DOGE: The You Cannot Be Serious Committee

What to make of the House's DOGE committee makeup

John McEnroe at Wimbledon. (Screenshot of ESPN on YouTube by Tom LoBianco/24sight News.)

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As I was updating the evolving structure of the 119^th Congress for our apps, one caught my eye immediately: The House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency.

That’s DC-speak for the DOGE (sub)committee, a Capitol Hill proxy for Elon Musk’s White House-supported (for now) effort to address the massive debt both political parties have run up over the past three decades.

We’ll get to the Musk/DOGE effort in a minute, but let’s recap what we’re facing as a nation first.

A Serious Challenge

We know intuitively that the United States of America has been running up the national debt, particularly during and after the pandemic, but how bad is it? It’s worse than you might think. As of January 24, 2025, at 3:25pm ET the federal debt is:

According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the national debt is being driven by our aging population, driving increasing costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Add to that rising healthcare costs and tax rates that don’t zero out deficits and we have a very challenging national problem.

The political constraints are significant. With the national consensus that immigration should be limited, the United States will not be growing the population of workers to help subsidize these vital programs. If Trump is successful in deporting 11 million illegal immigrants, the overall workforce will contract, lowering revenues and increasing the debt.

There’s no obvious way out of this, which is why bringing in someone from outside government, someone who has been so successful at cutting costs, as well as working with the federal government to streamline major efforts, is a solid move on paper.

Tapping Elon Musk seems like a serious move. It’s not.

Successful Efforts

Since the mid-1980s, there have been three relatively successful bipartisan efforts at reducing the United States budget deficit and paying down the national debt.

1. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act was signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 12, 1985. Sens. Phil Gramm and Warren Rudman were Republican and Friz Hollings was a Democrat. While the effort ran up against roadblocks from the Supreme Court, it laid the foundation that efforts like these needed to be bipartisan.

2. The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 was signed by President George H.W. Bush in November of that year, a disaster for him personally, as it revoked his “Read My Lips, No New Taxes” pledge but restructured deficit reduction in terms of “pay-as-you-go” so that Congress was forced to offset spending with revenues, resulting in deficits that wouldn’t increase. It was a bipartisan effort and it worked.

3. The Balanced Budget act of 1997 was signed by President Bill Clinton in early August, a bill that was introduced by Republican John Kasich. Related bills in the Senate included efforts to lower costs of housing, veterans, and welfare benefits. It also focused on Medicaid reforms to contain costs. Again, bipartisan, and it worked. Between 1998 and 2002 spending went down.

The bottom line is that any serious plan to reduce the deficit, let alone address the national debt, needs to be a bipartisan effort led by pros who know where the potential savings are, and how to handle the inevitable political traps.

Today’s cluster of activity is anything but that.

An Unserious Effort

Even before the inauguration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been loud on chatter (“The Manhattan Project of our time”), and low on professionalism. Musk has tried to lower expectations from savings of $2 trillion to $1 trillion, saying it’s a “good shot.” He has already cannonballed DOGE-startup partner Vivek Ramaswamy out to Ohio to run for governor. It is unclear who the “top 1% of applicants” were chosen to do the staff work for the pro-bono team.

What about that new DOGE Capitol Hill effort I mentioned at the top of the page? Surely, there are professionals there who could help Team Musk with sorting through the fine nuances of government funding and spending.

In a word, nope.

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DOGE is set up as a subcommittee under the least glamorous standing committee in the House of Representatives, Oversight and Government Reform. That committee cannot tell Appropriations (where money is allocated) or Ways and Means (where revenues are designed) what to do. It’s a dark corner of legislative activity, usually meant for messaging, not progress.

If it’s set up to have limited impact, then the people assigned to the subcommittee better be heavy hitters to get anything done. Let’s breakdown the rosters:

Republicans

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., is not exactly a Legislator. The three-term, safe-seat, Red state representative is a reliable Trump force and has all the incentives in the world to make nice with MAGA star Elon Musk. You don’t look at her and think, yes, this is the bipartisan dealmaker we need to solve this massive problem.

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., appears obsessed with UFOs and DEI. Eric Burlison has been in Congress for a term and a half. Brian Jack and Brandon Gill are freshmen.

Of the others on the committee, the only one with any kind of reform background is Rep. William Timmons, R-S.C., who gamely worked on the unheralded yet Select (full and separate) Committee on the Modernization of Congress.

Rep. Michael Cloud’s membership on DOGE seems like hazing, considering he’s also on Appropriations. Same for Rep. Pat Fallon, R-TX, who is on Armed Services. I’d be surprised if either one makes all the meetings.

Democrats

Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N. M., sits on the National Resources committee, not one that has any authority over taxes or spending. She’s in her fourth year of Congress. That’s how serious Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is taking this subcommittee.

The Republican lack of expertise is cloned on the Democratic side. Rep. Robert Garcia, D-CA, came to Congress in 2021, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-TX, and Rep. Greg Casar, D-TX, are in their second terms.

The Democrats do have two veterans on the committee but neither with elite influence, longtime Massachusetts Dem Stephen Lynch sits on the Finance Committee, the younger sibling of the Ways & Means Committee. And Washington, D.C.’s Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton is ironically on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, given she went viral for her epic fail at parking, and caring about how she parked, on Capitol Hill.

The DOGE committee, like the meme department itself, looks like it is set up to spark social media posts, not substantive policy options for Musk’s White House team. Neither the speaker, nor Jeffries believe this is a serious effort, or they would have given the committee more heft and more political firepower.

It’s likely just what President Trump wants: a subcommittee full of newbies that Musk can dominate on the way to a few targeted cuts to left-of-center priorities such as funding for Planned Parenthood, education, and reducing the federal workforce, while ignoring suggestions from Democrats.

As a very young John McEnroe might quip, “You cannot be serious,” and he’d be right. This is not a measured, bipartisan, collaboration at eliminating the deficit or reducing the debt.

Like Mac’s meltdown, it’s a sideshow.

Michael Cohen, is the author of the book Modern Political Campaigns, president of Cohen Research Group and a 30-year veteran of the polling industry. He writes The Level regularly for 24sight News, analyzing polling and campaign trends with a keen eye and level-headed approach.