The masterminds behind the proposed government efficiency agency have provided more detail about how it would function. Their explanations only makes their enterprise seem less plausible.

DOGE could be a mechanism for a Musk shadow presidency, a nonsense job designed to keep Musk busy without giving him real power, or a curious mix of the two. In any case, Musk and Ramaswamy have proposed cutting “thousands” of federal regulations and determining the “minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions.

Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-heads of the upcoming Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency commission, also known as “DOGE”, have vowed to slash federal spending by “at least $2 trillion,” Musk suggested last ...