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Notes -
Well, I'd argue "bureaucracy" is an overly narrow conception of what the problem is with "big government."
I don't know how much "revolving door" you think there is, but it's not all that much in my experience in the DoD/IC. Mostly, people leave federal/mil service to become a contractor for more money doing much the same job.
Mostly though, the idea that you can map any given government agency onto a model where it always or by default seeks to maximize its size/budget/power/whatever is empirically false. That is often true, but it's a loose assumption. Or often various subunits of a given agency have ambitious careerists trying to maximize their impact via mission growth, but that is a zero-sum competition by default as the overall agency has a set budget.
Mostly, as someone with a (past) career and professional education in government bureaucracy, I get a bit up in arms about simplistic notions of government bureaucracy because it leads to obvious idiocy like DOGE, instead of actually getting us limited, effective government.
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