Can an old DOGE learn new tricks?

WASHINGTON – For congressional Republicans, DOGE has truly aged in dog years.

The government’s effort to reduce costs, inspired by a meme from the 2010scaused a sensation in the Republican Party last winter. Republicans were excited to have Elon Musk, a genius billionaire, leading their cause. In the House, they created a DOGE caucus, which is basically a fan club, and an official DOGE committee.

Eleven months later, the committee chairman resigned, DOGE failed to come close to its promise of $1 trillion in spending cuts, its activities became dire. opinions from the public, and Musk not only abandoned the project, but suggested that he regrets starting it.

“Instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically built, worked on my companies,” Musk said in a recent podcast.

But Republicans on Capitol Hill are not willing to take down DOGE. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), whose panel includes the new Government Efficiency Enforcement subcommittee, said he will name a new chairman after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene resigns in early January.

“There are still some people in management tagged with DOGE,” Comer told News themezone. “They’re obviously not Elon Musk. So there are still a lot of areas to consider.”

The subcommittee will focus on rescissions, Comer said, which are controversial spending cuts led by the executive branch. President Donald Trump won congressional approval for a rescission package in 2025, and later cut $5 billion in foreign aid with a unilateral “pocket rescission” that even some Republicans questioned.

The subcommittee under Greene’s leadership held a hearing on codifying White House spending cuts, but also examined other issues, such as nongovernmental organizations or NGOs and the danger of humans trying to control the climate. Greene warned at a hearing in September that geoengineering enthusiasts “want to control the Earth’s climate to address the false climate change hoax.”

Greene, who feuded with Trump before his decision to resign, declined to comment on the fate of DOGE in his absence.

bean.house.gov/doge-caucus

Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.), co-chair of the DOGE group, said the group would meet in January.

“He launched a huge movement of a new focus on waste, fraud and abuse,” Bean told News themezone. “We are not dead.”

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), the first Democrat to join the DOGE caucus in February, said in May that the group was gone and had nothing to do with what Musk was doing. “DOGE was a complete failure,” Moskowitz he told politician.

Within the administration, Musk’s most notable initiatives included a short-lived requirement that all government employees write weekly emails detailing five accomplishments, a haphazard effort to attack imagined fraud at the Social Security Administration, and putting the U.S. Agency for International Development “in the shredder,” as he put it. Atul Gawande, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and former USAID official, has estimated gutting USAID. caused hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world.

At least one person in the president’s inner circle was shocked. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in an interview published on December 16 by Vanity Fairsaid: “no rational person could think that the USAID process was good. Nobody.”

The man most responsible for the Trump administration’s budget process – and its eagerness to act in Congress to cut spending – is Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought. And he’s still around.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), a top Democratic appropriator, said Musk and Trump had no idea how the government works and knew nothing about the appropriations process.

“Russ Vought is evil,” DeLauro said.

When Musk first came to town, several Democrats, including Moskowitz, were open-minded about DOGE and said they agreed with the basic concept of improving government efficiency. But Musk soon ended up being one of his biggest punching bags, as his attacks on Social Security in particular made him one of the least popular political figures in the United States.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), the top Democrat on the DOGE subcommittee, told News themezone that she doesn’t know why Republicans would want to worry more about it.

“I’m surprised to hear that my colleagues would want to continue associating with that company, even knowing that management and the founder have turned their backs on it,” Stansbury said.