The quotes I am replying to here are from another thread (
Trump announces Emergency Actions 1st Day to Drastically Reduce the Cost of Living):, but my reply is more on-topic for this thread.
Expanding the cabinet is the opposite of reducing it
Creating more agencies, departments and expanding the bureaucracy, obviously reduces the size, power and scope of government.
By definition, expanding the size of the cabinet is certainly the opposite of reducing the size of the cabinet - but it is not necessarily the opposite of reducing the size of the government in general. For example, if you increase the size of the cabinet by one department, but that department reduces the size of each of the other departments by half, then that might very well result in a net reduction in the size of the government. I am extremely skeptical that it would happen in actual practice, but it is at least theoretically possible to reduce the overall size of government by increasing some (new ?) part of it.
The Executive and Legislative branches have the power now to downsize government [in general] without first expanding it [at the cabinet level].
That is one of the reasons I am skeptical. If the will and wherewithal was there, it could already have been done.
On the other hand, given how inefficient the government is by its nature, it seems appropriately ironic that any attempt by (some part of) the government to make government more efficient would itself be ... inefficient.
And here's another reason I am skeptical:
"Government efficiency" is an oxymoron.
Unlike private actors, government has little to no incentive to be "efficient", because it suffers little or no serious or significant consequences for being "inefficient" (none, at least, that can't be fobbed off onto someone else - such as tax payers, et al.).
Even if genuinely dedicated reformers manage to somehow reduce wastefulness, etc., it can't and won't last - the system will inevitably revert to form and the status quo ante will reassert itself. (But in the meantime, it would be fun watching a bunch of outraged pundits and parasitic bureaucrats squeal like stuck pigs - so there's that, I guess ...)