Democratic members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee conducted an ultimately unsuccessful exercise today to round up enough votes to authorize a subpoena for Elon Musk to appear before the committee to explain recent actions of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) organization that he runs at the direction of President Donald Trump.
The subpoena call emerged at a hearing called by committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., to discuss the “rightsizing” of the Federal workforce. During the hearing, Rep. Comer offered support for DOGE and its actions thus far to shrink the government employee rolls and accused committee Democrats of “sensationalizing” actions by President Trump to reduce the size of the workforce.
“President Trump promised he would eliminate Washington waste and reform the unchecked Federal bureaucracy,” Rep. Comer said, adding, “he is delivering on his promise made to the American people.”
The chairman asserted that the committee has engaged in bipartisan efforts over many years to rein in government fraud, waste, and abuse, but said “now that President Trump is taking action to drain the Swamp and expose how the Federal government is spending taxpayer money – which he was elected to do – Democrats are hyperventilating and sensationalizing it.”
“Over the past few days, we’ve heard wild claims from Democrats that we are at ‘the beginning of a dictatorship’ and we are in a ‘constitutional crisis,’” he said, while pronouncing that kind of rhetoric to be “exactly what the American people rejected in November.”
“Americans know that Washington needs reform,” he said. “Real innovation isn’t clean and tidy. It’s necessarily disruptive and messy. But that’s exactly what Washington needs right now. And it’s what the American people voted for in November: a departure from the broken status quo.”
House Oversight created a DOGE subcommittee earlier this year, and Chairman Comer said today that the committee “intends to work in partnership with DOGE. We want to reinforce its efforts and not blunt the momentum it’s generating for needed change to the Federal bureaucracy.”
Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., ranking member of the committee, roundly criticized actions by President Trump and DOGE since Jan. 20 to reduce and politicize the Federal workforce, and to effectively shut down agencies including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
He also called – apparently to the surprise of Chairman Comer and other committee Republicans who quickly hustled into the hearing room – for a vote of committee members to subpoena Musk as a witness “at the earliest possible moment” to testify about DOGE actions.
The motion to subpoena was defeated by a 20-19 vote along party lines.
Among other criticisms of White House and DOGE actions, Rep. Connolly said that Musk is “using a wrecking ball to systematically dismember the government piece by piece.”
“The American people deserve better, and we in Congress have a constitutional duty to uphold the laws that we created,” he said. “We must protect the government, workers, programs and services that the future of this country depends on, and stop an unconstitutional assault on the government.”
