From time to time, I get missives from the office of Mary Gay Scanlon, a Democrat who represents me (in a manner of speaking) as the member in the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania’s 5th Congressional District, which comprises a slice of Philadelphia and a fair expanse of its western suburbs.

In one of her recent emails, I found this: “Should unelected billionaires have access to your sensitive Treasury data, including Social Security and Medicare payments systems?”

Click “Yes” or “No.”

The billionaire of special interest is, of course, Elon Musk, whose DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is acting as an advisory body to President Donald Trump. 

It will be interesting to see whether next comes a follow-up note with survey results aligning with Scanlon’s progressive bent.

Myself, I didn’t click. I did, however, send to the Scanlon press office a couple questions: 

— Who across the whole of the executive branch is elected, save the President and the Vice President?

— If being a billionaire should disqualify someone from making recommendations to the President, what do you think is the appropriate limit on personal assets? Half a billion? Half a million?

That was a couple days ago. No reply yet.

But who are we kidding? As for the scope of DOGE’s remit, it is already running up against court tests. The displeasure Scanlon takes from Musk has to do with more than any concern for proper procedure, more than his electioneering for Trump, more than his vulgar outbursts.

What must really irk Scanlon is to see such a volatile contrarian as Musk dead set on tearing off the veil over federal spending. He is the workaholic who stayed in a Tesla factory around the clock, sleeping under his desk on the factory floor. He is the critic of delays in federal launch licenses whose SpaceX enterprise managed to “parallel-park” a towering booster rocket upon its return to the launch pad, another step toward making rockets reusable.

Is it any wonder he leaves heads in Washington spinning?

The Gen-Z brainiacs whom Musk has brought to DOGE make that initiative all the more grating to those who once thought inside-the-Beltway turf their own. She who might suppose herself the doyenne of her party, Hillary Clinton, sniffs about the young’uns: “They have no relevant experience. Most of them aren’t old enough to rent a car.”

Consider one of them, albeit one who would not be turned away by a Hertz or an Avis. Luke Farritor, 23, last year won $40,000 in prize money put up by tech entrepreneurs when he used artificial intelligence to decipher a word in CT scans of scrolls that had been carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Once an intern at SpaceX, he’s now in place at the Energy Department, poking around amid some commotion over his security clearance.

What would happen if you cloned a Luke Farritor a thousand times and scattered the copies across federal agencies? Thrills, chills, and woe for the status quo.

Musk will be … Musk. Would it be delusional, though, to think that rather than fall in with the anti-Musk furies of her out-of-power party, Scanlon herself might push for pruning or even amputating one or another appendage of the federal government? 

It would. From a recent Scanlon press release: “Scanlon, Judiciary Committee Colleagues Demand Probe Into Elon Musk’s Conflicts Of Interest And Potential Violations Of Federal Law.”

The expenditures the Trump administration has ridiculed so far—say, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, or $19 million to promote “inclusion” in Vietnam—are pickings for talking points. They’re like the stuff that Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul digs up for his annual Festivus Report. Surely you wanted to know whether rats in “positive environments” are more likely to abstain from cocaine than are rats in “negative environments”? Washington gave New York University $419,470 to find out. Mirabile dictu, it’s happy rats that are more likely to shun the drug.

The truly worrying numbers are in the open for all to see. The national debt is $36 trillion and counting. Federal spending for fiscal year 2024 came in at $6.75 trillion, or 23 percent of gross domestic product, up from $4.89 trillion (in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars), or 20 percent of GDP, in fiscal 2015. 

“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.” It may be apocryphal that in the 1960s the late Senator Everett Dirksen made that remark. Even so, it has a point, a billion in Dirksen’s day being roughly $10 billion today.

Musk speaks of an “epic outcome” that can result from DOGE’s cost-cutting recommendations even as he retreats from earlier talk of clawing back $2 trillion. That was an absurd goal so long as entitlement-taking baby boomers — me among them — are burdening taxpayers. 

But what if DOGE pares away something even less than a tenth of $2 trillion? Say a tenth in the gap between the spending blow-out of last year and the annual outlay of only nine years ago: a difference of $186 billion. 

It might still be enough to give Scanlon’s bogeyman some bragging rights.

Richard Koenig is the author of the Kindle Single No Place to Go, an account of efforts to provide toilets during a cholera epidemic in Ghana.