Donald Trump's much-ballyhooed Department of Government Efficiency does not actually exist. The program's official status is more significant than it might seem, because it reflects the yawning gap between the president's promises of fiscal restraint and the reality of what can be accomplished without new legislation.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk first pitched the DOGE idea last August after Trump said he might appoint the world's richest man as a policy adviser. "I am willing to serve," Musk wrote on X, his social media platform, above an AI-created image of himself standing at a lectern labeled "Department of Government Efficiency."

That imaginary department's acronym alluded to dogecoin, a Musk-championed cryptocurrency that was originally created as a joke but became "too important to laugh off," as Barron's put it in 2021. Musk's DOGE concept followed a similar trajectory after Trump took him up on his offer, putting him in charge of a project that Trump said would bring "drastic change" to the federal government.

From the beginning, DOGE's mission was ambiguous. While Musk had........

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