Yeah, you are right. My thinking is a fallacy. Rationally, shrinking even a single program is "shrinking government".
But practically "shrinking government" is used to mean "shrinking the civilian parts of government".
> There is a legitimate case to be made that many people who would assert the need to shrink government in aggregate haven't actually considered things sufficiently and would not maintain that position if they considered things program by program,
This reminds me of an extended conversation I had with a local county politician who ran on a "shrink federal government" platform. I asked him what we should shrink. There are certainly parts of the federal government I'd be in favor of shrinking or cutting. He resisted, he wouldn't answer. I found a high level list of agencies and programs and asked him to run down the list and specify what his platform was.
He refused.
He'd get up and give a speech about the excesses of government and the deficit and all that. So I put together a list of what I'd like to see cut or what I thought would be okay to cut. I was able to provided a rough budget that cut the deficit in half and calculated out a small tax increase that would end the deficit and provide a small surplus that would simply be used to pay down the debt and then simply be returned as tax returns every year.
He refused.
Finally somebody pulled me aside and explained that he needed the support of the national party to help fund his campaign, and they hadn't publicly specified their platform for cuts yet. So he couldn't specify his support for specific cuts. Which meant the conversation never got beyond "shrink government" as a principle, but not any specifics.
A while later, the same national party put in place an across the board, every department gets the same cut, policy that for a while drove our news reporters to the brink of madness and was deeply deeply unpopular among much of the political spectrum.
So in terms of how the rhetoric "shrink government" gets transformed into specific policy actions, it seems that yes, cutting it across the board is not what's intended, but the hard work of establishing a specific platform hasn't been done yet...probably because intra-party politics means there's no consensus of what that should actually look like.