Can An Old DOGE Learn New Tricks?

WASHINGTON ― For congressional Republicans, DOGE really did age in dog years.

The government’s cost-cutting effort, inspired by a 2010s-era meme, was all the rage for the GOP last winter. Republicans were excited to have Elon Musk, a cool billionaire, lead their cause. In the House, they made a DOGE caucus, which is basically a fan club, and an official DOGE committee.

Eleven months later, the committee’s chair has resigned, DOGE failed to get anywhere close to its promise of $1 trillion in spending cuts, its activities got terrible reviews from the public, and Musk has not only abandoned the project, he’s suggested he regrets starting it.

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

But Republicans on Capitol Hill aren’t ready to put DOGE down. House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.), whose panel includes the new Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee, said he’ll appoint a new chair after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene resigns in early January.

“There’s still a few people in the administration tagged with DOGE,” Comer told HuffPost. “They’re just not Elon Musk, obviously. So there’s still plenty of areas to look at.”

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

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

Greene, who feuded with Trump in the run-up to her decision to resign, declined to comment on DOGE’s fate in her absence.

The Congressional DOGE Caucus logo from Rep. Aaron Bean's website.

bean.house.gov/doge-caucus

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

“He launched a big movement of a new focus on waste, fraud and abuse,” Bean told HuffPost. “We’re not dead.”

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), the first Democrat to join the DOGE Caucus back in February, said in May the group was defunct and had nothing to do with what Musk was up to. “DOGE was a complete failure,” Moskowitz told Politico.

Inside the administration, Musk’s most prominent initiatives included a short-lived requirement that all government employees write weekly emails detailing five achievements, a haphazard effort to attack imaginary fraud at the Social Security Administration, and putting the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the woodchipper,” as he said it. Atul Gawande, a Harvard University Medical professor and former USAID official, has estimated gutting USAID resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide.

At least one person in the president’s inner circle was appalled. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, in an interview published on Dec. 16 by Vanity Fair, said “no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”

The man most responsible for the Trump administration’s budget process ― and its zeal for doing around 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 were clueless about how the government works and didn’t know anything about an appropriations process.

“Russ Vought is evil,” DeLauro said.

When Musk first came to town, several Democrats, including Moskowitz, had an open mind about DOGE and said they agreed with the basic concept of improving government efficiency. But Musk soon wound up as one of their biggest punching bags, as his attacks on Social Security in particular made him one of the least popular political figures in America.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), the top Democrat on the DOGE subcommittee, told HuffPost she doesn’t know why Republicans would want to bother with it anymore.

“I am surprised to hear that my colleagues would want to continue to associate themselves with that enterprise, even knowing that the administration themselves and the founder have turned their backs on it,” Stansbury said.