Yes but he does nothing to change the factors behind the overpopulation, and assumes that trillions of people on a huge range of planets across a presumably very ecologically and structurally diverse universe are exactly double the population they need to be in relation to available resources, or what distribution of resources between planets might look like. He’s been doing this for decades and hasn’t noticed that one-off reductions of populations of that scale would be wiped out in a generation. He’s supposed to be intelligent enough to put all these plans together and outwit various opponents but not intelligent enough to work out that by his own experience his plan isn’t working, and also he’s supposed to be powerful enough by the end of the film to reorder the entire universe according to his will but it doesn’t occur to him to come up with an alternative approach that would be more effective.