Over at the Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy make the legal case for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. For now, I will leave it to legal scholars to decide whether it is a good or bad case. I just want to comment on two sentences in the piece:

Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require Congress to shrink. But this deflects attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end—and that DOGE aims to address by identifying pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.

We should, of course, do as much as we can to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse — and, more generally, to shrink the government footprint on our lives. Many of us have spent our professional lives making that case. That’s why so many scholars were out hours after the DOGE announcement with their list of programs to cut or reform and departments to eliminate. The government does too much and is bloated even in many of its appropriate operations. I offered a small list here. I have 50 more items where that came from, including selling Freddie, Fannie, some federal land, air-traffic control, airports, railways, and the USPS.

Nevertheless, I would urge Musk and Ramaswamy not to deflect attention from the need to put entitlement programs on sound fiscal footing. Their task and approach (as I understand it) at DOGE doesn’t include entitlement reform. I get that. But if Congress keeps kicking the can down the road by failing to reform entitlements, we will be in a fiscal mess, and their efforts could be wasted. Besides, without taking on the task themselves, there are ways they could still help.

That’s because they have a bigger microphone than any of us have or will ever have. They could reach and educate people about the reality of our future fiscal health and the fact that it ultimately boils down to whether we reform Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

It also seems that it would be consistent with what they are trying to achieve. Ramaswamy, for instance, has pointed out how Congress doesn’t do its job by not bothering to reauthorize programs it wants to spend money on. The same can be said about Congress allowing entitlement programs to grow on autopilot.

Musk and Ramaswamy have energized many people to talk about fiscal issues in a way we haven’t seen in a while. They could get people engaged about demanding that Congress be part of their efforts.

So, by all means, cut away at the bureaucratic fat — but don’t deflect attention away from the reality that making Uncle Sam more efficient at doing things it shouldn’t be doing in the first place will eventually have to be paired with actions by Congress to put this country on a sound fiscal path.