I recall Reagan reducing the number of FAA employees by 11,000 or so. Contrast that with Trump who wouldn't fire one NIH hack.
Reagan did a lot. In trying to discredit Reagan's reputation for shrinking government, leftists and their fellow big government supporting Trumpist buddies point to total federal spending under him, but conspicuously ignore how that money was spent. National defense is something most of us would recognize is a proper role of government, and Reagan did increase that when he came into office.
What he
did cut was discretionary domestic spending, and also some entitlements:
In 1981, the president signed into law significant cuts in government spending and tax rates. Reagan’s “historic” turnaround cut the projected spending of the federal government by 4.7 percent for the next fiscal year. Taking inflation into account, the Reagan cuts amounted to 5 percent of the total cost of government. Overall, discretionary domestic spending dropped about 14.2 percent during Reagan’s first year. Several Great Society programs were sharply cut. The Community Development Block Grant program, for example, lost two‐thirds of its funding. Reagan also won a 32 percent cut in mass transit spending.
Sen. Pete V. Domenici was correct to call the 1981 budget “the most dramatic reduction in the ongoing programs in the history of the country” — but mostly because federal spending had risen relentlessly for three decades both absolutely and relative to the nation’s wealth. Had that trend continued, the federal government would have grown relative to national income by about 25 percent (from one‐fifth of GDP to one‐fourth).
https://www.cato.org/policy-report/march/april-2010/limiting-government-1980-2010
What's remarkable about that was that Reagan managed to cut that spending despite Democrats holding a 243-192 advantage under Tip O'Neill in the House of Representatives. In fact, Reagan
never had a GOP House with which to work. If he'd have had a GOP Congress, he obviously could have cut even more. The increase in defense spending eventually paid off big-time by eventually leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and resultant "peace dividend" that enabled significant cuts in our military spending.
In contrast, Trump keeps talking like a big-government liberal about the federal government needing to make more "investments" -- which has always been the code word for "more federal discretionary spending". We got the whole Freedom cities proposal, and now this plan to permanently feed and house homeless at federal government expense.
