This seems like a subject a lot of conservatives and liberals fail to understand. The premise is that a larger bureaucracy becomes less efficient as it increases in size, eventually reaching some non-quantifiable asymptotic point where more money and manpower can no longer be justified by their results. I've talked briefly on here about the how conservative and progressive aren't opposites: conservatives believe the best path to social, economic, national, and personal betterment is through more limited government spending than liberal policies, allowing private industry and citizens to drive the nation's growth. This is similar to what is going on with the Brexit--an economic argument is that Britain is devoting too many resources to a bloated bureaucracy when they could benefit more from independence. 

A domestic example of this exponential curve of efficiency is seen in tuition costs.

As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.
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As public spending to universities have increased (disproportionately higher than other public services), tuition costs and university administrative costs and staffing have skyrocketed, while professor salaries have stagnated.
State appropriations reached a record inflation-adjusted high of $86.6 billion in 2009. They declined as a consequence of the Great Recession, but have since risen to $81 billion. And these totals do not include the enormous expansion of the federal Pell Grant program, which has grown, in today’s dollars, to $34.3 billion per year from $10.3 billion in 2000.
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Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.

It's true that a lot of uninformed conservatives use 'small government' as a cudgel anytime the government demonstrates its inefficiency, though the same can be said for any political party and its taglines. The reality of our situation is that the U.S. will never see some radical shift in size and power; a department may be defunded here or there, the military will always lose funding in peacetime (only to be rapidly built up again in wartime, reflecting the tuition example), and states will always be held to account for federal laws through withheld funding.

What're your thoughts on the concept of a small government? Do you think it's even a relevant topic today, or do you feel otherwise, and that maybe a larger government is always more beneficial?

I just want the ending of the Welfare scam, man. When it pays more in benefits to play the system then to work for 30k gross yearly, the system is broken.