Republican lawmakers were thrilled to meet with the leaders of the Department of Government Efficiency on Thursday.
Sure, DOGE is not a true department with statutory authority, but instead a kind of extra-governmental advisory panel. And sure, lawmakers didn’t hear much from the two men leading DOGE — the meeting was really a chance for members of Congress to share their own ideas. But they were glad someone shared their passion for cutting government waste.
Other than a feel-good talk, though, what can the recommendation-making body — with no real force of law — actually accomplish?
“The most important thing they can do is expose the stupid and shame members of Congress into stop funding the stupid,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told NOTUS before the meeting. “I would see their primary responsibility as just to identify, using, you know, crowdsourcing and using AI and whatever they can to make sure that we know, and the people know, that we’re funding dumb things.”
“Hopefully, these guys can expose it so that Congress has to do its job,” Roy added.
In the next breath, he pointed out just how difficult cutting spending will be in practice. “Anybody with common sense could rip apart the federal spending and identify thousands of things that we shouldn’t be funding,” he said. Roy then gestured down the hallway to where his Republican colleagues were gathering: “But these guys that I work with believe they’ve got an unlimited checkbook. They have no limiting principle.”
Tech billionaire Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, the two leaders of DOGE, have said they’ll consider firing much of the federal workforce, abolishing some government agencies and that they may even find $2 trillion to cut from the government’s expenditures. They could take stabs at some reforms through executive authority, if President-elect Donald Trump agrees with their recommendations. But other ideas would likely have to go through Congress.
Plenty of Republican lawmakers say they would be happy to see changes to make the government function better and for less money — but they’ve also spent years trying to pass their own efficiency bills and spending cuts, and they know how much of an uphill climb real reform might be.
“Half of the people in the room were probably very excited, and the other half are in reality,” Rep. Max Miller of Ohio told reporters as he left the meeting.
“We have a four-seat majority,” he noted. “Two trillion is a lot.”
If Miller seemed skeptical about the chances of success, he also didn’t sound very impressed with the message in the room.
“They said it was going to be — the velocity of how quick they were going to move and how, like, I don’t know, how aggressive it’s going to be is going to shock people,” he said. “Something like that.”
Rep. Andy Biggs, a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said he was heartened by a sense of unity during the conversation about taking serious action on spending.
But he also said he’s introduced 523 bills to cut “small amounts — a few million here, a few million there — and we couldn’t get a single one of those bills to be even looked at by the Appropriations Committee.”
So he’s “a little concerned” about whether change is possible.
“We’ve met the enemy,” he told NOTUS, “and the enemy is us.”
Even so, Republicans want to make sure Congress keeps its power over spending.
“At the end of the day, spending is an act of Congress, and it should be done with congressional approval,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York told NOTUS when asked about DOGE. “So really, it’s OK that it’s advisory.”
And Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana said he will be happy to look at their suggestions, but Congress will want to make sure the ideas would actually work first.
“The government does provide important services,” Zinke, the former interior secretary, told NOTUS when asked about recommendations to cut the federal workforce. “Meat inspection, all these things.”
“By reduction with a hammer, you’re probably going to miss a few things,” he said. “I don’t mind bold ideas. But also you have to make sure that it doesn’t have unintended consequences.”
Republicans on Thursday weren’t entirely clear on how DOGE will be structured, funded or what powers it will have. When asked what DOGE actually is, Appropriations Chair Tom Cole responded: “You’d need to ask them.”
“I didn’t vote to create it, so you’d need to ask them,” he repeated. Still, he told reporters, he’s “happy to have the help.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.