President Ronald Reagan created the efficiency-minded Grace Commission in 1982, promising that it would “drain the swamp.” President Bill Clinton established the National Partnership for Reinventing Government in 1993 with the goal of making the government “work better, cost less, and get results Americans care about,” keeping it active until 1998.

As promised, Donald Trump has given Elon Musk a job in (or at least adjacent to) his second administration, in a brand-new extragovernmental organization named for a meme turned cryptocurrency: the Department of Government Efficiency,