractors, I'm not even sure it has any use whatsoever. And that's not getting into all the things where some government would clearly be useful—for instance, getting internet speeds off the list of things that aren't bigger in Texas.