That the White House is eager to defend Elon Musk is certainly not new. After all, it was just a few weeks ago when Donald Trump hosted what was effectively an infomercial for Tesla on the South Lawn, followed soon after by a member of the president’s Cabinet urging the public to purchase shares in Musk’s auto company.

But as The Washington Post noted, the White House’s latest line on the Republican megadonor’s efforts included some talking points the public doesn’t often hear:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday defended Elon Musk, who leads the U.S. DOGE Service, and its efforts to shrink the federal government, saying he ‘is trying to save democracy.’ … ‘The United States of America will cease to exist. Our government will fail if we continue to go down the road of bankruptcy,’ she said during a Fox News interview, labeling some federal program spending as ‘wasteful and useless priorities.’

The president’s chief spokesperson delivered the lines with apparent confidence, as if the public should take such rhetoric seriously.

At this point, we could explore in detail why it’s demonstrably ridiculous to think Trump and Musk are working to “save democracy.” We could also note the irony of seeing the Trump White House, after adding roughly $7.8 trillion to the national debt in the president’s first term — most of it before the Covid pandemic — talk about deficits pushing the nation toward “bankruptcy.”

While we’re at it, we could also spend some time talking about how odd it is to see the White House expressing concern about the nation’s finances while urging congressional Republican members to approve several trillion dollars’ worth of tax cuts. We might even take a moment to mention that if the political world is going to have a conversation about avoiding national “bankruptcy,” perhaps it’d be wise to ignore the wishes of someone who’s filed for bankruptcy six times.

But for now, let’s put all of that aside and consider a more foundational question: Are Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency helping get our fiscal house in order?

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There’s reason to believe otherwise.

It’s a problem, of course, that DOGE has struggled at times with arithmetic, at one point famously confusing $8 billion with $8 million. But it’s a bigger problem that DOGE-driven disruptions at the Internal Revenue Service are poised to be extraordinarily expensive. The Washington Post reported last week:

Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue. … ‘The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,’ said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.

To be sure, these figures are based on projections that may or may not prove true — we’ll know more after the April 15 tax deadline — but the dire assessment, the Post’s report added, is based in part on the White House’s “rapid demolition of parts of the IRS.”

If Leavitt is correct and the United States of America “will cease to exist” without fiscal reforms, shouldn’t the White House do largely the opposite of what Trump and Musk have spent the last 10 weeks doing?