In case you haven’t been paying attention, Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk have decided to take a little time off from their day jobs (pharmaceuticals for the former and Donald Trump’s shadow bestie for the latter) and endless social media iconoclasm to run a little something called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE (like the meme and cryptocurrency). This may sound like an actual government department but it isn’t. It’s more like a privately funded shadow organization charged with cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget with help from “super-high-IQ small-government revolutionaries.”

Sounds like a put-on, right? But here’s the thing. We’d be happy to root for anyone who can find ways to run the federal government more cheaply and efficiently. Who wouldn’t? Waste, fraud and abuse aren’t exactly unknown in any large enterprise whether it’s government or the private sector. But $2 trillion (nearly one-third of the Fiscal 2024 budget) and run by those guys? This has all the markings of a phony baloney PR stunt.

We’ve gone down this road before. The Grace Commission under President Ronald Reagan was launched with great fanfare but didn’t accomplish much. President Bill Clinton went down a similar path with his “reinvention” of government. Even President Barack Obama had his “Campaign to Cut Waste.” There are generally two big obstacles. The first is Congress which can barely find the votes to pass a budget of any kind, let alone pass one that might prove dramatically different from the past.

The second one is far, far tougher. The majority of the budget is for debt service, the military and entitlement programs. You can pick on hated regulatory agencies all you want but they collectively represent less than one out of ten federal dollars. Same for all those other programs that many conservatives dislike including the Internal Revenue Service or foreign aid. That’s peanuts compared with Social Security, the largest single line item at 21% of overall annual spending.

But, of course, none of that matters very much if your true purpose is simply to make a lot of noise about wasteful federal spending while President Trump is extending costly tax breaks that the country can no longer afford. No doubt the big brains working for Musk and Ramaswamy will find some pitiful examples of waste (well, aside from tax breaks for the electric vehicle industry, one assumes) but they won’t add up to much.