But that's the cornerstone of what would appear to be a Conservatives biggest concern; that allowing an organization to get too big and bloated leads to precisely this kind of outcome. Hence why I find it difficult to reconcile why conservatives from Reagan to Bush to Romney always want to write our big and bloated military a blank check.
Here's the deal.
That's how organizations tend to work at a minimum. Now there's great variation - there are organizations with a lot less 'fat', and there are organizations that are largely fine with 'fat' and have far more. In my opinion, for example, ask anyone who has experience with some big private corporate firms, from Accenture to Blackwater/Xe, who tend to get more people than needed on things and/or inflated compensation for things and/or unnecessary missions.
You don't see the right-wing say a lot about the inflated costs of 'privatized' activities, where activities done by more efficient, inexpensive government employees are shifted to outsourced, private operations that cost a lot more - completely coincidentally, giving tax dollars to typically their donors. Republicans are often and largely behind such move - they sell them politically by demonizing 'wasteful, inefficient government' because people fall for that attack, and often replace it with much more wasteful private alternatives.
For one example, you can just look to some of the contracting in Iraq, where there were 'cost plus, often no bid contracts set up where companies were incented to do things like if a truck got a flat tire, abandon it and buy a new truck, because the government would pay for a new truck plus some more profit. Contractors hired large numbers of US special forces and military people for far more than they were paid by the governmnet, turning around and billing the governmnet far more for their services.
For another example, recall the Bush adminstration's second highest priority their first term (after the tax cuts for the rich), the Medicare Part D drug benefit to benefit seniors. They were able to get some political benefit from it as supporting their claim Bush was a 'compassionate conservative' and it did help some seniors - though its 'doughnut' design made many seniors actually pay more - but the key provision in it was one prohibitijng the government from negotiating prices, so they had to pay full price.
That made the cost to the taxpayers hundreds of billions more of pure handout to the drug companies; and the drug companies were Repblicans' #1 donor industry.
That is basically theft from the American people - donate to the Republicans and get handed billions of dollars of tax money for nothing.
So the Republicans have a big sales pitch about how much they hate waste, with lots of unrealistic and often false criticisms of the government people that justify their creating more wasteful programs that let them shift tax dollars to their political allies. In the meantime, groups who are not their allies can be slashed to the bone - see the effects of the sequester on 'ordinary Americans'.
The military spending often fits into the same agenda - though that's a bi-partisan issue, politicians of both parties try to protect that money for their districts.
It's just that Democrats are a lot more willing to make larger, broader cuts to military spending, knowing the money can help people more in other areas, than Republicans.
Look at this leaker days ago - working for a military contracter, Booz Allen Hamilton who gets 98% of its revenue from government contracts - he's a high school dropout GED person, 29, who had been a security guard for the NSA, who was making $122,000 or more suddenly. It's just an example of the inflated 'waste' they will defend, where analysts will say that our explosion of 'security spending' in the last decade was largely wasteful that made a lot of donors rich.
The confusion you mention is that you are noticing the difference between what Republican say and what they do. They have a sales pitch about 'fiscal conservatism' and hating deficits and hating government waste that has gotten them votes for a very long time, while especially since Reagan, they have gotten away with saying those things while then shooting up our deficit spending money on largely things that benefit them politically - while often successfully attacking Democrats for being the people 'wasting money'.
If you listen to what they say, it's not going to explain a lot of what they do. If you view that as a sales pitch they hide behind and they have a different agenda, it makes sense.
They really do want to cut back a lot of government - because they support the wealthy, and to the extent that democratically elected government represents the people and helps makde sure everyone gets a share of our economy, they can simply be against government doing that, slashing spending on the people because that's all money that could be going to the wealthy. So a safety net, education, anti-poverty programs and so on are demonized. Medicare for citizens' healthcare is demonized as 'socialized medicine'.
Or at least it was as long as they could - now that that would hurt them politically, they claim to love Medicare, but propose programs to 'save' Medicare that would destroy it, replacing the system with vouchers, cutting a third of the spending just to start and who knows how much more later, that would shift all that money into our terribly inefficitent and expensive private insurance industry
Organizations always have some 'waste' and 'inefficiency'. You can demonize even a little of that by cherry-picking - why, LOOK at that IRS video that they spent $16,000 to make that was a morale booster for employees! The horror of wasted tax dollars! Yet when billions and billions are misspent on programs for donors, that's ok.
That's largely the game for the politicians - demonize the spending for the people they wanto to take money form, and sell or hide the spending they want to do (for example, defense spending that's not needed will be 'sold' as all that money being critical for our defense from all the enemies who would conquer us, while losing tens of billions in Iraq isn't sold, it's just kept as quiet as possible.) The Medicare drug benefit was hyped as helping seniors more than it did, while the drug company giveaway was kept as quiet as possible (nevermind that weeks after its passage, the Republicans congressman who led the passage quit Congress to become head of drug company lobbying for $2 million a year).
Republicans will put a huge amount of effort into their 'branding' as people concerned about wasteful spending, because it gets them votes and something to hide their policies behind.
The funny thing is, Republicans will attack Democrats for doing the very thing Republicans do - why, those dirty Democrats don't want to increase education spending for any good reason, they're just trying to bribe the people with that spending to get their votes! How corrupt! You see the same attacks on things like the safety net. Democrats spending on the poor, that's just bribing them for votes!
It's helpful not to listen to what a lot of politicians say - you can find the photo of Paul Ryan wearing an apron at the soup kitchen he forced his way in to pretend he was cleaning a pot, you can hear Mitt Romney express his enormous concern for the poor - and to look at the spending priorities to see what they stand for.
And the phrase 'stand for' really gives them too much credit, like it's some sort of principle when it often is not - it's more who they represent.