Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., on June 24 called on Congress to make further reductions to Federal government spending while praising cost-cutting efforts that the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already undertaken.
Rep. Greene, who chairs the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s DOGE Subcommittee, pointed at a hearing on Tuesday to DOGE’s claimed savings of $180 billion in Federal spending since January.
“We need to make sure we lock in those savings,” the chairwoman said. “It should be the first installment we pay on our nation’s $36 trillion debt.”
“That’s why Congress needs to act,” she continued. “DOGE has shown how our government can cost less and deliver more. It’s shown how we can turn down the spigot.”
“It has shown we don’t need to spend all the dollars that Congress appropriated for this year,” said Rep. Greene, who also praised efforts in the House earlier this month to approve a $9 billion spending rescission package on a party-line vote. That measure still requires Senate approval.
“But we need to do more – much more,” she said, while calling $9 billion “just the tip of the iceberg of the waste that DOGE has identified, and of the spending that the administration has paused or shut off. Congress needs to work with the administration and DOGE to rescind billions more of the dollars it has appropriated for agencies to spend.”
Rep. Greene also called for further cementing DOGE – whose charter is set to lapse in 2026 – into the structure of the Federal government.
“We need to lock in DOGE savings for taxpayers,” she said, adding, “We should also be thinking about locking in the DOGE process that has produced those savings. DOGE has attracted enemies because it has taken on Washington’s culture of spending.”
“We should make that a permanent battle,” Rep. Greene said. “We should institutionalize the battle against waste, fraud and abuse in Government.”
On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., ranking member of the subcommittee, claimed that the DOGE effort thus far has amounted to “abject failure,” and cited recent polling data that she said shows two-thirds of Americans believe DOGE has done a “bad job.”
“The American people are over it,” she concluded.
DOGE, she said, has “been used to wage a chaotic, destructive, and ideological war against the American people and the vital programs that they depend on.”
“We’re not going to sit here and pretend like DOGE is just some normal government program,” she said. “It is a scam in service of a political agenda.”
“We came to the table at the beginning of this whole process in good faith with real ideas, bipartisan ideas, that folks have been working on for years, and a desire to actually fix and modernize the Federal government,” Rep. Stansbury said. “What we’ve seen from DOGE is the exact opposite.”
Matthew Dickerson, director of budget policy at the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) think tank and a witness at Tuesday’s hearing, largely agreed with Rep. Greene on the continuing need for DOGE.
DOGE, he said, “has exposed astonishing amounts of government waste, fraud, and abuse.”
“While it is still the early days of the new administration and results are still coming in, DOGE has been an asset to the American taxpayer,” Dickerson said. “To ensure lasting change, Congress must partner with President Trump and DOGE to put the budget on a sustainable path.”
“The fiscal state of our nation is deteriorating, and unsustainable spending is the underlying problem,” he said. “Government spending that grows faster than the economy is inherently unsustainable over the long run. Excessive and irresponsible government spending has eroded Americans’ purchasing power and eroded public trust.”