That article seems confused, e.g.:
> If government spending isn’t going to pay government workers, it must be going to pay people who work in the private sector — nonprofits, for-profit contractors, consultants, and so on. In other words, state capacity is being outsourced.
The money is going to social security payments. Social security went from <1% of federal spending at its outset to more than 20% of federal spending today. Medicare and other assistance programs are a similar story. Most of the money from these programs goes to paying benefits rather than administrative costs, which is generally regarded as a good thing. But they're also what together now constitute the majority of federal spending.
Meanwhile there is another reason why the number of government workers has gone down: Computers were invented. Things that used to be done by hand are now done by machine, and then you don't need as many clerks and bookkeepers to manually process paper records. This is also generally regarded as a good thing.
The points it makes about unfunded mandates and NIMBYs holding everything up with meritless lawsuits are valid, but the "ministerial review" it proposes is the existing permitting process. The problem is we have unfunded mandates and NIMBY lawsuits on top of that, which could simply be deleted and replaced with nothing.
This really seems like the fundamental misunderstanding:
> And guess who’s responsible for monitoring Medicare spending? Bureaucrats. So that’s at least a 2300% return on investment in bureaucracy!
If you only look at the most efficient thing a bureaucrat could be doing, look how efficient bureaucrats are!
Meanwhile the government is still paying thousands of people to process paper records because although computers were invented many decades ago, only parts of the government have discovered them and there are still many things you have to do by bringing physical documents to government offices to be processed in person even when those things have no legitimate reason not to be a government website.
What we need is not to have more bureaucrats, but rather to finish computerizing the things that have no reason not to be so the existing government employees can do the high value stuff instead of wasting time shuffling paper that should have been bits.