The star of the first House’s Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee hearing on Wednesday was an individual not in attendance: Elon Musk.
Democrats on the panel took intense aim at Musk, who is heading the DOGE initiative under President Trump, accusing him of breaking the law in his quest to eliminate spending he deems wasteful and analyze government payments.
“While we’re sitting here, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are recklessly and illegally dismantling the federal government, shuttering federal agencies, firing federal workers, withholding funds vital to the safety and well-being of our communities and hacking our sensitive data systems,” said ranking member Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.). She repeatedly said that Musk should testify under oath before the panel.
But Republicans on the subcommittee, which is chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), fiercely defended Musk’s actions even in the wake of federal judges attempting to stop some of its actions.
Greene said that a ruling blocking DOGE from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment systems was “absurd.”
And Greene issued a warning: “We will hold this judge and others who try to stop the will of the people and their elected leaders accountable.”
“The whole D.C. swamp is freaking out that the unelected officials from DOGE were allowed access to these systems. That makes no sense,” Greene said. “Federal judges were not elected. The Treasury bureaucrats were not elected, and they have failed to fix the problem that is enabling American taxpayers to be robbed. So why not bring in skilled outside experts like private companies and private citizens who were successful in the real world to do everyday work that we need to get done here, like audits?”
The topic of the hearing was related to that recent DOGE effort, aimed at “stamping at the scourge of improper payments and fraud.” And while Greene said that “this is not a time for political theater and partisan attacks,” the big personalities on the panel came through.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) took a swipe at Musk by making reference to Greene previously showing censored intimate photos of Hunter Biden, former President Biden’s son, in a hearing in 2023.
“In the last Congress, Chairwoman Greene literally showed a d— pic in an Oversight congressional hearing, so I thought I’d bring one as well,” Garcia said.
A staff member for Garcia then pulled out a poster board with a photo of the DOGE head. “Now this, of course, we know, is President Elon Musk,” the congressman said.
Though some Democrats initially signaled openness to the idea of DOGE in the aftermath of the 2024 election, Musk and his effort have since become a major source of outrage and symbol of everything they dislike about the Trump administration, leaving them little appetite for working with the GOP on much of anything in Congress.
“We should in no way be cooperating with House Republicans who want to shut down the Department of Education and destroy Medicare and Medicaid, and should not stand by as the richest man on the planet gives himself and his companies huge tax cuts, while the American people can absolutely nothing,” Garcia said.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) put the goal of Democrats simply: “It is time for us to do our job and rein in this rogue actor known as Elon Musk.”
The hearing did get into some discussion of the technicalities of improper payments.
Witness Haywood Talcove, the CEO for Government at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, estimated that implementing front-end identity verification, eliminating self-certification and monitoring the back end of the programs could save $1 trillion annually across federal, state and local governments. That, he said, could take a fraud rating of around 20 percent to around 5 percent.
“The gravy train for a lot of these folks, it’s been on biscuit wheels and it’s about to run off the dadgum tracks,” quipped Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.).
But another witness dinged the Trump administration’s actions for potentially hurting efforts to combat waste, fraud and abuse by firing inspectors general.
“It seems to me that if an administration were serious about wanting to root out waste, fraud and abuse, they would support and resource whistleblowers and inspectors general, they would not demonize them, and they would certainly not fire them en masse in an unlawful midnight purge,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, director of government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight.
Greene promised that in the coming days, the subcommittee would release a report with suggested legislative solutions to many of the problems identified in the hearing.
And Stansbury signaled that more big moments could be coming in future hearings.
“We are going to have so much fun in this committee this Congress,” she said.
