A true conservative POTUS would cut the federal government in half and the federal budget by one trillion dollars in four years. How?
1. Eliminate DoE, DoEd, Labor, Commerce.
2. Cut EPA, TSA, IRS, DoJ, NSA and half the people at the Pentagon.
3. Privatize USPS, Fannie and Freddie Mae.
4. Audit the Federal Reserve.
5. Cut taxes.
And on the second day,
While those are indeed goals, it is beyond treating them as a punchline: they need to be seriously “timetabled”, as part of the “1st hundred days” of a new administration.
(This assumes conservatives in control of the house and senate, and a conservative POTUS.)
The very first thing is to get the branches of the government reordered, to make undoing the changes much harder. This means the POTUS working with congress to reduce the power of the “imperial presidency”.
Then it means conservative chairmen of the house and senate judiciary committees letting the judiciary know that it will not interfere with, or try to block the process of downsizing the government, which otherwise it would do. This is pretty much a threat, that if they try to, and they will, this power will be taken from them.
Then the POTUS will nominate cabinet officers whose entire purpose is to downsize their agencies. This means that when congress zeroes the budget for that agency, except for funds to shut it down, they will have to work with these cabinet officers to do so in a methodical manner.
Because a lot of federal employees have job security, before they can be fired, they must be transferred to jobs that are not protected, so they will lose this security.
The budget process will have to move full steam ahead, and congress will need to split off the condemned agencies from others that are just to be reformed. Until congress completes its agency budgets, they will likely still be egregiously wasting money from the last Obama budget.
Behind the scenes there will have to be a purge list of federal employees who were engaged in improper political actions, corrupt activities, and unconstitutional acts. And this list is going to be very long indeed, including a lot of senior military personnel.
Then among the reforms, non-police, non-military and non-intelligence agencies are going to have to be “de-paramilitarized”, stripped of their weapons and SWAT teams. A major reorganization of the 16 intelligence agencies.
Lots of laws will need to be restored as well, including the War Powers and Posse Comitatus Acts.
Vast amounts of land takings by the federal government need to be restored to the states, again without judicial interference.
Streamlining of the appeals process for state and federal death penalty cases. The recreation of the US energy and heavy industry, even if foreign treaties need to be abrogated to do so.
The list goes on and on. They’ve got their work cut out for them.