300 million person democracy that regulates a fire service seems to be quite a bit bigger... Way too big of administrative clutter

Yeh but who cares? That isn't what most people mean by big and small government. Though I can forgive someone for thinking that since our Uniparty and faux conservative movement for the past 50 years has given us nothing but a dialectic over "muh taxes", and never the opportunity to actually restructure or eliminate government control. Sure if you cut the EPA's budget they can't annoy people as much for a while, but as long as the regulatory framework exists they'll come back.