Trump's complete failure to put a dent in the administrative state led many to conclude that it's a hopeless effort. Even Vivek is being too clever by half with the schemes he's concocting.

The main hurdle in significantly scaling down the Federal Government is that it's very difficult to fire anyone. I think most of the employees are unionized and they have all sorts of protections, regardless.

The easiest path is not to fire people, it's to make them voluntarily quit. A few years ago, Trump relocated the USDA to Kansas City. This was big news amongst economists, because so many work for the USDA. The vast majority of USDA economists quit, rather than move to Kansas City. I imagine that was also the case for other USDA employees. If Trump had been smart, he would have taken the opportunity to cut the USDA personnel budget. That would have stopped them from staffing back up, which I imagine they've done by now.

So, the easy to implement plan for draining the swamp is to just move all of the agencies out of DC and into places where snobby elites don't want to live. Then, after the mass resignations, cap the personnel budgets at much lower levels.

There are added governance benefits like making it more difficult to lobby and reducing costs per worker.

Another option that would likely cause mass resignations would be to make all positions remote and then take away cost of living adjustments. Right now, government employees get paid more for living in expensive places. If they were remote, then there's no rationale for keeping that, since they could live in a less expensive place.