Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy met with congressional lawmakers on Thursday as they ramp up their agenda for DOGE, the new non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency, tasked with recommending ways to cut spending and regulations.
Details of the talks were scarce. “There won’t be a lot of detail for the press today, and that’s by design, because this is a brainstorming session,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters.
Musk has said he thinks DOGE can cut almost a third of the federal government’s more than $6.5 trillion in annual spending. Analysts and budget experts have said that’s essentially impossible, at least not without inflicting massive economic pain. Many lawmakers reportedly have similar concerns. “Some members left the meeting highly skeptical that Musk and Ramaswamy will be able to get anything like $2 trillion in spending cuts through Congress,” The Hill’s Emily Brooks and Miranda Nazzaro report.
They add that the DOGE leaders failed to provide much of an answer to a question “about how feasible it is to cut $2 trillion in annual spending, given how hard it was to reach a deal to cut $1.5 trillion over 10 years in the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act that also raised the debt limit — and all without touching entitlement spending.”
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina explained that it was still “way too early” to lay out the priorities of the new DOGE Caucus, according to Politico, though he suggested that rolling back regulatory red tape would be on the incoming Congress’s initial agenda and he stressed that the effort to scale back the federal government would stretch throughout the four years of the Trump administration.
Musk, the Tesla founder, reportedly told the media that he is looking to eliminate tax credits, including those for electric vehicles.
After meeting with Musk, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told reporters that she was “very impressed” and that their conversation was about “how we could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government to better serve the American people and to save taxpayer dollars.”
She added that they “did not go through any kind of list of cuts or anything like that."
Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn announced that she will be introducing legislation the “freeze federal hiring, begin the process to relocate agencies out of the D.C. swamp, and establish a merit-based salary system for the federal workforce.”
And Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters that there was some talk of allowing President-elect Donald Trump to use impoundment to cut spending authorized by Congress. “The top appropriator did not take issue with the president-elect potentially using executive power to usurp Congress and said he was ‘happy to have the help’,” The Washington Post reports.
