What will Elon Musk’s “DOGE” mean for America’s social safety net?
That was the question on the minds of many as Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy came to the Capitol on Thursday to present their vision for the “Department of Government Efficiency” to Congress. Billed as a bipartisan meeting to which all senators and representatives were invited, it was in reality mostly attended by Republicans.
But the short answer to what DOGE means after Thursday: Nobody knows.
Musk and Ramaswamy met with senior members of the House GOP as well as Marjorie Taylor Greene, chair of the to-be-formed “DOGE” subcommittee in Congress, ahead of the presentation Thursday afternoon. The two were tight-lipped as they passed reporters, with Musk answering just one question — turning and giving an emphatic “yes!” to a shouted question from the pool regarding whether he wanted to see more Democrats join the effort.
That was a general theme of the day. Republicans who talked to a large scrum of reporters gathered outside of the closed-door meetings gave little in the way of details as to how the federal budget would be reduced, instead pivoting towards expressing their excitement at the arrival of Musk, the newest member of Donald Trump’s inner circle. The most frequently cited example of “waste” was a survey out this week reporting that the vast majority of federal workers are now in hybrid or primarily work-from-home roles.
Speaker Mike Johnson gave slightly more information at a scheduled presser ahead of the presentation by Musk and Ramaswamy, but even he said that there would be little in terms of real substance released to the press today.
“They're innovators and they're forward thinkers, and so that's what we need right now,” Johnson said of Musk and Ramaswamy. “We need to make government more efficient. And that is what this whole objective is. It's what the DOGE effort will be about. You're going to see a bicameral cooperation, and it will be, by the way, bipartisan.”
He pointed to a number of Democrats he said had already come forward to join the effort. But he dodged a question regarding whether it was truly feasible to make such deep cuts to the federal budget without touching Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, the bulk of America’s medical and financial safety net for low-income and older citizens.
Other Republican committee chairs who filed in and out of both meetings similarly dodged such questions, though a few were willing to address the question of the safety net and entitlement reform directly.
“If we don't reform them, then potential retirees will not have them,” said Rep. Kevin Hern, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee’s sub-panel on Health.
Alabama senator Katie Britt gave a quick rundown of her own frustrations with the federal government, which included failures to pay down the national debt and delays on the passage of major pieces of legislation including the Farm Bill.
“I’m excited for him to be here,” Britt told reporters of Musk as she entered.
Greene told reporters that she and Musk had spoken about how Congress could work to address national debt, which she called “unsustainable.”
“To quote Elon, he said something extremely important. Every single payment that the federal government pays out, we need to be checking those payments to see if they're legitimate and that’s something that hasn't been done,” she said on Thursday after her meeting with the Tesla/Twitter CEO.
“I am looking forward to exposing every single unelected bureaucrat, every single agency that is wasting the American people's money, and the big government departments that need to be exposed for how they're not serving the American people,” she added.
