Got any polls for that statement?

Nope. But it doesn't invalidate it... especially in the wake of things like Flint. I doubt the American public, upon hearing thousands being poisoned by lead are going to want to dismantle a government agency dedicated to stopping that.

So? That was back when communism and socialism were also viewed as threats, but people have forgotten about that. The argument to make is simple: The states can do those jobs better.

Can they? Say you have one state with a river which flows into another and it pollutes it, how would the receiving state handle that?

More importantly: without the EPA, we've seen what America was like. People dying needlessly from pollution and having lower air quality and health outcomes.

Sorry, but no one wants the US to become like China where people need masks to make it through a bad smog day. That's in our past thanks to the EPA.

I generally dislike subsidies.

Do you own a home or plan to? Well then goodbye to your Mortgage Interest Deduction, literally the biggest gimme to 1st time homeowners in the US.

Social security can go, I think that one is easily winnable. It's going to implode on itself sooner or later anyway. The VA can stay, but it needs better oversight. Unemployment benefits should go and those programs can be run by the states where they can do a better job of ensuring people are looking for work.

Literally no candidate ever has made it into office (or held one) on the plank of "Social Security has to go", much less a Republican one. This is a deeply contentious issue for a demographic that Republicans/Conservatives depend on.

Other programs are incredibly popular, like UI, which basically kept people on their feet throughout the 2008-now Recession.

Ok, so imagine for a moment if you will, that we keep all spending in place, all programs, and all of that stuff the way it is, but have the states run all of it. What happens to federal taxes? They drop to almost nothing. State taxes increase to as much as federal taxes were before. The money is there, but all of it goes to the feds, I'm simply suggesting that we re-route it to the states and only pay taxes to the feds for the bare minimum. The whole advantage to letting states do what they want to do is that the average citizen has more power over his government and that states will run tighter budgets than the fed with less waste overall.

Except state taxes can't get blood out of a stone. In this scenario, places like NY, California, and other denser and metropolitan states thrive while more rural and sparsely populated ones suffer.

This is a bad model for conservatives as a whole as generally more Red states benefit today than they would without an over-arching Federal framework to redistribute funding.

Heck, despite federal intervention we still have people living in shacks without clean water in some parts of the country. Where I grew up there were people on dirt floors. In flint Michigan homes in the area are abandoned and the water is toxic. The federal government isn't the end all. It has a place, but most of what they do isn't in the job description.

Yes, but the problem is not as bad as it used to be. 50 years ago, it was much, much worse.

Listen, there is ideology and there is pragmatism. Conservatism demands a lot which simply will never happen or is so impossible to not be worth it. Can't we return to the days of fixing what we have now instead of demolishing the whole building and trying to start from scratch?