All that would do is cut cabinet secretaries and their immediate staff; the former departments will now be sub-departments, but will still have to have the same amount of people working for them, because they do different things.
The obvious routes to “streamlining” any office/brain work (and, yes, public service does require quite a bit of brain work) are computerisation/automation (and not far over the horizon, artifical “intelligence”). Which raises all sorts of problems about (a) whether the public at large is equipped to interact with government through computers/internet (material access and the relevant skills) (b) how adaptable the processes and procedures are to changes of political priority and discretionary powers - or whether it locks everyone into a system that reflects its creators’ mindsets and assumptions making changes in policy much more difficult and expensive to implement.
Interesting examples, in that Education, Housing and HHS were originally together in the Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare. And HEW combined various agencies from the departments of Agriculture, Interior, War and Treasury to bring together functions like the Public Health Service and Social Security. Education was later spun off into its own agency to make both agencies more focused.
The DOE was formed in 1977 to bring together the functions of research, electrical power, and weapons from nuclear energy, and fold in agencies like the Federal Power Administration, to create a more focused approach.
Similarly, the Dept. of Veterans Affairs was organized from the old Veterans Administration because something like 1/3 of Americans were eligible for some program administered by the VA.
So the answer is, sure you can reorganize when it makes administrative or policy sense to do so. Some day the health care functions of the DVA may be transferred to HHS, or the research functions of the DOE could be switched to the Dept. of Commerce or Education. But that doesn’t mean government will be “streamlined.”
Bureaucracies generally run in cycles. They start off understaffed, grow, become bloated and slow, and then are trimmed back down to being understaffed. So, depending on where in the cycle a particular agency might be, it may or may not be possible to make them better and faster by laying people off.
But that’s just speaking in general. In the case of US and State government, I get the impression that a lot of the low-level workers in the post office, licensing offices, etc. are either employed largely to ensure that veterans don’t go hungry or to provide labor to people who don’t have any real skills. Since neither of these groups are really hired out of need nor due to capability, it’s probably quite likely that getting rid of a lot of them would just make things better from an organizational standpoint. Though, from a societal standpoint, keeping them employed might be worth it. At the end of the day, having slow service at the post office isn’t the worst thing in life (though it might feel like it for a half hour).
Now a second thing:
What about the tax code?
The right always talks about ‘simplifying the tax code’; usually, this is just doubletalk for reducing taxes on the wealthy and raising them on the middle class.
BUT
Can we actually simplify the tax code in a way that doesn’t harm the poor and middle classes, if so, how?
Simple: Cut the Department of Defense in half, with a focus on cutting our capability to project force. It’d still be able to do its job (i.e., defending the nation), but would be less capable at getting us into unwinnable quagmires.
Next step: Introduce universal health care, thereby cutting out all of the bureaucracy dedicated to determining whether someone is eligible for some program or another, and decreasing the long-term costs by keeping health higher across the board.
Any attempt at shrinking the government that doesn’t start with the military, Social Security, or Medicaid is doomed from the start. There’s just not enough of anything else to make a meaningful difference.
Bureaucracy often gets an undeservedly bad reputation. It’s not a bad idea. It’s actually a form of efficiency.
The basic idea is that if you’re confronted with a large mass of problems you need to solve, you’re going to get overwhelmed if you try to solve each problem individually. The smart solution is to start finding similar problems that all have a similar solution and grouping them together.
Now instead of handling ten problems a day and finding the best possible solution to each of them, you’re handling a hundred problems a day and giving each of them the solution that works best for the group of problems they’re in.
Some people don’t like this. They want a solution that’s individually tailored to their problem rather than a generic solution to problems like theirs.
We can simplify the tax system. Just let the government figure out how much taxes you owe.
Some might think this is a horrible idea. But we essentially do it that way now. We figure out how much taxes we owe. And the IRS can figure out how much taxes we owe. And if our figure disagrees with theirs, we pay theirs. If we have to accept their figures, why not just have them do all the work? What are we accomplishing by doing our own tax returns?
This is the way a lot of other countries handle it. Their tax agencies just sent everyone a bill for how much taxes they owe or a check for how much of a refund they’re getting. You don’t have to do your own tax returns. (But you have the option of figuring out your own returns if you wish and you can appeal if you think the government is overcharging you.)
So why don’t we do it that way in America? Special interests. Any time somebody suggests enacting such a system, there is intense lobbying from H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, TurboTax, and other companies that are based on doing people’s tax returns. These companies have a vested interest in keeping the tax system complicated and keeping participation in it mandatory.
One thing you definitely would very much NOT want to do, given your goals, would be to “roll the Departments of the Interior and Energy into one department called say The Department of Natural Resources.”
Those government functions are in direct opposition to each other, and one would destroy the other if they were combined. Promoting the access and use of national resources is inherently in opposition to preserving the environment. There’s a similar problem already within some agencies, such as the conflict of interest within the FAA, between promoting the use of air travel, and making it safe.
I’m in favor of efficiency too, but unfortunately, every time a politician gets a hankering to make an agency “more efficient,” the result is usually that they actually want to either directly cripple the agency because they are opposed to it existing at all, or they want to streamline it by removing things like health and safety considerations from it.