I must not have made my position clear. I don't think that they're particularly committed or effective deficit hawks – the true fiscal conservatives were purged years ago – but rather that this is now a key part of their public image. They heavily promote the idea that government is inefficient because it keeps people voting for them and, most importantly, keeps corporate-backed groups like Fox News from going on the attack in the next election.

That might necessitate a token effort somewhere to cut things but the real goal is the posture, not the results, so maximizing inefficiency isn't something they're concerned with. In most cases, they'll try to cut things which affect people who don't vote for them anyway – mass transit, funding for the poor, etc.

Lately they have cut things – the sequester was real and will be causing damage for decades[1] – but generally in the least productive ways possible. That gives them something to point at while still leaving plenty to rant about and, of course, more chances to grandstand over self-created problems like backlogs at the IRS, VA, etc. I'm sure we're going to hear plenty about this security breach and nobody will mention that the federal pay scale tops out below what the average infosec professional makes or that agencies have been begging for funding to improve their IT staff for years.

1. Most young scientists are leaving research due to budget cuts at NIH, NSF, NASA, etc. They're unlikely to ever come back so we've lost a large chunk of an entire generation of research in most fields. Sure, many of them are going to industry but I would submit that a crop of data scientists selling ads is less productive for the country long-term than all of the foundational pure research which industry rarely funds.

The poster above is saying that it's part of the GOP's political agenda that's marketed to voters, rather than necessarily what they do once they're in office.