Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene will lead a new congressional panel to work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on their plans to slash the federal budget and fire workers across the government.
Greene has been tapped to chair a House subcommittee that will work in tandem with Donald Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory board that the president-elect appointed the billionaire and wealthy entrepreneur to lead.
The “Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency” is “designed to work hand in hand with President Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the entire DOGE team,” the congresswoman from Georgia said in a statement to CNBC.
The panel, first reported by Fox News Digital, will recommend firing government “bureaucrats” and will provide “transparency and truth to the American people through hearings,” according to Greene.
“No topic will be off the table,” she said.
The panel will operate under the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Republican congressman James Comer of Kentucky.
The congressman told Fox News Digital that the new panel “will align with the Trump administration’s priorities to eliminate government waste, streamline the federal government’s operations and cut red tape that’s stifling jobs and increasing costs for the American people.”
Looking forward to working together with Congress. Proper oversight of agencies & public transparency are critical. https://t.co/K5ZoGLcdb8
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) November 21, 2024
In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramaswamy broadly outlined their ambitions for DOGE, which expects to rely on a pair of recent Supreme Court rulings they argue give Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress unilateral authority to gut federal agencies and make drastic cuts in spending.
They want to reduce annual federal spending by at least $500 billion — specifically, by cutting $1.5 billion earmarked for “international organizations,” another $535 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds hundreds of locally owned public radio and television stations, and another $300 million for “progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”
Musk has said he would recommend cutting the nation’s budget by “at least $2 trillion” — or roughly one-third.
The men also argued that civil service protections won’t stop them from recommending mass firings of federal workers, and that Trump can make “large-scale firings” and move federal agencies out of Washington DC, which could result in the loss of hundreds of jobs.
“A key step to driving greater efficiency in government is exposing the problem to the public — we are grateful that the House Oversight Committee has created a subcommittee to focus on this work,” a spokesperson for Ramaswamy told Fox News Digital.
Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, fired back at the news, stressing that Democrats on the committee “will stay focused on waste, fraud, abuse and corruption.”
“It’s hard to keep track of all the new departments and bureaucracies the Republicans are setting up to study the size and efficiency of government. But isn’t that what Chairman Comer and the Committee on Oversight and Accountability actually said they were doing over the last two years?” he said in a statement shared with The Independent.
“Where’s their report and recommendations? Perhaps the impeachment flop derailed them a bit,” he added. “So now a noted student of American government, [Greene], will chair a subcommittee to work with two unvetted billionaires who stand to receive billions more in government contracts and subsidies from the government under Trump. ... The government belongs to the people, not the billionaire oligarchs.”
