I’m not sure what “unaffected” means. Do you mean from the end user perspective? Or government employee perspective?
I think people underestimate the overhead associated with many government services. Even thing like social security disability have 30-40% of the money not going to the recipient, it’s going to the administration.
If you were able to improve social security administration efficiency (benefit validation, denial appeal, check mailing costs) by just 10%, you just reduced social the federal budget by a few percentage points. That’s huge.
My own experience with government services is that significant efficiencies could be squeezed out and keep the end user service the same (or better?).
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html
A 10% increase in administration efficiency would shave of $700 million.
But regardless, a 10% improvement in efficiency, in one government program, potentially saves almost $1B.
That seems quite striking to me when you think about all the US government programs.
Congratulations, you just saved 200 billion dollars of expenditure.
The difference between expenditure and revenue in 2023 was 1.7 trillion.
Let me be clear - if money is being spent poorly, that is bad and it should be spent more effectively, or not spent at all. I'm just trying to demonstrate that "waste", at least waste as it is traditionally understood, is almost irrelevant in any attempt to balance the federal budget.
The one big opportunity to do that is defence and it is the one that Republicans, particularly, treat as a sacred cow.
Social Security is already extremely efficient in that the cost of moving money around is minimal.
Medicare and Medicaid are also more efficient than the private sector.
Is government perfect? Hell no. But in the really big picture the big and rising areas of civilian expenditure are not where the inefficiencies lie.