I deliberately did not answer your question. I refuse to get into the weeds because I reject your premise. I don't know anything about the inner workings of these organizations. (It's really not a "simple question" at all!) It's not my job, I'm just a voter. I have other things to do.
You seem to want me to assume that because of this, I have to default to YOUR position. I'm saying, that doesn't match my broad view of the world. I have the opposite default position.
I guess what I can say, broadly, is that the US Government has a MASSIVE budget. The cruft is in there somewhere. If there's one guy who says he's gonna try to slash it, I'll take that guy and hope for the best.
> I refuse to get into the weeds because I reject your premise.
Occam's Razor would indicate that you have made an unsubstantiated claim that you cannot justify and have been deflecting, desperately. Starting discussions in bad faith, is not constructive.
> If there's one guy who says he's gonna try to slash it, I'll take that guy and hope for the best.
Ok, and then what we actually got was elon musk's incompetent "doge" organization.
This is literally my point, you have faith that there is this "bad cruft" and so you're willing to believe in, and give power to, incompetent idiots merely because they sound like they agree with your predetermined faith.
It's frustrating to watch this sort of thing happen. Regardless of the actual status of "cruft", musk and trump are famously incompetent, the odds of them suddenly developing the skills necessary to combat "cruft" are highly unlikely.
Why, exactly, do you want to throw a hail mary? Are we about to fall off a cliff? Is there some kind of apocalypse waiting to destroy us if we don't do something drastic? Have we run out of other options?
The point I'm trying to make is that the federal government is not some kind of faceless opaque entity that can be treated as a foe to be defeated. It's a big ol' complicated conglomeration of thousands of groups made of of millions of people. Yes, that is hard to wrap your head around at once, but the information is out there. It's all public, you don't need to sneak around or bribe people or whatever, you can just look up who does what, when, why and for how much.
It was a simple question.