resident Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is perhaps the most welcome wake-up call for the federal government—and its obscene spending habits—in decades. It is refreshing to see many overpaid, underworked, often-vacationing federal employees fretting about whether their cushy jobs will disappear, and to see at least one branch of the federal government working to rein in our massive deficit spending. All of this is long overdue.

Yet it remains to be seen whether DOGE will help jump-start a serious and sustained effort to restore fiscal sanity, or whether its high-profile efforts will wrongly convince Americans that enough has been done, and that we can stop worrying that the federal government is bankrupting the country. If the former happens, it will be an extraordinary and much-needed development; if the latter, it will provide further evidence that, as Lincoln warned us nearly two centuries ago, if our republic is to be destroyed, it will be destroyed from within.

There are already signs that DOGE might not be able to deliver as much as originally promised. 

Shortly before the election, Elon Musk said he thought it was possible to slice “at least $2 trillion” out of the current federal budget of roughly $7 trillion. Earlier this year, he said that “if we try for two trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one [trillion].” Last month, he told Fox News’s Bret Baier, “Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars,” or “to drop the federal spending from $7 trillion to $6 trillion.” If achieved, such a reduction might not be “the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution,” as Musk told Baier it might be, but it would still be a remarkable feat, cutting the deficit roughly in half. (Our national debt, however, would continue to rise, as the deficit—even if much lower—would add to our existing debt.)