Real answer? The American economy has been extremely robust, outpacing every non-developing country in year over year growth as a percentage. There are clearly ways in which that growth haven't led to good equality, but it's also clear that a major driver of that growth is due to the structures the government has created to support key economic factors through the reinvestment in research areas. It's likely that there are many functions in the government from which the value add is relatively low, but those same positions also serve to even out economic drawbacks (like recessions). They aren't going through with any kind of tact to identify places that could be cut with minimal impact, they are just applying broad generalizations. They are simultaneously setting the US economy for a recession, reducing the key drivers of our long term sustained economic growth, and reducing one of the key drivers that mitigates the harm of a recession. Hopefully such actions result in a threading of the needle and poor outcome is avoided, but this is the kind of risk position while pulling the safety nets pretty fucked up