A reduction in the size of the US federal government (and its budget) is long overdue.
Both of these things can be true.
It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry.
If understanding is your goal, it may be a useful intellectual exercise to internally steelman the counterargument to your own position.
The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research with no clear path to monetization.
Yes, private schools do both of these things, but in both cases they are only doing so by means of public funding.
The point is that the efficiency of the private sector is a Faustian bargain: it comes at the cost of expecting an ROI for the investigators.
How will you survive if what you're doing takes both a lot of time and makes no money?
Think about something like the FDA. It's a cost sink. The private sector will never do something like that because it's explicitly anti-profit.
Considering this is simply a religious statement posing as an assertion of fact, I would argue it is anti-intellectual to an extreme.
Please share some libertarian paradises where this has proven true. How’s Kentucky doing again?