The right's take on this also seems premised on the idea that the bureaucracy has just grown and grown (it's been fairly steady over time, and leans small when

The right's take on this also seems premised on the idea that the bureaucracy has just grown and grown (it's been fairly steady over time, and leans small when compared to our international peers, so...) and that nobody's worked on efficiency or tracking work that whole time, when in fact there's been a shitload of that and, while you can find waste or even, rarely, fraud, it is not rampant, unless you define waste or fraud as "doing things I don't want them to, even though it's in the budget". In fact, on the fraud front, a lot of government inefficiency has been deliberately introduced—to fight fraud or corruption. So even if you find something inefficient, you better be careful or you'll be undoing an anti-fraud or anti-corruption measure. You see stuff like Elon asking for those dumb-ass "five things" emails when a large proportion of government workers already have their productivity tracked multiple ways, many of them quite objective and hard to fake, because people who are not complete morons have already worked on these problems. This is government based on dumb right-wing misconceptions about how government works. Or, if the people doing it aren't true believers, at least playing to those incorrect notions among voters.