Actually you're succumbing to a silly strawman. A huge chunk of government "bigness" doesn't come from those programs, it comes from a penny-wise and pound-foolish stance most americans seem to take of: we must spend 300-800% of any given cost on accounting, oversight, tripple checking etc. That isn't a typo - it costs so much to do things because most of the money goes to oversight crap. We could simplify all the red tape, let a full 25% of costs go to grift, and still come out ahead by a lot.

Note: this assumes that there isn't just fancy grift in the whole set of red tape procedures.