The federal government’s prodigious aptitude for spending money is hardly a secret.

Indeed, the feds’ profligacy has inspired jokes, and provoked outrage from watchdog groups, for decades.

Reports of exorbitantly priced toilet seats and hammers are part of American lore.

Dismay over this addiction to tax dollars has been decidedly nonpartisan.

Although the level of hyperbole from different political persuasions varies dramatically depending on which party has control of Congress.

(Or occupies the White House. Although Congress, not the president, doles out dollars, blame for outlandish expenditures often targets the executive branch. President Trump, who seems to consider the separation of powers something of a suggestion rather than a constitutional edict, has contributed much recently to this confusion about who is most responsible for America’s habitual deficit spending.)

But now, in the first month of Trump’s second term, stale rhetoric has been overwhelmed by action.

The intense scrutiny of the federal budget that Trump promised during the campaign has come to pass.

Even without his unique brand of bluster, this effort was destined to prompt hyperbole.

We’re so accustomed to politicians who can talk for hours about problems but rarely get around to solutions that the flurry of activity from the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has been bewildering.

The blizzard of publicity entertains, but I’m skeptical that it educates.

I have gotten half a dozen or so emails over the past two weeks from Oregon’s U.S. senators, Democrats Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, that portray the Trump administration’s efforts in apocalyptic terms.

They joined the Democratic caucus in sending a letter to Robert F. Kennedy, the new Health and Human Services secretary, claiming that a Trump proposal to reduce the “indirect costs” share of National Institutes of Health research grants would not only slow medical research, it would “cost lives.”

Accusing the administration of killing people is no small thing, it seems to me.

The claim can’t be proved since the proposed cuts in grants haven’t actually happened, pending a legal challenge.

Trump’s critics, both elected and not, have made similar predictions about each of the administration’s plans to trim spending.

If you read only those prognostications you could reasonably conclude that every aspect of life in America depends on federal spending, and that any interference in the budget imperils our very lives.

I hope reasonable people recognize this as hyperbole.

Certainly the media, which are supposed to be instinctively skeptical of everything politicians proclaim, ought to seek concrete examples rather than blithely regurgitating general claims of imminent mayhem which have partisan origins even a simpleton would recognize.

Yet it’s equally important, it seems to me, to put into context what Trump could potentially accomplish with this unprecedented scrutiny of federal spending.

The president’s acolytes are giddy as they celebrate DOGE and its effort to root out such ridiculous federally supported work as how cocaine affects honeybees and whether drunk finches can sing.

But these and dozens of other examples, however inane, involve such small amounts of money, compared with the gargantuan federal budget, that getting rid of them amounts to a rounding error.

And although critics typically define these sorts of projects as “waste,” I think that word, however apt it might seem in the context of cocaine and bees, alcohol and finches, can also mislead.

Waste implies that the money might as well have been doused in gasoline and ignited.

Except those dollars weren’t all used to buy cocaine and booze. Most, I suspect, was paid to the people doing the research. Which meant those dollars enriched the economy just as wages paid to private sector workers do.

I don’t mean to imply that I endorse using public dollars for such silly purposes.

(If a private institution chooses to do so, that’s their prerogative.)

I imagine the researchers benefiting from the federal largesse could put their talents to work on more useful endeavors.

Ultimately, though, I’m waiting to see how Trump’s efforts affect the federal deficit.

That, to me, is what matters most.

Can Trump succeed where each of the previous four presidents (himself included) failed?

The federal government hasn’t had a budget surplus since 2001, the last of four straight fiscal years, during President Bill Clinton’s second term, when the feds brought in more revenue than they sent out.

Clinton, a Democrat, had to deal with Republican majorities in the House and Senate during his second term. They negotiated the Balanced Budget Act of 1997.

But for almost a quarter century since, each year the federal government has operated in the red. Each year’s deficit has bloated the federal debt, which now amounts to about $37 trillion.

If Trump can interrupt that trend it would be a meaningful accomplishment.

But if he does not, then Trump and his supporters’ gleeful boasts about Musk and DOGE finally cutting off the people siphoning tax dollars for spurious purposes will amount to little more than political posturing.

Certain it is that Trump will need to address more substantive, and expensive, matters than cocaine-infused insects.

Income tax rates and military spending, among others.