Government Isn't Too Big Because It Helps Too Many People

Why the Cabinet Must Shrink — and How We Do It While Improving Service Quality

Campaign Briefing: Executive Efficiency and Reform

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

April 17, 2026

I. The Argument That Gets Made and the Argument That Should Be Made

When politicians say they want to shrink government, they usually mean they want to cut things that other people depend on. The framing sounds fiscally responsible and generates applause — but it rarely produces results. The programs that get cut tend to be the ones serving people without political power. The redundancy, the overlap, the administrative sprawl that actually drives cost — that persists, because the people who benefit from it have lobbyists.

This campaign makes a different argument. Government is not too big because it helps too many people. Government is too big because it tries to do the same job in too many places at once. Cabinet consolidation is not about cutting services. It is about cutting redundancy — the duplicated back offices, the overlapping mandates, the programs that report to twelve different principals and serve none of them well.

The goal is a government that does its actual job better, not a smaller government that does less.

II. How It Got This Way

The Cabinet was not designed. It accumulated. Each department was created in response to a specific moment — a crisis, a political bargain, a new national priority — and then remained, largely unreformed, as the moment passed and the priorities evolved. Over two centuries, the result is a Cabinet that reflects the residue of American political history more than the logic of American governance.

Departments whose mandates overlap in ways that serve no one. Agencies that regulate the same activities through different legal authorities, each with its own budget, its own staff, its own congressional oversight relationships. Programs duplicated across multiple Cabinet-level structures, each competing for appropriations and attention while the public they are supposed to serve navigates a maze of bureaucratic jurisdictions.

The people who depend on these programs do not care which department administers them. They care whether the service arrives on time, whether the form makes sense, whether someone answers the phone. Right now, the structure frequently gets in the way of all three.

III. The Principle Behind Consolidation

Every consolidation decision in this administration will begin with a single question: Does this structure serve the mission, or does it serve itself?

If two programs are addressing the same need through separate administrative structures, one of those structures is unnecessary overhead. If four agencies each employ their own legal teams, financial officers, IT systems, and human resources departments to perform identical back-office functions, three of those are redundancy. If a citizen must navigate three separate Cabinet departments to access a single integrated set of services — housing, employment, healthcare — the structure is serving the government, not the citizen.

Consolidation eliminates what serves the structure. It preserves what serves the mission. The inspectors who keep food safe, the caseworkers who process benefits, the field staff who deliver services — their work is the mission. The administrative apparatus that has grown around it is, in many cases, a cost that can be reduced without touching the work itself.

IV. The Commitment

This administration will not consolidate agencies in ways that reduce service capacity at the point of delivery. Front-line workers are protected. Programs that serve the public are protected. What is subject to consolidation is the duplicated layer above them — the administrative overhead that has accumulated without a clear public purpose.

The savings from consolidation will be documented, published, and directed back into the programs they were extracted from. This is not a budget exercise dressed up as a reform. It is a structural correction whose benefits flow to the people who fund the government, not to the next round of budget negotiations.

Government isn't too big because it helps too many people. It's too big because it tries to do the same job in too many places. We intend to fix that — without touching the work that matters.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN