- The House’s DOGE committee held a hearing on Wednesday about improper payments and fraud.
- In reality, it was all about Elon Musk.
- Democrats used the hearing to spotlight Musk and DOGE’s recent antics in the executive branch.
The official reason for Wednesday’s hearing, convened in a cramped, pastel-walled room in the second floor of a labyrinthine House office building, was to examine improper payments and fraud.
In practice, it was mostly about Elon Musk.
Over the course of two hours, the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency met for the first time against the backdrop of a DOGE-led blitz across the federal government that’s spurred numerous lawsuits and ignited Democratic resistance.
“We can’t just sit here today and pretend like everything is normal, and that this is just another hearing on government efficiency,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the committee. “While we’re sitting here, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are recklessly and illegally dismantling the federal government.”
The House’s DOGE subcommittee was established to support the Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency” in the executive branch. While some Democrats have expressed an eagerness to work with Musk, those lawmakers didn’t end up on this committee. Instead, the party selected some of its most ostentatious brawlers to prosecute the case against Musk.
For Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the committee’s chairwoman, it was a high-stakes moment. Four years ago, a bipartisan majority of the House voted to bar the Georgia Republican from serving on any committee for the entirety of her first term, owing to her history of violent and conspiratorial rhetoric. Now, she’s chairing one of the most high-profile committees in the House.
As she led the hearing, Greene largely eschewed the theatrics for which she’s known, using her opening remarks to offer a relatively boilerplate disquisition on the national debt.
“This is not a Democrat problem. This is not a Republican problem. This is an American problem,” Greene said. “We, as Republicans and Democrats, can still hold tightly to our beliefs, but we are going to have to let go of funding them in order to save our sinking ship.”
Democrats on the committee took a decidedly different approach, using the forum to attack Musk, DOGE, the machinations of the billionaire businessman’s young lieutenants, his potential conflicts of interests, and President Donald Trump’s recent firing of inspectors general across the federal government. Stansbury even invited Musk to testify before the committee, alluding to his eagerness to “engage with members of Congress on social media.”
The most dramatic moment of the hearing came when Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California, referring to Greene’s display of nude photos of Hunter Biden during a 2023 hearing, unveiled what he called a “dick pick” — a posterboard plastered with Musk’s face.
“This is not about working with the richest man on the planet,” Garcia said. “This committee wants to empower the richest person in the world to hurt people.”
Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas grilled witnesses on Trump’s recent firing of inspectors general, the independent officials at agencies throughout the government whose jobs include investigating waste and fraud.
“If this committee were serious about rooting out waste from our federal government, then today’s whole hearing would be about how Musk and Donald Trump are firing the independent watchdogs who’ve done this work for decades,” Casar said.
Both sides of the dais largely agreed on the substance of the hearing: that improper payments and fraud in the federal government are worth addressing. But as with most congressional hearings, the testimony and questioning were largely for the cameras, and Greene found herself in the unusual position of bemoaning that Democrats had decided to “make a political theater of the whole thing.”
“If they want to make this a place to create partisan attacks and future campaign ads, they’re really going to be on the losing side of the issue,” Greene told reporters.
Toward the end of the hearing, Republican Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas bemoaned the direction that the proceedings had taken.
“All we’ve heard about for most of this hearing on the other side of the aisle is Elon Musk, Elon Musk, Elon Musk,” Gill said.
