The best answer he could have given, if he’d been a more natural politician, would be something like:

“Of course I would be furious and full of rage, naturally! But that is why we don’t settle crimes by letting the victims take revenge, but instead we have a court and a judge and a jury who can look at it with their emotions out of the way.”

Not a perfect response, but it would have been better than what he said.

Both sides get ‘gotcha’ questions regularly. Obama was once faced with a question of whether he would deport a close illegal relative, either answer was problematic.

IIRC, about 85% of all federal employees are to be found outside of greater Washington. There might be too many HQ employees, but that’s a secondary issue. The real problem is agencies performing tasks which should be discontinued left to the private sector or devolved to the state governments. So doing would reduce federal employment everywhere, not just in the capital.
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(Candidates for dissolution, sale, or radical budget surgery would include the Food and Nutrition Service (USDA), the rural development division of the USDA, the National Institute on Food and Agriculture, the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HHS), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (HHS), most of the components of the Administration for Children and Families (HHS), the Administration on Aging (HHS); every component of the Department of Education bar the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the statistical collection units, and the consumer protection function; the Postal Service, the Small Business Administration, the National Science Foundation, USAID and other foreign aid agencies, the telecom subsidies distributed by the Federal Communication Commission, the entire grants and loans operation of the Department of Energy, the bulk of the grant distribution function of the Federal Highway Administration and other components of the Department of Transportation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the grant distribution function of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Export-Import Bank, the Farm Credit System, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the Elections Assistance Commission, AmTrak, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and miscellanous grant programs).

All implemented by the Easter Bunny.

This kind of thinking is in the same category as the fantasy of solving our of our political issues with a Constitutional Convention. In practice, even if we could do the above (which we cannot), a lot of it would promptly grow back after the electorate utterly annihilated the GOP in the next subsequent election.

Some of that stuff is popular. Some of it serves useful purposes. Some of it is gross waste of money. Some of it is a mix.

The GOP has tried to run on ‘small government’ for decades, and that approach has a track record of failure. Without the cultural and national security aspects of the agenda, the small government agenda would be a permanent electoral loser, because the electorate doesn’t believe in it. The median voter is happy to cut someone else’s spending, generally speaking.

In practice, there might be a viable ‘medium-sized government’ agenda that could work. But actually cutting the size of government is necessarily going to require a case by case examination of the spending, always with one eye on politics.

For ex, a lot of strongly MAGA rural areas are heavily dependent on various government employees and spending to hold up the local economy and sustain local services. Slash those and those districts are suddenly not MAGA anymore. Just a fact of political life.

OTOH, moving the headquarters complexes out of the DC area makes a lot of sense on multiple levels. The heart of the problem in the Deep State is that tremendous concentration of power and influence in a few Virginia and Maryland counties. Spread that out, break up that concentration of power, and you serve several good ends at once, and it’s mostly either politically neutral or upside.

For he has a little list … and they’ll none of them be missed.

Because Guam is not one of the 50 states?

As for moving Agriculture to Sioux Falls or Fargo — what do you have against those cities, Gordon?

There’s a subtle or not-so-subtle emotional component of such gotcha questions. “This is how we *feel* and we should decide the penalty on that basis”. Whether people believe in the death penalty or not its use or non-use should be based more on principles of law, justice, and yes morality.