I know I'm probably dreaming, but it would be really cool if Trump would nominate a bunch of successful business owners, that really want to go back to their businesses and be left alone. He could then tell each one to shrink their departments as fast as is reasonable and as much as possible even to elimination.

I'd love to eliminate everything, but if we eliminated it all in a day, there are so many people 100% dependent on the government that it would be a bloodbath, so realistically we just need to make a path to eliminate things as fast as possible. Some things, like the Department of Education, should be eliminated within a year. I think the government employees, who lose their jobs, would be the only people harmed at all. In the long run, they could all find actual productive jobs.

Some departments would have to have a much longer path to elimination. Chile eliminated their version of Social Security, but it took something like 50 years because they didn't want to toss out anyone who was currently dependent on the government or just shy of retirement. They allowed younger people to chose to invest most of their retirement (if I recall they still paid a small amount like 20% to the system) and use their investments to fund their retirement. All of the young people wound up better off than they would've been if they'd stayed on the system. We could do something similar, especially if we cut a bunch of other departments and we could even tax non-citizens with work permits (they'd be ineligible) to help keep the system afloat till we could wean everyone off of it.

Honestly, we should be able to abolish 50-80% of government in 5 years without much hardship to anyone other than government employees.