House Oversight Chair James Comer vows to work closely with DOGE to slash government debt
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer wants to take suggestions from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and turn them into legislation.
The Kentucky Republican said the Oversight Committee, which spent much of last Congress investigating the Biden family, will shift gears to work closely with the nongovernment commission President-elect Donald Trump is creating to cut federal bureaucracy and reduce the debt.
“There are too many bureaucrats, too many rules, too many regulations, too many government agencies, too many federal employees. So everything that Musk and Ramaswamy are talking about with respect to government efficiency, we believe wholeheartedly in the Oversight Committee,” Mr. Comer told The Washington Times.
He said the committee is aligned with the mission of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramswamy to lead. The chairman quipped that their job to make government more efficient would keep his committee “pretty busy.”
Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy are scheduled to meet on Dec. 5 with Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill to discuss how they can coordinate their efforts.
“We want to make government more efficient,” Mr. Comer said.
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That doesn’t mean that Oversight investigations would end, he said, adding, “There’s always going to be investigations, a demand for new investigations.”
Mr. Trump announced earlier this month that he had enlisted Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy to provide “advice and guidance from outside of Government” to take a hatchet to bureaucracy, regulations and expenditures and restructure federal agencies.
In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy zeroed in on slashing more than $500 billion in federal spending that they say is unauthorized by Congress or “being used in ways that Congress never intended.”
They also have their sights set on reducing the federal workforce and want to implement a policy that would end remote work and require federal workers return to the office five days a week, which they believe would lead to “voluntary terminations.”
Because the commission operates only in an advisory capacity, executing its recommendations will require action from inside the government. That’s where the House Oversight Committee could play a role.
“We feel like we’ll be working very closely with that entity, and a lot of the proposals that they propose, we would like to take and try to get implemented in Congress,” Mr. Comer said.
He announced last week that the Oversight Committee would launch a new panel dubbed the Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee that will be chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican.
Ms. Greene said her panel would work hand-in-hand with DOGE, effectively making it the commission’s arm in Congress.
She laid out a broad to-do list for the subcommittee, including bringing governors of sanctuary states and mayors of sanctuary cities before the panel to explain why they deserve federal funding “if they’re going to harbor illegal, criminal aliens in their states and their cities.”
“I see the American people as the federal government’s customers,” Ms. Greene said on Fox News. “The federal government should be providing the top and the best customer service to the American people, and the way to do that is to carefully spend their money.”
“The way to do that is to cut programs, contracts, employees, grant programs, you name it, that are failing the American people and not serving the American people’s interests,” she said. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
