It was not too hard to find, but its unusual placement disrupted the interface between taxpayers and tax collectors.

It was a simple fix.

Yet an IRS engineer reportedly estimated that it would take at least 103 days to move the button. 

Thankfully, Elon Musk's team posted last month on X:

"This engineer worked with the DOGE team to delete the red tape and accomplished the task in 71 minutes."

If DOGE has revealed anything in its first 100 days, it is the depth of government dysfunction. While Musk's detractors are reveling in his most obvious shortcoming – to date, it has cut an estimated $160 billion in government spending instead of the promised $2 trillion – the urgent need for reform is clear. The difficulty smart and dedicated cost-cutters are encountering in paring the mounds of federal waste is the canary crying in the coal mine.

To take a favorite word of progressives, the issues we face with government inefficiency are systemic. Fraud and abuse are real problems, but, as the IRS button example shows, the deeper issues involve what passes for standard operating procedure. We have built a leviathan that is strangling us with process.

Fred Kaplan provides a telling example in his New York Review of Books piece on Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff's new book, "Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War."

As a U.S. Air Force captain, Shah was flying missions over Iraq in 2006, Kaplan writes, when he noticed that his F16's display screen did not "indicate his location in relation to coordinates on the ground." Back in his barracks, Shah loaded a pocket PC he had for playing video games "with digital maps and strapped it to his knee while he flew. The software in that $300 gadget let him see where he was – basic information that the gadgetry on his $30 million plane could not provide."