[joe_the_user]

The thing I'd offer that you could perhaps consider that the people who push the "starve the beast" rhetoric are generally not in favor of accountability or efficiency but simply grifters leveraging people's shallow understanding of how government works - and that's the earlier cycles, not just the current obvious one.

The thing is that the ordinary cycle of government balances political interests with the need to actually accomplish things in an imperfect fashion. Whereas "broad cuts" tend to allow only the politically connected to survive since cuts have no rationality beyond "this government makes no sense".