Musk might be out of DOGE, but Congress' budget hawks won't quit cost-cutting crusade

Washington’s waste-watchers have contended that the Department of Government Efficiency was, is and should be more than Elon Musk.

With Mr. Musk now gone, the challenge for those fiscal hawks is convincing the public that the belt-tightening effort can continue without the eccentric billionaire at its helm.

Sen. Joni Ernst, a top DOGE proponent on Capitol Hill, said it’s the moment for Congress to take Mr. Musk’s work — tweet after tweet of questionable government spending — and write laws to shut it all down.

“We’re at a point now where if we keep going like this, we’re going to drive the country into the ground,” the Iowa Republican said. “So I would just say, watch for the legislation, watch for the messaging that’s coming out of our DOGE conference members, and you’ll notice a big difference between this year and where we were last.”

When led by the tech billionaire, DOGE consistently grabbed headlines on an hourly basis. 

Whether it was an agency blocking DOGE employees from access, a Musk tweet exposing frivolous projects, or a court ruling, President Trump’s pet commission dominated the limelight.

However, lasting accomplishments have been tougher to achieve.

An early round of DOGE-inspired cuts that Mr. Trump sent to Congress — including gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps finance NPR and PBS — barely cleared the House and now faces hurdles among Republicans in the Senate.

And budget cutters gripe that there’s little of DOGE’s work in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — a fact that spurred Mr. Musk to denounce the legislation.

Ms. Ernst, chair of the Senate DOGE caucus, said she still sees opportunities.

One test is her new proposal to auction off six federal buildings, which she estimates could yield at least $400 million in revenue and save $2.9 billion in deferred maintenance on the buildings. She called her legislation the FOR SALE Act.

Ms. Ernst also pointed to her Protecting Taxpayers’ Wallets Act, which aims to prohibit federal employees from engaging in union activity while on the clock.

“Do I see it actually getting amended into the One Big, Beautiful Bill? Probably not, but we will have other avenues and ways of approaching this and in the future, and I’d love to get it done this year, if at all possible,” she said. “We really need to wipe out this cost to our taxpayers.”

Mr. Musk left government service a month ago, and DOGE has receded as attention has shifted to the budget debate.

His goal of finding $1 trillion in savings — already down from his initial $2 trillion goal — remained elusive.

The latest running tally from DOGE shows the group has found $180 billion in estimated savings through a combination of selling federal assets, canceling and renegotiating contracts and leases, identifying improper payments, and reducing the size of the federal workforce.

Mr. Trump has attempted to push through much of that through executive action, rattling the Washington establishment.

He infuriated Democrats and frustrated international organizations, medical research facilities, and federal employee unions, who rushed to the courts, where they’ve been moderately successful in winning injunctions.

Budget watchdog groups, meanwhile, cast DOGE cuts as largely illusory, saying it will take more than personnel reductions and ending some federal grants to change Uncle Sam’s debt dive.

They have also questioned how any effort to curb government spending could fail to address Social Security and Medicare, the two most significant drivers of national spending.

This brings the focus back to Congress, where the big issues were always going to have to be decided, and where the budget hawks are hoping DOGE’s highlighting of frivolous spending can encourage lawmakers.

“We need to make sure we lock in those savings,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican and chair of the House’s DOGE subcommittee, said at a recent hearing. “It should be the first installment we pay on our Nation’s $36 trillion debt.”

Democrats, though, are reluctant to embrace anything DOGE-related, casting the entire operation as an ideological crusade run amok.

“The American people are over it,” New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stanbury, the ranking Democrat on the DOGE subcommittee, said at the hearing this week.  “DOGE has been used to wage a chaotic, destructive, and ideological war against the American people and the vital programs that they depend on.”