Elon Musk Meets With Lawmakers About ‘DOGE’ Crusade Against Government Spending

WASHINGTON — Tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy came to Capitol Hill Thursday to join Republicans in a celebration of the new initiative named the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) proclaimed it a “new day in Washington and a new day in America” and said Thursday’s meeting marked “the beginning of a journey.”

Just don’t ask where the journey’s going or what DOGE, whose name is a nod to both a meme and a digital currency, will actually do.

“There won’t be a lot of detail for the press today — and that’s by design, because this is a brainstorming session,” Johnson told reporters, before ducking into a meeting with Musk, Ramaswamy and a bunch of Republican lawmakers.

The two men, who have outsize influence in Trump’s forthcoming White House without being in Trump’s Cabinet, created a spectacle on the Hill. The Tesla CEO moved between meetings carrying one of his young children on his shoulders, flanked by an entourage. Neither he nor Ramaswamy responded to questions from reporters. (Editor’s note: Ramaswamy owns a stake in HuffPost’s parent company, BuzzFeed.)

Earlier on Thursday, Ramaswamy met alone with GOP senators, some of whom stressed afterwards that it is still up to Congress, not Musk and Ramaswamy, to set spending levels. President-elect Donald Trump has described DOGE as a non-governmental project that would function as more of an advisory panel for ways to root out waste, rather than a traditional government agency.

“They’re more of an advisory group that works behind the scenes with the White House,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) told reporters after leaving the meeting.

Asked why DOGE would succeed when previous efforts to drive down spending with the help of an outside commission, like the 2010 deficit commission, have failed, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters, “That question is way too early for this process.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who’s leading the House group working with DOGE, told reporters the lawmakers talked with Musk and Ramaswamy about the national debt. “It’s unsustainable and our country is on a crash course,” she said.

Greene also offered some insight into how DOGE would rate lawmakers: “Elon and Vivek talked about having a naughty list and a nice list for members of Congress and senators, and how we vote and how we’re spending the American people’s money,” she said.

While lawmakers await DOGE recommendations, its leaders are both in favor of dramatically slashing federal spending. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who ran for president and then became a top surrogate for Trump, wants to eliminate 75% of the federal workforce. Musk has talked about wanting to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget — a goal that budget experts consider laughably unrealistic without reductions to Social Security and Medicare, which Trump has previously vowed not to touch.

But Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.), co-founder of the House DOGE caucus, told reporters that lawmakers would, in fact, examine cuts to “mandatory spending,” a category that includes these popular programs for older Americans.

“I don’t want to take away benefits, but we do want to look at how we give those benefits away to do it in the most efficient way possible,” Bean said.

Bean and many other Republicans are excited that Musk and Ramaswamy have brought renewed interest in cutting spending. Bean mused about other ways of driving attention to the project.

“I envision some type of scoreboard where we can go to a website and see exactly how many positions we’ve cut, agencies we’ve cut,” he said.

The House DOGE group includes at least one Democrat, Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz, who said eliminating waste and fraud “shouldn’t be a partisan issue.” But Democrats weren’t invited to attend Thursday’s meeting.

As he left the meeting, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) offered a pessimistic take on the DOGE mission.

“If Congress doesn’t have the guts to do those things they’re talking real big about, it’s just a waste of time,” Burchett said.