To make good on the past empty party line promises to limit the size and scope of the federal government.  The Constitution is clear about what the role and function of the national government is to be.  Couple that with common sense to know how many executive departments there should be, though the framers didn't specify a specific number.  They knew that that should be left open to meet the needs of changing times and circumstances.  They did not know that those changing times and circumstances would consist of an encroaching socialism and an emerging and evolving political class hellbent on preserving their power and insulating themselves within bulwarks of bureaucracy.
    Like any chartered organization, the U.S. government is mandated to perform certain, specific tasks that must be administered by competent, conscientious executives serving at the pleasure of the chief executive, the President, who is answerable to those who can vote every four years and to those who can impeach and convict at any time between those elections.
     The early Presidents had it correct in developing the very few executive departments necessary for overseeing the Constitutionally mandated operations of the federal government.  And even today, two hundred plus years later, the President's cabinet should still consist of the Vice President, Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, an Attorney General, and even though there is a contemporary train of thought that the the mail should be totally privatized, I know that once upon a time, the U.S.. Postal Service did a bang-up job, and could again, with proper leadership and management, so I say that Postmaster General should still be a cabinet post.  I'll even capitulate to the Cabinet position of Surgeon General.  As it is such a monumental task to build and maintain an interconnecting traversable infrastructure that reaches each and every individual citizen, legal resident and visitor, I would say that there should be a Department of Transportation, to release the Post Office from that Constitutionally mandated responsibility.   Since one of the government's few specific specified functions is "to regulate commerce", I'll acquiesce to a Commerce Department and its Secretary.
     As for all of the other Cabinet Secretaries and Cabinet level advisers, their duties should be rolled back into the job descriptions of the Cabinet members who actually have some Constitutional validity or be eliminated altogether.  The Department of Interior should be a division of the State Department, equivalent to that department's Foreign Service, to attend to matters of internal political affairs concerning the states, commonwealths, possessions and the citizenries therein.  And shouldn't the U.S. Trade Representative be the Secretary of State?..and/or the Secretary of Commerce?  Or better yet, a sub Cabinet level bureaucratic functionary whose function is to barter and broker nationally favorable commercial transactions as a trained and talented trader and nimble negotiator?  We could even pay him or her  commissions on well done deals.  That might help eliminate such problems as fecal infested produce from Mexico and poison pet food from China.          And aren't Homeland Security and Veterans' Affairs parts of a Defense Department?  Departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Labor, HHS, HUD, the ONDCP, and the EPA are nationally socialistic inventions and capitulations to special interests which all far overreach the designated authority of government and should be eliminated outright and forthwith.  And shouldn't the Secretary of the Treasury be the budget director?  Or, if there HAS to be a Budget Director, he or she should be another of those functionaries whose primary function would be to insure that the budget is always balanced, ledgered by the rules of Accounting, not through the cooking of the federal books.  And  then, there are all of these Chiefs of Staff, who, as we viewers of "24" know, are generally nothing but trouble. 
      And speaking of the job of Chief of Staff...it seems that every elected and appointed official has to have one, so as to bloat the bureaucracy and insulate him- or herself .  All elected officers and politically appointed officials should serve as their own Chief of Staff, as Jack Kennedy, the last President to do so, did.  These people should be allowed to hire clerical and communicative staffs necessary to the operation of the office, but no more hiring of lawyers and the like to be Aides and Advisers.  Make it so that these people whom we elect to do a job, actually do that job,  rather than having it done in their names by a pant load of pinheaded, pansified Ivy League socialist social climbers, bucolically bumbleheaded bureaucrats, and lowlife lobbyists, who without those jobs would most likely be living in a commune, chasing ambulances, and/or asking the rest of us if we want fries with our burger, or if we need our windshield washed.                
       If our elected representatives in Washington had to do the work of writing legislation, maybe we wouldn't be so overwhelmed by so many overbearing, overreaching, oppressive laws and regulations.  And they would actually earn the salaries that we are paying them.  I wouldn't mind paying a group of real, working, representative government employees who worked as competent and conscientious servants of the people a whole lot more than the hundreds of thousands of dollars that we're presently paying our political class oligarchs.  We could pay them incentive bonuses for being good stewards of the nation's time, talent, and treasury.  And if any of them breach the public trust of their office, through acts of force or fraud, they will be subject to the most punitive penalties and punishments possible, including exile and execution.     
       Modern legislation, laws, rules, and regulations are written in legalese, the lawyerly language of shysters and charlatans.  And their primary purpose is not public benefit.  They perpetuate that ever expanding political class and burgeoning bureaucracy by progressing pet projects of pinheaded politicos and politico wannabes and by conveying kickbackable courtesies to connected commercialists corrupting capitalism. Through pork, power corrupts and through perpetual pork, absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Remember what Ike said: "Beware the military/industrial complex."   And be mindful to beware other governmental complexes, like the government/education complex that allows teachers' unions to implement a policy of non-education and especially beware the government/media complex that creates and controls mass communications and its content  through cooperative coexistence with preferred and preferential pundits and press outlets, together prostituting the once proud, one constitutionally protected profession of journalism, which seems to exist only to sell celebrityism and schlock. 
      We must elect principled persons and not performing personalities as President.  We need people who know that the Presidency is not a post from which to royally rule.   We deserve the kind of persons who recognize that George Washington's start of the two term tradition should not have needed the 22nd Amendment.  But our most socialistic President to that point in American history, FDR, mucked that up.  And we need to elect  Representatives and Senators who wish to serve their constituencies as members of a citizen Congress for a term or two, or few, rather than those, like Ted Kennedy, Kerry, McCain, Feingold, Byrd, Lott, Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi,  Strom Thurman, Gerry Ford, Jesse Helms, Howard Coble, Mel Watt, and others, past and present, too numerous to name or even remember, who wish to wield personal and party line political power over their countrymen and -women while obtaining, retaining and maintaining oligarchical perks and privileges through a lifelong career.  That is not to advocate legislated term limits, as any elected official who serves his or her constituents AND the nation as a whole with honor and integrity and intelligence should stay in office for as long as he or she desires and an informed and enlightened electorate dictates.  But as we presently don't have an informed and enlightened electorate, who thinks that their Congressperson and Senators are great, and that it's the other 532 buffoons that are causing all of the problems.  Believe it, people:  Your Congressperson and Senators are most probably just like my Congressman and Senators; three party line political hacks.