The issue is that the concept of "size" is very nebulous, and it's very reductionist and misleading to measure that with just money. A good example to make here

The issue is that the concept of "size" is very nebulous, and it's very reductionist and misleading to measure that with just money. A good example to make here is that North Korea has no income tax. The undesirable part of the war on terror is not the fact that it wastes a few billion dollars of federal money; it's all of the secondary burdens that it imposes on ordinary people. Airport security at the time was almost nonexistent by comparison to today. The growth of federal prison is not harmful because it imposes $23 worth of taxes per person; it's harmful because, well, it imprisons people. It's $7 billion of money to law enforcement, but 1% of the population is $150 billion lost GDP. If the regulatory authorities become 4x more efficient due to technology and enforce 2x as many regulations at 0.5x the cost, that's not small government. So I think the general way of describing this is that government might be growing smaller in the sense of being less useful, but at the same time larger in the sense of being more intrusive.