Firstly, comparing government to private companies is already a a bad premise. The point of a private company is to make money. They make cuts to try and save money. Cutting credit cards is a sign that they want to reduce traveling and decrease efficiency by counting every penny. Instead of discounting microcharges as that and just bundling them up later on to handle at once.

With that said: someone claiming efficiency would not resort to penny pinching, especially with a budget in the trillions. It's not efficient in any metric

>just think I've been through private downsizing events and I don't really know why the public sector shouldn't occasionally have similar occurrences.

They do pcc. It's just a meticulous process becsuse government jobs are not at-will employment. But generally the country is growing so of course the government grows with it. That parts no different from the private sector.

Also keep in mind that this downsizing, outside of its legal dubiousness, is not in any way planned. It's not performance based and there's been no audits on what they are trying to reduce costs on. It's just a wrecking ball and Musk's tried and false method is to try to pick up the pieces afterwards. That's not how you want to treat people with access to a country's money, nuclear technology, taxes, and weapons.