If, hopefully, a sufficient crop of conservatives Republicans is produced in the upcoming election to give control of one or both houses to the GOP, it will give conservatives a chance to reclaim our fiscally conservative credentials.  This can begin by cutting back on the size of government and consolidating and eliminating selected government agencies.  Even though, I'm a super hawk, there are ways we can cut the Defense Dept. budget without harming national security.  For instance, defense contracts should be managed through a single agency with helpful guidance from a recognized private sector accounting firm with the guts to stand up to corrupt or poorly performing contractors or petulant Representatives or Senators who are more concerned with whether these firms help their reelection prospects or their districts rather than actually produce dependable, high-quality, and affordable weapons that benefit national security.  Individual armed service branch science boards should be eliminated and consolidated into a single defense scientific research agency which would promote joint scientific and technological research and development collaboration within our military and holistically addressing current and emerging national security threats instead of seeking to promote selfish service budgetary dreams and prerogatives.

Unlike some conservatives, I am against eliminating the Energy Dept.  However, DOE's national laboratory system is a giant octopus that needs to be consolidated and some labs eliminated.  For instance, the Sandia National and Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico and the Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in California are very close to each other geographically and must have a significant amount of duplication in their research.  Starting here would be a good start.  There are several districts of the Federal Reserve system.  While they all do good analysis of regional economic conditions, do we need to have so many.  For instance, the part of Indiana where I live is part of the Chicago branch of the Fed, while Indianapolis and southern Indiana are part of the St. Louis branch of the Fed.  Surely, some consolidation is possible here.
NASA is another agency where facility and program consolidation should occur. Inspired by the pork barreling of its creator Lyndon Johnson, members of Congress have placed NASA facilities in areas as diverse as Washington, DC's Maryland suburbs, Pasadena, CA, Cleveland, OH, the Texas and Mississippi Gulf coasts, and Florida's Atlantic coast.  Opportunities for consolidating facilities and eliminating duplicate programs are also available here.

Agencies created in the depression are still around that have outlived their usefulness and their duties can be better performed by the private sector include the Agriculture Dept's Rural Utilities Service, the Bonneville Power Administration, and Tennessee Valley Authority.  Agencies such as the Interior Dept's Bureau of Land Management own significant percentages of western U.S. states and these should be sold off to private interests who would do a better job of managing them and bring in revenue from natural resources on these lands while following existing environmental regulations.  Smaller agencies such as the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the Çorporation for National Service (Americorps), Legal Services Corporation could also be eliminated.  There are also a large number of health care research agencies within the National Institutes of Health whose research needs to be better prioritized and some of these agencies could be consolidated or downsized.  Do we need both an National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) within the Dept. of Health and Human Services and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the Labor Dept?

There are numerous individual government statistical agencies; most of whom produce useful research.   However, most developed foreign countries have a single centralized national statistical agency to collect, analyze, and disseminate government and private sector quantitative information.  We should look at consolidating these agency into a single national governmental statistical agency such as Canada's Statistics Canada.  We also need commissions that can look at ways of reforming entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to make them more sustainable and to encourage Americans to develop an ethos of personal savings from the beginnings of their formal education so they can make lifestyle choices that will keep them from becoming dependent on governmental assistance programs.  This is just a start, but as conservatives we need to introduce substantive proposals for reducing the size of our government besides rhetorical complaining and this is one modest step in that direction.