When all the options that would effectively reduce the deficit[0] with minimal pain (best cost/benefit) are off the table because you're pretending they're not real (i.e. you're operating from a model of reality that is fiction) all you're left with are performance, lies, and excessively-painful-for-their-benefit options, so that's what we're getting. All (more or less) of their actions may be expected to fall into one or more of those categories, because it's just about all they've got, by their own decisions (about how to relate to reality).

This is activity so they can pretend they're doing effective things. That they're not effective, or even getting them farther from their stated goals, doesn't matter to them. Doing effective things isn't an option when you've ruled all those options out up front. Headlines demonstrating to some segment of society that they're doing stuff is what they're after, not efficacy (they can just lie about the efficacy, and have been)

Checking up on wacky stuff like this to make sure claimed "savings measures" aren't actually costing more money is something the independent IGs Trump illegally fired at the beginning of this term might do, and have done. Firing them, especially given why we even have them in the first place (Nixon—whose fall is also the trigger for all this we're dealing with now, a faction of Republicans decided they were going to work toward a place where their guy couldn't get taken down so easily, even for grossly illegal activity, and here we are, they did it) should have set off every alarm bell there is.

[0] Read CBO and GAO reports some time if you have an interest in what good ideas for this might look like. Spoiler alert: it's gonna become clear after a lot of boring reading that no serious plan won't have something akin to "restore taxes to 1990s levels" right at the top, #1.

It's not going to cost the government anything, when they destroy the government. That is exactly their intent.

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." - Grover Norquist, an unelected person, who many Republicans in congress signed a pledge to.

We're at the "small enough" phase, and soon enough we'll be at the "drowning" phase. This is their dream come true, unfortunately it's going to be a nightmare for everyone but the most wealthy.