Worth a read: Francis Fukuyama’s latest post at Persuasion, “A Letter to Elon Musk”:
In any event, firing government bureaucrats is not necessarily a path to greater efficiency. It is a widely believed myth that the federal bureaucracy is bloated and overstaffed. This is not the case: there are basically the same number of full-time federal employees today as there were back in 1969, about 2.3 million. This is despite the fact that the government now disburses more than five times as many dollars as it did back then. In fact, you can argue that the government is understaffed, due to relentless pressure over the decades to keep headcounts down.
Instead, Fukuyama recommends deregulatory measures, targeting the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which stands in the way of many energy efficiency and infrastructure projects, and the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), which impose mind-boggling burdens on government purchasing, along with providing better recruitment, training, professional development and pay for federal employees—de-bureaucratizing the bureaucracy.