Of Donald Trump’s recent announcements, the one that intrigues — even excites — me the most is the establishment of DOGE, the misnamed “Department of Government Efficiency” (misnamed because it is really a nongovernmental advisory body that will work with the White House, not any kind of “department” inside government).

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be in charge of DOGE, are both brilliant, and the federal government has clearly become too expansive and its writ too cumbersome. There are more than 180,000 pages of federal regulations. Surely it’s worth taking a close look at them and retiring many.

Observers have pointed out that the duo’s goals will be much harder to achieve than they imagine. Washington is quite inefficient, but most of what it does is write checks — with great efficiency. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and other mandatory programs make up about 60% of the federal budget. Trump has often said that he would protect most of this spending.

Next is the Defense Department, at more than $800 billion, which has generally been considered untouchable for political reasons — though it is probably the department that most desperately needs to be streamlined. (For example, America has four air forces, the Air Force itself, the Army’s air force, the Navy’s air force and that of the Marines.)

Then comes interest on the debt, also untouchable, which is almost as large as the Pentagon’s budget.

What is left is about 15% of the federal budget, which includes certain veterans’ benefits, agricultural subsidies, spending on roads and highways, etc. To achieve the $2 trillion spending cuts that Musk has often talked about, he would need to eliminate all this spending and all defense spending.

But I support the impulse to reform — and not just because I think it will force greater scrutiny and efficiency on government, which needs it. The duo will also force the country and especially the Republican Party to confront a reality it has danced around for decades. The modern Republican Party was forged in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Ever since the 1930s, the party’s strongest ideologues have promised to repeal the New Deal and dismantle the architecture of the federal government. But they never did.

The first Republican president to occupy the White House after FDR was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who largely accepted Roosevelt’s legacy. Next came Richard M. Nixon, who actually expanded it, establishing bureaucracies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and proposing a version of universal health care. All this infuriated conservatives, who kept urging rollback. Ronald Reagan came to political prominence in a nationally televised speech he made on Barry Goldwater’s behalf — against a growing government and deeply skeptical of farm subsidies and programs such as Medicare and Social Security, warning of socialism that would doom the American republic to a future of unfreedom. But of course, during his two terms in office, Reagan never seriously tried to repeal Social Security or Medicare. In fact, federal debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP grew under Reagan. It’s worth noting that the only president to oversee a balanced budget since 1969 was Bill Clinton.

Ramaswamy and Musk have both taken to posting a clip of economist Milton Friedman on their social media, in which he argues for a very limited role for the federal government. (Ironically, this role would not seem to envisage any support for, say, electric vehicles and civilian space programs, which have helped create the bulk of Musk’s fortune.) But what decades of public policy have revealed is that Friedman’s vision has little support in the United States. We are where we are because the American public has voted for Republican levels of taxation and Democratic levels of spending — which leaves a gap that can be filled only by borrowing.

There is a strong argument that U.S. debt is on an unsustainable path, especially considering the rising costs that will come as more and more baby boomers retire. But slashing federal spending will almost certainly cause an economic downturn. The central lesson of macroeconomic policy in recent decades has been that government spending now constitutes so large a part of the economy that drastically cutting it can lead to a downward spiral of reduced consumer spending and declining confidence.

The U.S. federal government is smaller than others in much of the industrial world, in terms of spending as a percentage of GDP. It is still desperately in need of reform and streamlining. In fact, much of the rage that has built up among parts of the Republican base over decades has been centered on the notion that party leaders have promised a massive downsizing of the state but never delivered.

With DOGE, we might finally get an effort to actually deliver on the central Republican promise of the past 90 years. And we will find out what America thinks of it.