I'm going to push back a little - because it comes with the name. I'm not a Musk fan, far from it but I have also worked with large organisations and there can be a lot of waste - waste that the private sector wouldn't allow. A friend of mine who worked at the BBC (tax payer funded) once told me that for two weeks she just carried pieces of paper around and had coffee - because they didn't have a job for her to do. Her old one had started, her new one wasn't up and running yet. When she cleaned the office, there was an irate email from the cleaning team who felt they had been disrespected and this escalated into a fiasco that involved managers and buckets of time.

Admittedly this is anecdotal, but the same has been true of the NHS and many local authorities I've worked for. There are plenty of civil servants who get into a job, become very comfortable with doing next to nothing and who simply wait it out for a pension. That's not a good use of taxpayers money.

Perhaps DOGE picked the wrong E. Efficiency is the wrong word here. Perhaps what is required is 'elimination'. That is finding things the Government should never have been doing in the first place and eliminating them entirely. It's more than possible to make something useless very efficient, but that may not be what needs looking at. Is the role of the US Government to educate Iraqi children, is the role of the US Government to provide education on climate change? Is the role of the US Government to fund opera in Columbia.... if so, why? If not, why not?

There tends to be a presumption on the left that Government is the answer to everything, rather than considering perhaps a smaller state might free up finances for those who wished to support LGBTQ+ rights in Serbia to provide that support via charity or by other NGO. You're arguing from a place that a programme exists is inherently good - that's (probably) not how Conservatives see it. I'm not a Conservative, so I don't know this and am making a presumption - but I hope some come along and explain. :o)