Elon Musk has been having a good time the last month and a half going cracking down on funding for life-saving drugs for people suffering from AIDS and blocking shipments of food to starving kids in Africa. He also thinks he’s really tough because he can fire park rangers getting $40,000 a year. But for some reason, Elon’s chainsaw doesn’t seem to work very well when it might affect the money going to rich people.

The most obvious case of government waste that somehow escapes Elon’s chainsaw is his friend Donald Trump’s golfing trips. While most presidents spend their time working at either the White House or Camp David, or a single vacation home that can be easily protected by the Secret Service, Donald Trump seems to spend most of his time at the various golf courses he owns.

This turns out to be very expensive, since it requires that a whole contingent of Secret Service agents circulate around the course ensuring that Trump is protected against a possible assassin. In Trump’s first term taxpayers spent almost $152 million protecting Trump on his golf outings. We already had spent $10.7 million protecting Trump in his golf games less than one month into his second term.

While these are not huge sums in the context of a $7 trillion federal budget, Trump’s golfing expenses are large relative to some of the savings Elon Musk has been boasting that his “super-high IQ” DOGE boys have been able to achieve. For example, on Musk’s “Wall of Receipts” he shows a contract with the Bureau of Land Management for “EEO DEIA Support” for $440,000. There is another one for $3,204,000 from the Corporation for National and Community Service with Change Management and Business Process Reengineering Professional Services. And Musk and the DOGE boys also found one for $3,437,000 from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for IT Research and Advisory Subscriptions.

If we compare the potential savings from restricting Donald Trump’s golf-playing with the work of Elon Musk and the DOGE boys, it looks like this.

But seriously, all this stuff is small potatoes in the federal budget. There are places with large-scale waste, but Elon Musk is scared to go near them with his chainsaw because they involve money that goes to rich people. The most obvious place to look is the $888 billion military budget. There are undoubtedly many instances of overpaid contractors or big payouts for systems that don’t work.

The also is the $100 billion handout that Trump wants to give the crypto bros for his so-called “Strategic Crypto Reserve.” But the crypto bros have donated lots of money to Trump to get this payback, so don’t look for Elon to be going anywhere near this boondoggle with his chainsaw.

And then there is Medicare Advantage, which is insurance that private plans offer as an alternative to standard Medicare. While the idea was that these private plans would save the government money, the opposite has proven to be the case.

The private plans inflate what the government pays them by “upcoding” the patients that sign up for their plans. This means that when a patient signs up for a plan in Medicare Advantage, the insurer lists additional conditions for the patient, exaggerating or even inventing conditions the patient has. By making the patient appear in worse health, the insurer collects more money from the government.

One estimate put the amount the government lost last year due to this upcoding at $83 billion. These losses dwarf the nickel and dime stuff that Musk and the DOGE boys have been touting. And unlike their finds, which almost entirely involved spending they don’t like, Medicare Advantage is actually fraud.

But no one expects Elon Musk to take his chainsaw to Medicare Advantage. The problem is that the insurers are powerful companies with big bucks. Musk’s chainsaw only works on little people, government workers getting $100,000 a year or so. When it comes to the rich and powerful, Musk’s chainsaw has an automatic cutoff switch.