In the interest of this being a place for discussions: I have frequently heard the slogan that the republican efforts to cut federal programs is a major cause of why these programs failure. As I mentioned above, I am sure that such policy is not helping these programs, but as a bigger point, there is just not a good correlation between such policies and the actual effectiveness of various government programs. The military/dod is a great example of a part of the government that has received bipartisan budget increases for more than two decades running (it always escapes republican calls for fiscal responsibility) and yet the military is a pretty bloated and ineffective operation. Meanwhile the parks service, department of interior, EPA, etc are all constantly getting squeezed by the republicans and yet they are all pretty good at what they do and deliver a lot on a tight budget. If anything I would say that the effectiveness of government programs is inversely correlated with the intensity of republican assaults on them. Meanwhile in solidly blue areas there are plenty of government programs that just plain suck and plenty that work very well. If it were a simply matter of one party being the difference then you would not see so much variance. There is a lot more to what makes a government program effective than whether it is well funded. Saying that government is incapable of delivering core services is clearly a nonsense position, but blaming the failures of government on the republicans doesn't really seem to be supported by any evidence.