You’re mostly speaking my language, but my primary goal towards axing much of the FedGov would be around reducing the powers of the Presidency (which encompasse

You’re mostly speaking my language, but my primary goal towards axing much of the FedGov would be around reducing the powers of the Presidency (which encompasses all of the Executive bureaucracy), focusing the objectives of the Presidency on fewer but more important domains and reducing the stakes of each election’s outcome. The more you have the FedGov do for you, the more intent you are on seeing that the “right” people win when there are very functions that the FedGov provides domestically that couldn’t be served by State governments that, as a side effect of not having their overlapping tax bases contributing so much towards a large Federal bureaucracy, don’t need to get their money back from Departments that serve as umbrella organizations for redistributing wealth between States. I don’t think there’s much gains to be had by trying to re-architect who does what and what we conceptualize them as as just moving offices under an appropriate enough Secretary and shutting down the superfluous ones. DHS is one I’ll give up as one I had in mind for shutting down, but most of the Offices and Agencies that make up DHS had prior homes until they were shuffled into the newly created DHS. We still need immigration and border control functions, we probably still need some form of airport security (which doesn’t have to be TSA). We still need the Coast Guard, but we don’t need DHS specifically with one more secretary with associated undersecretaries in the stew vying for funds straight from the Congressional teat. EDIT: Just as additional context, each US Department generally has several separate administrative function offices dedicated to providing that specific Department with resources, budgeting offices are pretty common, and handle the budgeting for all agencies under that Department. Axing an entire US Department is a quick and dirty way to reduce some of that overhead. The remaining Departments will increase the headcount of their own administrative offices to compensate any agencies they take in, but given that the big win here is massive reduction of the US Government’s headcount, that is a tradeoff I’m willing to make.