Not even the most dyed-in-the-wool progressives would seriously contend that the federal government was a good steward of our tax dollars. Years ago, it was $600 toilet seats and a bridge to nowhere. Senator William Proxmire would tender the Golden Fleece Award to the most wasteful government spending. He never ran out of projects worthy of disdain. The federal government was in dire need of review for efficiency and effectiveness, since it was our money they were pissing away.

Something must be done.

This is something.

Putting aside the myriad legal and functional issues surrounding a non-governmental person with a coterie of like-minded, in the worst sense of the phrase, kids playing with toys they neither understood nor had any lawful authority to know about, no less touch, the hope was that Elon Musk and his Muskrats would do something that seemed impossible, seemed too complicated and convoluted to pull off. So what if his prime directive was to move fast and break things. Things needed breaking, and who, other than the richest man in the world would have the gumption to just do it?

This must be done.

Except its promise was doomed from the outset for a few very obvious reasons. The first was that the marginal dollars could only be found on the fringes. The core expenses of the government were fixed and untouchable. The pennies to be saved would do nothing to significantly reduce the cost of government. It’s not that wasted pennies shouldn’t be saved. They should. It’s that grandiose claims of the sort that fills the hearts of the unwashed with glee were never possible.

The second was that all the pieces of the puzzle were there for a reason, and to appreciate the reason required a fairly deep understanding of why they existed and what would happen in their absence. This is the Chesterton’s Fence problem, knowing why the fence was built before tearing it down. But that took time, thought, effort and understanding, none of which were interesting to Musk.

And now that tens of thousands of employees have been fired or forcibly retired, offices closed, telephone lines ringing incessantly with no one to answer them, and valued functions teetering on the edge of collapse, did we at least get the bang for the buck-saving?

He previously said his powerful budget-cutting team could reduce the next fiscal year’s federal budget by $1 trillion, and do it by Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year. Instead, in a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk said that he anticipated the group would save about $150 billion, 85 percent less than its objective.

It started as a claim of $2 trillion savings before the election, but then it’s facile to toss out big numbers to sell your claim. Still, saving $1 trillion is nothing to sneeze at. But even that was a crack pipe dream.

That’s because, when Mr. Musk’s group tallies up its savings so far, it inflates its progress by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year — and by making guesses about spending that might not happen at all.

One of the group’s largest claims, in fact, involves canceling a contract that did not exist. Although the government says it had merely asked for proposals in that case, and had not settled on a vendor or a price, Mr. Musk’s group ignored that uncertainty and assigned itself a large and very specific amount of credit for canceling it.

It said it had saved exactly $318,310,328.30.

To better understand the concept of “saving,” it’s only saving if it produces the same amount of value at a lesser cost. If you decided not to buy a car that would have cost you $50,000, you didn’t save $50,000 because you didn’t get a car you needed. If you didn’t need the car, then you saved money. If you did need the car, then you saved nothing.

Mr. Musk’s group has now triggered mass firings across the government, and sharp cutbacks in humanitarian aid around the world. Mr. Musk has justified those disruptions with two promises: that the group would be transparent, and that it would achieve budget cuts that others called impossible.

It’s clear by now that the mass firings, which were justified by falsely claiming poor performance, were indiscriminate and failed to take into account the need and value of the services being provided. If the fired had been incompetent or failed to perform their functions, fire away. If the fired were in jobs that served no useful purpose, send out those pink emails. But it has since become clear that many, probably most, of the fired were competent and dedicated, and that many, if not most, of the jobs eliminated were necessary to the minimal functioning of government. So even with the firings, there were no savings. Maybe pennies were saved, but at the expense of a functioning governmental service.

To add insult to injury, the balance of employees still on the payroll are now wasteful, not because they aren’t competent and dedicated, but because the mass firing made the remaining employees unable to perform the function for which their office exists. If the function can’t be performed, then the cost of maintaining the remnants of a once-functional department is wasted.

The one thing that Musk has failed miserably to accomplish is to unearth fraud, waste and abuse. He claimed to find it, such as the non-existent 150-year-old social security recipients, which was close enough for Trump and the MAGA faithful to believe what they wanted so desperately to believe, and using some of its never-ending supply of superlatives, the White House wants to keep selling the “win.”

The White House press office defended the team, saying it had compiled “massive accomplishments,” but declined to address specific instances where the group seemed to have inflated its progress.

Ironically, the government may well be just as rife with fraud, waste and abuse as it was before, but at least something was done, which is all that really matters if you want to believe hard enough.