The Swamp isn't Twitter: Budget-watcher Prisinzano (at right) to Musk (left). “DOGE” may be able to cut thousands of jobs. It will find fat to trim.It won’t end up eliminating federal government departments or axing trillions of dollars in spending. Not even close.So predicts a budget-watcher who’s monitoring the incoming Trump Administration’s effort to take a blowtorch to the ​“Deep State.”That budget-watcher is Richard Prisinzano. He serves as director of policy analysis at New Haven’s new nonpartisan federal economics think tank called The Budget Lab at Yale. Prisinzano offered his take on DOGE — aka ​“The Department of Government Efficiency” led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Incoming President Donald Trump assigned the pair to come up with proposals to cut a full third of the $6 trillion-plus federal budget, eliminate agencies, and slash regulations on corporations.“There are probably some ideas that they will find that will be useful and potentially be able to be implemented in the government,” Prisinzano predicted. ​“I don’t think that they’re going to make the wholesale changes [and cut] $2 trillion without blowing up the entire government.”And, for the record, he doesn’t predict that government will blow up.This is hardly the first time an incoming president formed a high-profile commission to root out waste and make government more ​“efficient.” Ronald Reagan did it. Bill Clinton did it.Barack Obama did it.All three efforts inevitably proved anticlimactic: It proved harder than expected to just ​“cut the fat.”And, as Prisinzano noted, to get anywhere near cutting a third of the budget, the Trump administration and Congress would need to touch political third rails: tightening Social Security and Medicare benefits while slashing the military budget.That said, the Clinton administration did manage to cut 200,000 federal jobs through its effort, Prisinzano said. In his own work serving as a financial economist for the U.S. Department of the Treasury, he saw firsthand how some regulations can become duplicative and some jobs that once made sense aren’t needed anymore. DOGE will definitely find ​“low-hanging fruit” to cut. The tax code, too, can always use efficiency-oriented updating, such as how small businesses are defined, Prisinzano said.It won’t necessarily be as simple to, say, abolish the Department of Education or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he said: Only Congress can do that.Congress has established a subcommittee to the Oversight and Accountability Committee to work with DOGE. ​“If it really came down to it, that there would be three senators who would vote against disbanding the Department of Education,” Prisinzano said. ​“Is there a way to get it passed or get rid of a department without going through Congress? I don’t think so.”Similarly, efforts to hold back already appropriated money — for electrical vehicles, for instance — would spark court challenges about presidential authority to rescind Congressionally approved funds. (Click here to read an extended rundown of the legal hurdles facing DOGE.)Musk’s DOGE won’t be able to step in and fire masses of workers the way Musk did when he took over Twitter, Prisinzano said. ​“It’s different from business when you come into the government. The Constitution is set there, so that specifically someone can’t come in for four years and get rid of [the] Senate, or get rid of Congress or disband the Supreme Court…. We want that because we don’t want it to just to go back and forth between who’s in charge gets to decide whether we spend money on Medicare and Medicaid or not.”Click on the video below to watch the interview with the Budget Lab’s Richard Prisinzano on WNHHFM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” The video following is from an earlier ​“Dateline” interview with Budget Lab co-founder Martha Gimbel. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of ​“Dateline New Haven.”