You're conflating multiple different things. You can have big government without multiple layers of contractors. E.g. the federal court/prosecutors offices are a pretty huge operation in the aggregate, but it's all distributed so each office or court individually is small and lean.

At the same time, one of the ways to get "small government" has historically been to outsource as much as possible to contractors. That's why the military industrial complex looks the way it does.

Or it makes the case that the goverment should do things inhouse instead of outsourcing everything and having hordes of contractors.

> Real big government is the multiple layers of crony contractors you're talking about. That's entirely the opposite of that the GOP means when they say Big Government. They mean large offices of government employees. They demonstrate a love of having a few contract managers and a slew of corny contractors.