Going to steel man this since theres obviously no one on here answering this question seriously. Not a republican and don’t agree with all this, just imagining what my republican dad would say about this:

For ukraine and Europe, we have no interest in protecting them besides sentimental attachments. Ukraine is not our problem, it’s Europe’s and if they want to dump money into a lost cause by all means go ahead, but leave the u.s. out of it unless your going to compensate us for it. The u.s. isn’t threatened by Russia, we have an ocean, the world’s largest navy and nukes to protect us. The larger threat is China and we should be focusing on them, not russia which can barely invade it’s neighbor, much less march across Europe and the atlantic. Europe can handle its own problems.

For Canada and Mexico and tarriffs in general. We need to bring manufacturing back to America and revitalize the rust belt. We can’t do that if companies find it more profitable to go over seas and pay people pennies when they’d have to pay Americans much more. The only way to get them to come back is to make it too expensive to import things.

This is all about putting America first. For decades America has been spending billions to protect Europe and has been sending billions of dollars over seas to build factories owhile factory after factory closes here in the u.s. We need to stop all of that and spend our money in America for Americans.

Feel free to use this comment as a punching bag, I don’t care, just trying to give OP an actual answer if this was a legitimate question and not some rhetorical question seeking affirmation on how dumb the Republicans are. They are, don’t get me wrong, but just say so and don’t dress it up in questions like this.

As a resident of the city that won the lawsuit, and thus doesn’t have to pay for a $10 billion sewer renovation, I feel this is not in my favor

Yeah, if you repeated this test with the person having access to a stack exchange or not you’d see the same results. Not much difference between someone mindlessly copying an answer from stack overflow vs copying it from AI. Both lead to more homogeneous answers and lower critical thinking skills.

They may not be more effective, how many consultants, contractors etc. are on the payroll since then?

A lot of time with these budget cuts some politician will come in and fire a bunch of people or a department, realize they actually do need that work done and then hire a contractor or a consultancy company to do the same work often for more . So the amount of people directly working for the federal government may be down but the amount of people who are working for the government through some middle man goes up to compensate.