The lonely cadre of spending cutters on Capitol Hill has spent decades in the wilderness, offering up trillions of dollars in budget-cutting ideas only to be disregarded by the big-spending consensus that binds Democrats and Republicans.

President-elect Donald Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have given them hope.

The spending cutters are flooding the DOGE with targets for where to start cutting.

“I can give them a long list of things that we need to defund,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, North Carolina Republican and chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, told Fox Business.

Sen. Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican and founder of the Senate’s DOGE caucus, last week sent Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy a list of $1 trillion in potential budget savings.

Her ideas included shutting down a trio of budget-busting train projects in California, slashing bonuses paid to poor-performing defense contractors and closing federal office buildings left vacant by generous telework policies.

“If you can’t find waste in Washington, there can only be one reason: you didn’t look,” Ms. Ernst said.

Rep. Greg Steube, Florida Republican, urged the DOGE to slash federally funded testing on dogs and cats, arguing it’s unnecessary and wrong.

The prospect of having an ear in the new administration is heady stuff for those who have been fighting the budget wars over the years.

“It’s definitely the moment,” said Joelle Cannon, a former staffer for Sen. Tom Coburn and the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission.

She compared pushing for budget cuts over the last couple of decades to a “John the Baptist feel” of being a voice in the wilderness. And now “it looks like someone is coming, with plans to do something about it,” Ms. Cannon said.

It is a marked change from the past 30 years, when attempts to pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, reform entitlement spending or tame the Pentagon’s budget have collapsed on Capitol Hill.

Yet the optimism is tempered by questions about what, exactly, the DOGE will try to do.

Despite the word “department” in its name, the better analogy is to a White House commission. Unless Congress grants it powers, it can do little more than shine a light on problems and recommend solutions.

Still, with Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy at the helm and Mr. Trump behind them, they could be plenty powerful in overcoming the inertia of the big spenders.

The two billionaires said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month that their initial target is to cut $500 billion worth of annual spending in programs that Congress doesn’t authorize. They have pointed to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the federal workforce and international aid as some targets.

The two also are eyeing changes to federal regulations that strangle economic growth.

Before the DOGE, the last big budget-righting effort was the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (commonly known as the Simpson-Bowles commission) — a 2010 attempt forged by President Obama. It suggested a mix of spending trims and new taxes that could have resulted in $4 trillion lower deficits over the standard 10-year budget window. Versions of the plan failed in both chambers.

Ms. Cannon, who served on the Bowles-Simpson effort, said there’s not much mystery about the path to fiscal sanity, but there’s been a problem of willpower and action.

“We’ve had the lists of reforms for 30 years,” she said. “No one’s ever done anything with any of them. The hope is that this now it is, ‘Oh, the playbook has been written already. Let’s update the numbers and fix the actual problem.’”

Congressional staffers said Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy are looking at a broad attack on spending by leveraging Congress, the White House and even the courts.

Some of the plans lawmakers are suggesting to the DOGE smack of everyday politics, as members of Congress figure to harness the commission to go after their perennial targets.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican tapped to head a House subcommittee coordinating with the DOGE, said she wants scrutiny of spending on overseas military bases, defense contracts and foreign wars.

Other ideas have been kicking around forever. They range from big-dollar items, such as limiting the growth of Social Security spending by using a different cost-of-living adjustment, to smaller-dollar gains, such as barring those with million-dollar incomes from claiming unemployment benefits.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.