The thing to remember is no matter who is president, the wasteful money is hardly the problem. Its entitlements. If you just said, “No earmarks, no spending, nada nothing”, you might save $18-25 billion. Nat Defense, Social Security, and Medicaid is about 85% of the money. The other money is mostly for running the government like BLM and other bureaucracies. Which one do you think you could get cut? Saving a few million on a bridge to nowhere is a noble thing, but really a drop in the bucket for the coming problem in baby boomers retiring.
Bush made some mistakes, but Clinton had a party compared to what Bush has been through. The available money to cut is minuscule compared to what must go out, day in and day out. You won't get any votes from either party to cut $5 from Social Security or Medicare. Which weapons system would you cut during a wartime? We can't even get illegals cut off of Social Security. We had to burn up the phones to get illegals off the stupid Stimulus Package, and I bet they still get it.
Bush's mistakes were the pharma bill, throwing money at Katrina without limits, and not vetoing some of the Republican earmarks when he had the chance. Other than those, he's pretty limited. If Louisiana wanted $100 billion and he said $50 bill, he would have been impeached. Now we know most of the money was not needed, but who has the time to check every applicant to make sure they lived in the storm area if you have the Dems breathing down your neck?
Entitlements didn’t grow that much from 1.7 and a balanced budget to 2.7 + 400 billion in deficit in 8 years. And, if they did, then we have only 1 man to blame for that for not having the balls to just say no. As far as the other problems, they could have easily been handled from surplus by holding spending increases to reasonable limits.
But, no, Bush rarely said no to spending of any kind.