I searched everywhere on how to reduce the number of minion nodes that you have in your cluster after following this guide
https://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/gce/
kubectl drain, kubectl delete node <nodename>, and manually deleting the virtual machines still causes the nodes to spawn back up again.
gcloud compute instance-groups managed resize kubernetes-minion-group --size=42
The variable size is how many worker/minion nodes you would like in your cluster