If you’re reading this, you probably want a small(er) government. So did those who designed the government (the Founders) and those who consented to being governed by it (the American people through their ratifying sovereign states). As Thomas Jefferson put it, they were seeking to authorize and establish “a wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry…this is the sum of good government.”
You might therefore think that a “good president” for the purpose of a presidential performance review is an executive who achieves demonstrable success in furthering this foundational key performance indicator: did the government actually shrink? This is a shockingly uncommon historical methodology not just amongst scholars and pundits who disagree with our founding principles (as you might expect), but also for those who DO agree with the idea of limited government.
So, recall your American history. What presidents do you think actually shrunk the government? Not merely slowed the growth of government, but actually had a smaller budget when they left than when they came in.
I’ll give you an even narrower parameter. There is only one president of whom that is true who was not winding down spending from a war. Can you think of him?
Probably not.
The answer is Martin Van Buren.
Figure 1. Even AI has trouble remembering what the man looked like, as this is the closest after several depictions of the President with a full head of hair. One might say the ‘Little Magician,’ as he was known, has pulled off a disappearing act. But it’s time now for his grand return!
Before you dismiss him as obscure and irrelevant compared to some presidential hero idolized by mainstream historians who don’t care about limited government, just for a moment entertain the math. And then marvel that Van Buren managed to actually cut government after another A-tier fiscally restrained President, Andrew Jackson, who not only shrunk the government per capita and paid off the entire national debt (that is to say, he did not just balance the budget and eliminate a deficit, he got us down to the point where we did not owe anyone anything), but also presided over a government that occupied the smallest portion of the economy ever (or, extremely optimistically, yet) - less than 1% of GDP, according to OpenAi. After that, amidst a financial crisis, Van Buren cut government, insisting “All communities are apt to look to government for too much. Even in our own country, where its powers and duties are so strictly limited, we are prone to do so, especially at periods of sudden embarrassment and distress.”
In the Panic of 1837, banks widely suspended redemption in precious metals as subsidized canal mania collapsed, causing states to default on their bonds ($60m worth!). Van Buren responded with intentional non-interventionism, fighting Henry Clay’s efforts for the federal government to assume state debt. “The refusal to bail out defaulting state governments produced a widening ripple of salutary effects, not the least of which was to make more difficult any future squandering of state money on public works and government-owned railroads. The Red Fox of Kinderhook thus had held the pass at the crucial time, when doing so was politically unpopular, against powerful mercantile, financial, and other special interests clamor- ing for national assistance.” States, compelled to rebuild their credit on their own, adopted balanced budget amendments to their constitution: 2/3 in the twenty years after 1837, 49/50 by the 2020s, though they vary in their stringency. Furthermore, states “restricted state investment in private corporations; limited or banned incorporation by special legislative act; created general incorporation laws for all types of business; altered the way state and local governments issued debt; put absolute limits on the amount of debt governments could issue; and fundamentally changed the structure of the property tax.” In other words, van Buren not only managed to enforce fiscal discipline at the federal level - but for the states, too!
One friend calls van Buren the “MVB” of fiscal responsibility. The very sharp economic historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel has a reasonably compelling article describing why he was our “greatest American president” that should at least cause you to seriously upgrade your ranking of him.
Figure 2. You may even be tempted to join the Van Buren Boys 🖐️👌.
The Chart
But in a pure analysis of fiscal restraint from OpenAI’s o1 pro, how do other presidents do? I’ve included a chart immediately and will get into qualitative analysis thereafter. There are some complications, of course: estimates are rough, especially of things like GDP in early America. It can be hard to fairly evaluate a “big spender” early on who tried to really expand government - but might have been horrified at how big government got later, even after a president shrunk it. We might also debate how much credit presidents should get for cutting spending after a war. There are presidents whose expenses we might justify as a good return on investment (though we always should compare that to what might have happened had they confiscated less taxes) - but this a ranking that really just aims for fiscal restraint, so even if you might instinctively nominate Ronald Reagan for the conservative cause for canonization on fiscal-responsibility, know that despite his many (beyond) laudable accomplishments, he does not do fantastically here. And finally there are presidents who committed taxpayers to paying a lot more beyond their time in office and their ranking should be appropriately punished. The exact ranking below is promulgated by o1, but I’ve added some notes. At the bottom of my qualitative analysis, I have rankings from Grok and Claude to give more context. Exact positions are debatable, but this feels broadly correct.
Postwar shrinkage
Eight presidents other than Van Buren shrank the government in real terms, but all of them did so in the wake of a war: James Monroe (shrank the budget by 70% after the unnecessary War of 1812 - that ought to be his more famous Doctrine!); Zachary Taylor and his successor Millard Fillmore (by 20%+ each after the unnecessary but fruitful Mexican-American War that got us most of the west); Andrew Johnson (by 55% after the cataclysmic Civil War) and Ulysses Grant (by another 25%, during a financial crisis); Warren G. Harding (by 50% after the unnecessary World War I, during a recession that quickly cured itself) and then Calvin Coolidge (by another 9%).
Cutting government after a major war is relatively easy because the expenses of arming, feeding, moving forces around the globe disappear - but all these presidents genuinely did want to restore a smaller, constitutionally limited government while considering the recent wars spending aberrations. Incredibly, Ulysses Grant managed to get the U.S. government down to its prewar size of the American economy (3% of GDP, after having occupied 15% during the Civil War). World War I, alas, permanently increased the size of government - Woodrow Wilson’s government increased its share of GDP from 3.2% to 22% of GDP - but Coolidge managed to get it down to 9% and the closest we’ve gotten since is double that. (And notably about 30% of his budget was interest on the debt and another substantial percentage was veteran benefits, so we were on a path to getting it down again).
Figure 3. Keep Cool with Coolidge was his genuine presidential slogan. But perhaps even better might have been “Keep Cutting.” Note that Ai doesn’t have a great grip on Coolidge’s appearance either.
There is one other president who managed to make real cuts after a big war, Harry Truman, such that the net effect was a budget 25% smaller - but it was off of a gigantic base, he proceeded to fight his own war on the Korean peninsula (which he arguably invited, and then was arguably merited), and most importantly for judging his commitment to fiscal responsibility, Truman wanted to deepen government entitlements, though he mostly just succeeded in sustaining his predecessor’s.
Letting the population grow faster than government
Then there are presidents whose budgets were higher at the end of their tenures - but we might admire the fact that they were spending fewer dollars per citizen because they restrained budget growth below population growth. At the top of this list is Andrew Jackson, whom we’ve already celebrated. Not quite as spectacular as the man who paid off the national debt and got the federal government to its lowest proportion of the economy ever - but still worthy - are John Tyler, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Chester A. Arthur. James Garfield might have been in the same category had he not been assassinated. Remarkably, Grant’s successors paid down the national debt, kept government costs flat, and in doing so shrunk the contribution of the federal government to the economy even further than he did, such that Arthur got the government down to 2.2% of GDP, a founding-era level. (Though they did oversee growth in Civil War pensions).
Figure 4. Perhaps taxpayers should better remember those forgettable presidents… (As you can see with this image, AI has absolutely no idea what they look like, so don’t assign it for a first draft of the new Rushmore)
Letting the economy grow faster than government
Our next category is presidents who saw modest increases in real spending but exercised restraint (or restraint was exercised for them). Thomas Jefferson was rhetorically committed to limited government, paid down the national debt, and may very well have shrunk government directly but for the extremely good real estate deal in the Louisiana Purchase (he can be lambasted for an absolutely insane economic policy in which he embargoed the entire world, self-inflicting a depression - though that technically made his shrinking government as a percentage of GDP more impressive: the economy was smaller).
Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed the opportunity to wind down Korean War spending, but he also got the federal government down from 20% to 18% of GDP while concentrating on spending like highways and science that would hopefully not spiral (he can be lambasted for leaving office with a top marginal tax rate of 91% - but this essay is focused on the spending side). We might also lament that he made peace with a permanently bigger post-war government rather than taking a tack closer to Grant or Coolidge.
Bill Clinton may not have been in this category but for triangulating with a Republican Congress and Alan Greenspan at the Fed, but together they managed to balance the budget, reduce the national debt as a percentage of GDP, and even get the federal government down from 23% to 19% of GDP - we even came one vote shy of having a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Yes, the job was made easier by the end of the Cold War - but they also tackled entitlement reform. It was the most productive effort in living memory.
Grover Cleveland was the opposite: a Democrat president desperately trying to veto as much as he could out of a spendthrift Republican Congress. He was only so successful. Ironically, John Tyler, already mentioned and long considered ineffective, was able to better constrain a spendthrift Whig Congress.
Franklin Pierce saw a remarkable 50% increase in real spending - but still managed to shrink the government as a percentage of the economy and pay down debt (Pierce bought about 30,000 square miles from northern Mexico which is now in southern Arizona; he wanted more but could not convince Congress to take advantage of Mexican political instability).
Leviathan growth
From there, we move on to more questionable territory, where real spending went up without a war, but perhaps we can understand some: George Washington doubled the real budget, but we might forgive him for what was necessary to set up the country - and, in the end, his government was only 2.5% of GDP. John Adams oversaw only a slight bump from there, but Jefferson got it down to 2.2%!
John Quincy Adams was somewhat similar to Clinton: he very much wanted to spend money - and even got an incredible peacetime 80% real increase in the federal budget - but Jacksonians in Congress restrained him from expanding the government as a share of the economy, so it remained a low 2%.
James Buchanan also managed only a small increase in spending as a percentage of GDP, though it can be argued that his inability to manage sectional conflict led to a gigantic government expansion during the Civil War.
William Howard Taft oversaw a flat government share of the economy - but continued Theodore Roosevelt’s expansion of government responsibilities (and endorsed the income tax, which would considerably ease government expansion in the future). Roosevelt’s expansion was bigger, though miniscule by today’s standards, and his vision for government was, alas, nearly as large as his personality.
JFK, in his brief tenure, oversaw a federal government that took up about as much of the economy as when he entered - but, had he lived, he very probably would have been worse: JFK had already committed to ending the tight fiscal and monetary policies of Ike and gave us America’s first non-war, non-recession deficit.
William McKinley’s war with Spain was brief and victorious but also unnecessary. Real spending was up 50% during his tenure as a result, and there were ongoing obligations. But crucially McKinley also stood for sound money, which was a serious constraint against successors until they abandoned it. If only he had lived!
Benjamin Harrison was the president who served between Cleveland’s two terms and wanted to indulge the infamous billion dollar Congress, including expanding entitlements. He was decidedly in favor of a bigger and bigger government. Benjamin’s grandfather, William Henry Harrison, very probably would have tried to be a spendthrift (for the time) had he lived.
Figure 5. The fact that it was only a billion dollar Congress should clue you into the fact that taxpayers would still want to be living under Benjamin Harrison’s budget rather than any after World War 1.
Gerald Ford genuinely wanted to try to slow the growth of entitlements and was really the first modern president to try to confront the fiscal reality - but he still wound up spending more in real terms without much success. Jimmy Carter initially thought he’d save money by cutting the defense budget, but his foreign policy led to results that demanded a reversal; nevertheless, Carter deserves significant credit for appointing Paul Volcker to the Fed, which helped manage the growing portion of the budget that was spent on paying down interest on the debt.
The patron saint of conservatism, Ronald Reagan, was more rhetorically committed to limited government than just about any modern president but grew the real budget by about 70%. We might forgive him for a defense build up that won the Cold War. And his economic policies helped ensure that, as a percentage of GDP, his federal government was stable, around 22%. But Reagan accomplished that through deficit spending, such that debt as a percentage of GDP went from 33% to 50%. And government certainly did not shrink. George HW Bush fought a brief Iraq war but also did not constrain spending: the government got a bit bigger across the board, and debt jumped further, to 64% of GDP in just 4 years. It took Clinton (and his Republican restrictors) to get prudence again.
Herbert Hoover is incorrectly infamous for doing nothing about the Great Depression - in reality, he kicked off spending projects to try to get the economy moving while badly regulating it (to the point where FDR, running against him, pledged to pursue balanced budgets - a promise that did not quite pan out)
Evaluating Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s first term is extremely complicated by covid, though I think it’s fair to say that we would have done things differently in retrospect. Trump’s numbers were up only 10% by the time the pandemic arrived - but then government spending exploded. Biden’s numbers are technically down from the covid height - but up substantially versus before covid. Here’s hoping Trump can do much better in his second try, though the betting markets as of March 2025, have gone from predicting that he’d cut over $300 billion in year one (4.4% of the budget) to less than $50 billion (0.74%). But remember: only one peacetime president has ever cut government in real spending without winding down a war, so Trump should aim to join that exclusive club, even if it’s just a $1 cut year over year! In fact, because of inflation, if Trump’s last year just spent the exact same amount in nominal terms as Biden’s last year, he would have cut government.
Kicking the can down the road
Dick Cheney rather famously intoned that deficits don’t matter and George W. Bush grew government across the board during his tenure as he both fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while expanding entitlements. Barack Obama did wind down Iraq and a Republican Congress did compel sequestration, which helped ensure the government did not take a bigger share of the economy in the short term - but Obama’s healthcare regime saddles future governments with more spending, more than W., according to o1. Truman might very well have been in this category if he had not been cutting off of the huge World War II baseline and/or if he had been more successful in his domestic agenda.
Richard Nixon’s record looks better in isolation than it deserves: while the numbers were up on a real basis, he concluded the war in Vietnam and the government and debt looked like it was shrinking as a percentage of GDP - but his break with the last remnants of the gold standard and his failure to undo the Great Society in its infancy had serious fiscal consequences.
Much worse was Lyndon B. Johnson, who like Nixon looks better in isolation, even managing to balance the budget one year - but while doing so, got us deeper into the Vietnam War and, disastrously for long-term fiscal prudence, committing the US government to the most massive spending regime of all.
Bigger wars, bigger government
At the very bottom of the spending less category are those Presidents who got us into a major war - though obviously we can debate whether those wars were worthwhile.
Just to show you that this list is an unbiased look at fiscal matters, in the worst category comes my favorite president: James Knox Polk. And yet! The man acquired for the United States the entire Pacific Coast and all or part of a dozen current U.S. states. Hard to call that anything but a bargain. Furthermore, outside of the Mexican American War, Polk was relentlessly cutting the domestic budget and attempting to constrain his successors by both cutting taxes and establishing an independent treasury. It basically worked until the Civil War, with the government shrinking back down appropriately.
James Madison may have been the father of the Constitution but, in the War of 1812, he also managed to declare war on Britain, the global superpower, at the exact wrong moment - when literally Britain was sending a ship over the Atlantic rescinding its terrible practice of conscripting our sailors that was the basis of the war. As a result, the federal budget exploded, the British burned Washington, and we got nothing out of it - except a national hero committed to future spending restraint: Andrew Jackson. In fact, the war was so expensive that Madison renounced his earlier, constitutional opposition to a national bank and chartered a second one.
The most gigantic explosions in spending occurred with Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. In Wikipedia’s table of presidential ranking surveys, Lincoln and Roosevelt are in the top three presidents in every one; Wilson is in the top 10 in most, in the top 15 in all. In the 25 surveys, van Buren cracks the top 20 only four times. Clearly, these rankers are not especially sensitive to spending, or think it was all worthwhile.
Figure 6. Naturally, AI has a much better idea of what they looked like
The Civil War famously freed the slaves (despite that not being an initial war goal) but also resulted in the deaths of about 6% of northern military-aged men and 18% of similar southerners (1 out of every 4 soldiers never came home), the highest per capita taxation in the world, the multiplication of our debt by over 40x, and laid the foundation for much bigger government than the Founders intended, most notably in its abandonment of the Constitutional restriction on paper money. Do read Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (the title refers to a Lincoln quote). Still, most Americans today feel the Civil War was worthwhile, even if they don’t totally understand the ledger, and even more significantly the presidents who came after Lincoln were determined to shrink the government back down and they basically did.
Until Wilson. World War I was the biggest disaster in modernity and it was obviously horrible to any observer a couple years in, which is why Wilson ran for re-election on the basis that he kept us out of the war. Then he won and got us in. Spending went from 3.3% of GDP before he took office - just a bit higher than most presidents until then - to 22% while the debt multiplied six times. And to what end? The world was not made safe for democracy - democracy was nearly murdered a couple decades later due to the cataclysmic results of World War I. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Wilson oversaw the introduction of the income tax and the Federal Reserve, a double punch that enabled the massive expansion of the government - and his scientific progressivism and war socialism previewed a whole new conception of government. Bill Kauffman reports that “Prices of wheat, coal, copper, iron, steel, food, and any other product with even a tenuous relationship to ‘national defense’ were set by the federal government, which essentially nationalized the railroad, shipping, telegraph, and telephone industries.” Harding campaigned for a return to “normalcy” and he and Coolidge did manage to head in that direction - but the government has never been as small as before Wilson. Indeed, as noted earlier, as a percentage of GDP, it has been at least double Coolidge ever since.
Despite promising fiscal prudence, FDR abandoned the gold standard, dramatically expanded entitlements, and engaged in a highly experimental, often inconsistent reaction to the Great Depression that simply did not work for years: at no point during the 1930s did unemployment go below 14%. As Jim Powell puts it in FDR’s Folly, Roosevelt paid farmers to destroy their crops and animals while people went hungry, made things more expensive while people went without, tripled taxes while employers were starved of capital, regulated banks to make them less diversified amidst a banking crisis, and channeled government subsidies toward politically helpful constituencies rather than the most needy. Indeed, the Great Depression actually looks like two depressions that came right after each other, with the recovery from the first exacerbated by the horrible monetary policy and unpredictable government policy of the time. FDR’s Treasury Secretary reflected: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work… after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!"
But of course what really cost a lot of money was World War II - the good war where we were attacked by the Japanese and declared war upon by the Germans. We won, and it was for the benefit of humanity. Thankfully, the presidents thereafter were initially committed to paying down this massive one-time debt and while they may not have succeeded in paring down the government to its prewar status like their post-Civil War predecessors, it was going along fine until LBJ set up the ticking time bombs that remain with us to this day. Regardless of the merits of spending lots on WW2, the rest of FDR’s presidency puts him deep down toward the bottom of our list of fiscally restrained presidents.
Additional Ai rankings
Claude:
Top Tier - exceptional fiscal discipline
Andrew Jackson
Martin Van Buren
Warren G. Harding
Calvin Coolidge
James Monroe
Grover Cleveland
Strong performers
Ulysses Grant
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Chester A. Arthur
Bill Clinton
Rutherford B. Hayes
Andrew Johnson
Middle tier: mixed records
Thomas Jefferson
John Adams
James Buchanan
Benjamin Harrison
Gerald Ford
Harry S. Truman
William McKinley
James K. Polk
Below average:
John Quincy Adams
James Garfield
William Howard Taft
Millard Fillmore
Poor fiscal discipline
Richard Nixon
JFK
Jimmy Carter
Franklin Pierce
George HW Bush
Ronald Reagan
Theodore Roosevelt
Barack Obama
Donald Trump (first term)
George W. Bush
Bottom tier
George Washington
Herbert Hoover
James Madison
Abraham Lincoln
Joe Biden
Woodrow Wilson
Franklin Roosevelt
LBJ
+
Grok (note that within each tier, the presidents are listed chronologically)
Top tier:
James Monroe
Andrew Jackson
Martin van Buren
John Tyler
Millard Fillmore
Andrew Johnson
US Grant
Grover Cleveland
Warren G. Harding
Calvin Coolidge
Upper mid:
John Quincy Adams
James Knox Polk
Rutherford B. Hayes
Chester Arthur
William Howard Taft
Dwight Eisenhower
Bill Clinton
Lower mid:
George Washington
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
Zachary Taylor
James Buchanan
Theodore Roosevelt
JFK
Richard Nixon
Gerald Ford
Jimmy Carter
Bottom tier:
James Madison
Franklin Pierce
Abraham Lincoln
Benjamin Harrison
William McKinley
Woodrow Wilson
Herbert Hoover
Franklin Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Lyndon B. Johnson
Ronald Reagan
George HW Bush
George W. Bush
Barack Obama
Donald Trump (first term)
Joe Biden