When he is not sharing memes of himself as a conquering Roman centurion or shrieking while brandishing a chain saw onstage at a CPAC conference, Elon Musk occasionally adopts the pose of a reasonable moderate offering an open hand of compromise that Democrats slap away.“What @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s,” he wrote on X last week. “The current Dem party has just gone so crazy far left that it isn’t recognizable anymore!” As evidence, he shared a video compilation of Bill Clinton promising to cut the federal workforce. Musk’s allies have made versions of this argument too. In a February 12 op-ed headlined “Democrats Ought to Love DOGE,” Matthew Hennessey, an opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal, argued, “Left and right should share a desire for government efficiency. It’s as unobjectionable as liberty and as essential as justice. Nobody who wants America to succeed could possibly be against it.”Who could have a problem with efficiency? Didn’t the Clinton administration undertake a big reform effort to overhaul the government? Well, sure. But the similarities end there.The Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative, led by Vice President Al Gore, took place over a five-year period. Gore carefully studied the federal government and consulted a wide array of experts rather than bursting into an unfamiliar domain with a handful of unqualified lackeys hopped up on conspiracy theories.[Conor Friedersdorf: The obvious inefficiency of Elon Musk’s new order]Clinton and Gore put their policy ideas through normal channels of legal process and public scrutiny—when they offered buyouts to the federal workforce, it was done through an act of Congress, not an email—whereas Musk, by canceling spending appropriated by Congress, has repeatedly violated the plain text of federal law and the Constitution, if you care about that sort of thing. Musk clearly does not—and an aversion to wild illegality and rank amateurism is a better explanation for Democrats’ opposition than them no longer caring about government efficiency.Crucially, the Clinton administration was actually attempting to make the government more efficient. Its most successful efforts involved carefully identifying and updating antiquated operational systems, including by introducing electronic filing at the Internal Revenue Service and giving federal employees more flexibility in procurement.Musk, by contrast, is wreaking havoc on government effectiveness for approximately zero benefit. His most sweeping method of culling the workforce—terminating probationary employees—is worse than random firings, because probationary employees include some longtime civil servants who have recently been promoted, which means many of the highest performers. Contrary to DOGE’s inflated claims, the group’s gross savings so far, which are concentrated in the minority of the budget that is domestic discretionary spending, amount to a rounding error. And because DOGE has turned its metaphorical chain saw upon the IRS, crippling the government’s ability to collect revenue, the net fiscal effect of Musk’s reign of terror may well wind up increasing the deficit. There’s a reason that none of the innumerable budget experts who have studied the deficit have proposed anything resembling what DOGE has come up with. By almost any ideological standard, it is the worst possible approach.DOGE’s haphazard methods are reflected in its work product. Its efforts have been marked by buffoonish mistakes, such as counting an $8 million cut as 1,000 times as large, and generally publishing ludicrously inflated tallies of its savings. Musk hastily fired, and then even more hastily un-fired, employees who turned out to have been securing America’s nuclear arsenal. The erratic decision making has unnerved not only Republicans in Congress but also Donald Trump’s own Cabinet. That Democrats are opposing publicly the things that many Republicans oppose privately is quite natural.[Derek Thompson: DOGE’s reign of ineptitude]One lesson of Clinton’s Reinventing Government project, if Musk had bothered to learn it, is that reducing staff is a bad way to save money. Cutting the government payroll was, by all accounts, the Clinton initiative’s greatest failure. Unlike a private company, the government is required to carry out certain functions by law. Clinton reduced the federal workforce, but not the responsibilities that those civil servants had carried out. As a result, the government wound up merely handing over more jobs to private-sector contractors. “Replacing government workers to do these jobs tended not to save money, and, of course, hiring the same employees back tended to cost government even more, because government paid twice—once for the buyout, once for hiring them as contractors,” Donald Kettl, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, told me. More contemporary plans to reform the federal workforce, such as an initiative led by Jennifer Pahlka at the Niskanen Center, have instead focused on making it easier for the government to both hire and fire employees rather than simply reducing its head count.Contrary to Musk’s complaints, Democrats have not stopped caring about identifying waste and making government more efficient. Many members of the party, chastened by the 2024 election results, were willing to find common ground with Trump, including Musk’s project, which is why a few Democrats joined the new DOGE Caucus in Congress. It was Musk’s choice to spurn the legislative route that Clinton took and put all the power in the hands of himself and a small team of policy amateurs.And it is Musk who, when he is not shedding crocodile tears over the lack of Democratic support, has been cackling maniacally about the conspiracies he thinks he’s uncovered. Musk seems to believe that the federal budget is hiding a gigantic scheme to prop up the nonconservative media and the Democratic Party through a web of disguised payments, and that canceling these will eliminate opposition to Trump. The factual predicate undergirding Musk’s plan to defund the American left is obviously a complete fantasy, but surely he understands that Democrats aren’t going to help him take actions designed to destroy them. Does he not realize that Democrats can see his posts?