FOR ALL THE talk of a new class-conscious GOP, the Republican Party sounded much like its old self when, in December, Vivek Ramaswamy laid out the mission of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). "Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security," Ramaswamy complained. "The dirty little secret is that many of those entitlement dollars aren't even going to people who they were supposed to."

There it is again: "entitlement" reform. Drawing from his own presidential campaign pitch, Ramaswamy has urged Donald Trump to deploy DOGE as a beachhead in a war on spending, arguing for using executive powers to slash "wasteful" federal expenditures without congressional approval. DOGE apes the language of a Silicon Valley slide deck, but it has so far presented little more than a memeified version of welltrodden right-wing austerity politics.

Ramaswamy and Elon Musk-DOGE'S co-chair-have pushed cuts in the corporate speak of "efficiency." But what they offer makes little sense. Musk has talked of slashing $2 trillion. How would such a change not destroy programs Trump has promised not to kill? The billionaire does not have an answer.