Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., attends a roundtable discussion with members of the House Freedom Caucus on the COVID-19 pandemic at The Heritage Foundation on Thursday, November 10, 2022.
Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., has been tapped to lead a new House subcommittee that will work with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Greene and House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., have met with Ramaswamy and his team and are “already working together,” a source familiar with the matter told CNBC on Thursday.
Comer aims to establish the subpanel early next year, the source said.
Greene’s group will be dubbed the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, allowing it to share the DOGE acronym with the outside-of-government entity commissioned by President-elect Donald Trump.
“I’m excited to chair this new subcommittee designed to work hand in hand with President Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the entire DOGE team,” Greene said in a statement to CNBC.
She said her panel will lead to the firings of government “bureaucrats,” and vowed to “provide transparency and truth to the American people through hearings.”
“No topic will be off the table,” Greene said.
The congressional version of DOGE, first reported earlier Thursday morning by Fox News, shares similar goals to the one led by the two billionaires. It aims to investigate government waste, and seek out ways to reorganize federal agencies and cut red tape, the source said.
“A key step to driving greater efficiency in government is exposing the problem to the public,” a spokesperson for Ramaswamy said.
“We are grateful that the House Oversight Committee has created a DOGE subcommittee to focus on this work. We look forward to working together.”
Comer said Thursday morning in a Fox Business interview, “We’re going to work very closely with Elon Musk and Ramaswamy.”
Decrying “too many fat cats in government,” Comer vowed that his committee will get the “chopping block going.”
Trump revealed on Nov. 12 that he had tapped Musk, the world’s richest man and a top backer of Trump’s presidential campaign, and the entrepreneur Ramaswamy to lead the government-efficiency group. The “DOGE” initials recall an internet meme and a related cryptocurrency that Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has frequently touted.
Trump’s announcement specified that the group will not be an official department at all, but rather will provide “advice and guidance” to the White House and the Office of Management & Budget.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Wednesday, Musk and Ramaswamy lamented that “most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants.”
Musk and Ramaswamy, who are also unelected, said they “will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings.”
Greene currently sits on Oversight’s Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, among other panels.
In the previous Congress, the House had voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments as punishment for her history of espousing fringe conspiracy theories.
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