ELON MUSK and Vivek Ramaswamy want to get the American government back into shape. On November 14, their new Ministry of Government Effectiveness (DOGE) announced that it wanted to hire “very high IQ small government revolutionaries” to get to work on cost reduction. It’s easy to ridicule the company. Mr. Musk talked about cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget; a reduction of this magnitude, carried out quickly, would render public services incapable of performing many basic functions and plunge the economy into recession. Moreover, Donald Trump gave DOGE less than two years to do the job. And the entity is a small advisory body, not a real department, whose name is inspired by a cryptocurrency joke.