Nobody much knows how to deal with the Department of Government Efficiency, whose DOGE acronym is based on a cryptocurrency-adjacent meme. Donald Trump’s recently acquired buddy Elon Musk seems to have developed the idea of a sort of cartoon superhero agency designed to destroy the Deep State–or maybe it was just a joke, suggests Decrypt’s Liz Napolitano. DOGE has no legal status, no public funding, no authority to do much of anything other than bloviate, headed by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, two men with zero experience inside the federal government they promise to expose and largely blow up.
Musk came up with the wild $2 trillion goal for federal budget savings that DOGE will allegedly generate (out of $6.75 trillion in total federal spending, including such trifles as mandatory interest payments on existing public debt, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, national defense, and a thousand other programs and services, most of which have enjoyed bipartisan support for decades). While he has argued that most of this excess spending is soaked up by........