They shouldn’t be taking pay cuts, for one. The government should be paying competitively and fairly.

How would this happen? More taxes? More government bonds to increase the national debt (an irresponsible, conservative favorite)?

When you cut out fraud waste and abuse you can actually reduce spend while increasing individual pay.

That assumes:

1. There is meaningful fraud or waste to cut out.

2. That the goal-post won’t be moved, to squeeze more savings.

3. That the methods that lead to inefficiencies aren’t being repeated.

4. That redundancies are a “waste”. Just in time supply chains are terrible in a disaster, for example.

And everything I’ve seen in the past 50 years and especially in the past month strongly indicate more long-term inefficiencies.

So I'm actually trying to recall if the US has ever been through a serious public austerity wave before. I'm Canadian, so I may have missed it, but... I'm 50 years old, and in the 90s we were (along with many other countries) put through a massive and brutal government cutback wave. Which in fact, most public services never really recovered from. But I don't actually recall the US ever really having the depth of cutbacks then under Clinton (or afterwards under Bush)... like not nearly at the same level. Services in places like New Zealand and many parts of Canada were cut to the bone, there were giant cuts.

But the TLDR, and I think our generation learned this lesson and maybe it needs to be learned again...? these austerity waves don't actually work. They don't produce better governance and they're actually generally ineffective at reigning in the budget, because there's just a base cost to actually doing things in government that doesn't go away, and the best way to reign in budgetary deficits is to improve the revenue side. The massive inefficiency assumptions are mostly right-wing fantasy and there's just a lot that government actually has to do to keep mass society running.

Never wholesale, but largely because there was a long tradition of resisting Federal government services.

So, very many government services were and still are at more local government levels.

Still, there are things ripe for privatization, such as commercial rockets, as another poster pointed out.

Then there are complete failures like privatized state and local prisons which are nonsense—what does it even mean to have a competitive market for prisons?—or our monopoly-by-design internet services held hostage by the large ISPs.

These should be largely government run.

But then the monstrosity of US healthcare is a design-by-committee. A pure private system with regulation AND mandated 100% price transparency of services; OR a Japanese/South Korean style national healthcare would still be better than what we have today.

It’s hard for me to give a cohesive answer because it’s such a mixed bag.