The only things the fed.gov ought to be doing are found in Article. I., Section. 8. of the Constitution, along with things attendant to those items. I get quite tired of telling folks that their wish list of "wants/needs" don't mean dick when there's no authority for it.Agreed and that's fine by me.
The only things the government should be doing are things that are so vital to the common good that we can't live without them (e.g. common defense, mediating international affairs, some legal system, etc.) but that are completely unprofitable and thus can't be done by the private sector.
Winning wars, for example, is expensive, inefficient, and wasteful. Any effective military can be described that way and nobody should care. Why? Because the government should only do jobs where effectiveness trumps all else.
No one cares how frugal and efficient their military is if it loses the war.
It doesn't bother me at all if the government is expensive, inefficient, and wasteful. It bothers me that the government is expensive, inefficient, and wasteful doing jobs it should never have started doing in the first place.
If the government only did the few tasks that governments should do and did them well, no one would complain about expense, inefficiency, and wastefulness.
Mission creep is the evil here. Focus on inefficiency is a meaningless distraction.