“While we’re sitting here, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are recklessly and illegally dismantling the federal government, shuttering federal agencies, firing federal workers, withholding funds vital to the safety and well-being of our communities and hacking our sensitive data systems,” ranking member Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) said.
She repeatedly said Musk should testify under oath before the panel.
But Republicans on the subcommittee, which is chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), fiercely defended Musk’s actions even in the wake of federal judges attempting to stop some of them.
Greene said a ruling blocking DOGE from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment systems was “absurd.”
And Greene issued a warning: “We will hold this judge and others who try to stop the will of the people and their elected leaders accountable.”
The hearing also got into some discussion of the technicalities of improper payments.
Witness Haywood Talcove, the CEO for Government at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, estimated that implementing front-end identity verification, eliminating self-certification and monitoring the back end of the programs could save $1 trillion annually across federal, state and local governments. That, he said, could take a fraud rating of around 20 percent to around 5 percent.
“The gravy train for a lot of these folks, it’s been on biscuit wheels and it’s about to run off the dadgum tracks,” quipped Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.).
The Hill's Emily Brooks takes it from here.
