The House Oversight and Reform Committee’s Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee quickly found a flashpoint – Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief Elon Musk – during its inaugural hearing today, with subcommittee Republicans hailing DOGE aims and Democratic members calling for the removal of “Musk and his hackers.”
The new subcommittee led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., was stood up by House Oversight as House leaders prepare to help execute on some of DOGE’s efforts to transform the Federal bureaucracy.
While the hearing began with both sides of the aisle agreeing on the potential for bipartisan work to cut back on government waste, the hearing rapidly turned to disagreement over Musk’s role and actions regarding the Federal government.
“We as a country are $36 trillion in debt,” said Rep. Greene in her opening remarks. “The legislative branch can’t sit on the sidelines. In this subcommittee, we will fight the war on waste shoulder to shoulder with President Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE team.”
While Republicans agreed with Greene and defended Musk’s recent actions to cut back on what the Trump administration has referred to as government waste – including shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), terminating contracts with the Education Department, and moving to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) – Democrats sounded the alarm.
“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, D-N.M., adding that “all you have to do is look across this room and see that it is not a normal hearing.”
One area of contention throughout the hearing included the DOGE team’s access to sensitive data and information at Federal agencies. The DOGE team appears to largely be comprised of young tech talent, though no official information has been made public on who has been hired by DOGE.
“For the last several weeks, I’ve been talking to Treasury and OMB [Office of Management and Budget] officials to try to get to the bottom of why Elon Musk and his team are trying to hack the Treasury payment system,” said Rep. Stansbury later in the hearing.
Stansbury also noted cybersecurity risks posed by accessing Federal systems, referring to a recent case involving a 25-year-old engineer hired by DOGE who was accidentally provided access to a Federal payment system within the Treasury Department, and reportedly had the ability to alter the code responsible for the vast majority of payments the U.S. government makes to citizens, according to an affidavit from the Treasury.
“[It’s a threat] because of the size and the significance of these payments, because it is an invasion of the privacy and security of the American people … and because it contains highly classified information that our foreign adversaries are trying to cyber attack us regularly for – so why is a private citizen being given access to this system,” said Rep. Stansbury.
Subcommittee Republicans turned the debate to evaluating cyber threats internal to Federal agencies and those outside – with a focus on unemployment insurance fraud (UI fraud) which accumulated up to $191 billion in lost funds to cyber criminals who committed identity theft during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Witness Haywood Talcove, chief executive officer of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, told the subcommittee that the nation faces a “data and technology problem” that left unaddressed “will continue to lead the world in funding cyber criminals.”
“We must reclaim control of our systems, not just from the criminal syndicates, but the flawed systems enabling them – smarter technology, data and identity verification are not optional, they are necessities to protect taxpayers,” Talcove told lawmakers in his opening statements, echoing similar remarks he made at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing last week.
Witness Dawn Royal, the director of the United Council on Welfare Fraud, agreed with Talcove while calling for increased funding for identity verification technology to help prevent fraud.
Rep. William Timmons, R-S.C., told the subcommittee that he will soon introduce legislation to improve identity and income verification, which would also require the Internal Revenue Service to share data with the Small Business Administration, Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to determine if someone is ineligible for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans – which were established during the pandemic to provide forgivable loans to small businesses.
“I’ve got $300 billion in savings proposed … I would just ask my colleagues across the aisle to get out of the way if you don’t want to help right the fiscal ship in this country, stop filing lawsuit after lawsuit,” said Rep. Timmons in reference to a flurry of recent lawsuits filed in the early weeks against actions taken by the Trump administration – some of which have been determined to be unconstitutional by Federal judges.
“We do not have the financial ability to continue down this path, and we’re going to save this country … you can kick and scream all the way, or you can get out of the way,” continued Rep. Timmons.
Meanwhile, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, said that modernizing data-related technology has long been a priority of the Democratic party.
“We’ve actually consistently on this side of the aisle promoted this idea of making investments into technology so that we can do things such as, say, look at the Department of Defense (DoD),” said Rep. Crockett. “[The DoD] has not been able to pass an audit in the last six audits … I don’t understand if you are trying to conduct audits and figure out where the waste, fraud, and abuse is. I don’t know why you would go to some tech guy. In fact, it was only techies that were sitting there at inauguration – we didn’t have auditors, I would welcome auditors to come in and do forensic audits.”
