$150 billion: that’s the grand total of savings Elon Musk revealed last Thursday that he and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team are expecting to make after months of ruthless and often mindless cuts from a government the billionaire Trump megadonor claimed was riddled with fraud, waste, and graft.

To call this a monumentally unimpressive number doesn’t do it justice. Musk’s “savings” here — which are already error-ridden and inflated in the first place, created by totaling up spending that never actually existed or that was, alternately, either already cut or never actually was — represent just 15 percent of the trillion dollars he originally promised he would slash. It’s a mere one-fiftieth of what the federal government spent just last year alone, would shave off only one-tenth of one year’s worth of the average federal deficit over the past decade, and is a whopping less than half a percent of the overall $36.21 trillion of US national debt.