Elon Musk, a Don Quixote with Vivek Ramaswamy tagging along as Sancho Panza, recently ascended Capitol Hill to warn the windmills of tiltings to come. They have vowed to cut government down to the size they prefer. But when they descended from the Hill, their most specific proposal remained what it was before they ascended: to eliminate … daylight saving time. How this would improve governmental “efficiency” is unclear.

Musk’s instrument for Washington’s betterment is the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” which might be more plausible if it did not incorporate two fibs in four words. DOGE is not a department; departments are created by Congress, which created pretty much everything Musk’s advisory committee exists to frown about. And his announced, and arithmetically daunting, goal is to slice a third of the federal budget from the less than a third of the budget that includes neither Social Security, Medicare, debt service nor defense.

He does not just want government to do what it does more efficiently, he wants it to stop doing much of what it does. Bet on the windmills.

Most things government does it does because a constituency — intense, articulate and well-lawyered — wants it done. Or because government wanted to create such a constituency that, benefiting from it, will demand its continuance, and expansion.

Transforming the strange and embarrassing charisma of wealth into political power, beginning around 4 a.m. on a December day, Musk unleashed more than 150 posts on X to kill a bill to fund the government. This fusillade of opinions and falsehoods provoked a digital uprising in the countryside and stampeded congressional Republicans. An exultant Musk, confusing himself with the American public, cried, “The voice of the people has triumphed!” And, making God his accomplice, he added: “Vox populi, vox dei.” With remarkable precision, Ramaswamy chimed in, “That’s how America is supposed to work.” This, of course, is exactly wrong.

The Framers’ institutional handiwork was designed to temper and refine, by slowing and filtering, the translation of impulses into policy. That process, however, presupposes elected representatives who understand the foundational principle of representative government: The people do not decide issues, they decide who shall decide.

Readers of Walter Isaacson’s meticulous and disturbing biography of Musk can decide the extent to which they think he is bipolar, on the Asperger’s spectrum. Clearly, however, no one ever entertained an ambition more vaulting than Musk’s.

He thinks, Isaacson shows, that because human consciousness might not exist anywhere else in the universe, and because something — war, disease, an asteroid, something — might someday make Earth uninhabitable, he is in a rush to make human beings an interplanetary species. Hence SpaceX, which seems more important to him than electric cars.

Meanwhile, Musk’s increasingly manic behavior extends to instructing German voters to embrace the Vladimir Putin-friendly Alternative for Germany party. (Musk: “Only the AfD can save Germany.”) And Musk reportedly is contemplating a financial intervention in British politics, pursuant to a Scot’s (Robert Browning’s) axiom that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.

President William Howard Taft, when being briefed by a young aide who repeatedly referred to “the machinery of government,” reportedly murmured, “He really thinks it’s machinery.” Musk is not the first engineer-in-politics to bedazzle Americans.

“World’s Biggest Man Chosen to Fill World’s Biggest Job,” said a headline soon after the 1928 presidential election. New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote in 1930: “We were in a mood for magic … We had summoned a great engineer to solve our problems for us … The modern technical mind was for the first time at the head of a government.”

In American parlance, saying that some task is simple often involves saying, “It’s not rocket science.” Radically changing government, as Musk promises to do, is not rocket science. It is harder.

As he will understand when, probably sooner than he or many mesmerized Americans expect, he returns to actual engineering challenges. They involve materials more tractable than those of politics: human beings, with their appetites and passions.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.