Congress takes up the Department of Government Efficiency cause

Tom Temin So it sounds like this Hail Mary shot they have has a receiver.

Mitchell Miller It does. And I think they are doing something that’s pretty smart, I think at the outset, in addition to all of the noise about the fact that they are going to potentially cut billions of dollars and potentially cut thousands of federal workers. The smart thing politically, I think that they’re doing is they’re actually getting Congress involved because, as you know, there is no way they can do anything if these are just recommendations. They actually have to go through the appropriations process if you want to get rid of a department or an agency or a whole slew of workers. So what they have done is put a couple of point people in Congress to advance the DOGE agenda, if you will, Department of Government Efficiency. Of course, it’s not a government agency. But one of the people heading it up in the House will be Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), she has been somebody who’s been very critical of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). But I think they kind of threw her a bone here and said, we’ll let you head this subcommittee. And she is taking it with relish. She says she can’t wait to dive in and try to make some of these cuts. And then on the Senate side, Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is heading up what’s called the DOGE caucus. And she has, of course, been a very vocal person in recent years about trying to get government workers back in the office. She gives out awards that basically are for ineptitude related to the government to try to embarrass groups. She says it’s the Squeal Awards, basically where she wants to get government agencies feeling uncomfortable about spending too much money. So that is one of the ways that they are trying to tie all this together with Congress.

Tom Temin Sure. And getting people embarrassed in Washington these days is kind of a high bar. Well, that’s true. So this caucus then will just try to work together. But it doesn’t really have any, it’s not a committee. It doesn’t have any real leadership.

Mitchell Miller On the Senate side. It is just going to be a matter of basically beating the drum on all these proposed cuts. On the House side, potentially with the fact that it’s a subcommittee within the House Oversight Committee. They might have a little more umph, if you will. However, one other thing we should note is that the Republican majority in the House is going to be very, very tenuous. It’s going to be basically what it was in the past Congress. And we saw what happened in the past, Congress in the House. So if even just a handful of very conservatives, very conservative lawmakers or others who don’t like something, start to protest against it, it could slow things down. By the way, there’s another interesting thing related to all of these proposals I went back and looked to see during the first term of President Trump’s what actually happened with federal cuts and proposals. Of course, there was this big call to drain the swamp. But if you go back and look, the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service went back and looked at what actually happened during the administration. And not surprisingly, there were not that many major, major cuts in that first administration. It basically went actually up. The employment of the federal government went up by just under 1% each of those four years he was in office. Now, people in various departments that were hit will tell you, well, wait a second, we got hit hard like the Office of Personnel Management, OPM. They started with more than 5,000 employees that fell by 14%. The Department of Labor also got cut. So this will be interesting to see because a lot of people, as you know, are saying that the administration knows what it wants to do coming in, whereas it was a little more chaotic the first time around.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Mitchell Miller, Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. And I still point to the amazing fact of the 21st century is that Bill Clinton, that’s the administration that actually cut the federal bureaucracy size by a couple of hundred thousand.

Mitchell Miller The year of big government is over, remember that?

Tom Temin Right. Until it wasn’t. And the meantime, the lame duck Congress has got some work to do.

Mitchell Miller Yeah, there’s a lot that’s got to be done in the next few weeks here. They are looming toward a Dec. 20 deadline for, of course, the government running out of money, essentially. And so one of the things they’re going to have to do is get a continuing resolution passed sometime in the next few weeks. House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to kick it well into the next year, probably into March. Some Republicans are grumbling about that, but that’s the way he wants to go. A lot of them want the new Trump administration, the president elect, to have his own imprint on what the government can do. And then just late last week, there was a push once again from Senators Mark Warner (D-Va.) And Tim Kaine (D-Va.), as well as senators from North Carolina, Georgia, other states that have been damaged by those recent hurricanes. And they are essentially saying, look, we need to do something this week. There needs to be a supplemental emergency disaster aid passed. So we’ll have to see what happens this week. There’s been a lot of talk about it, but they didn’t really move on it the last couple of weeks when they were back. So this could be a big week for that as well.

Tom Temin And then there is the NDAA and nothing’s really happened in the week they were here before the Christmas break.

Mitchell Miller Right. It’s interesting.

Tom Temin Thanksgiving break, I should say.

Mitchell Miller Virginia Congressman Rob Wittman (R-Va.) had said in early November that he had hoped that it would all be done by the end of November. Well, obviously, that didn’t happen. So they’re still trying to reconcile a lot of things in connection with the top line funding recommendations. The House bill came in at about 880 billion. The Senate wanted to boost that by more than $25 billion. And there’s a lot of other things in connection with the House where they’ve put in a variety of proposals that the Senate doesn’t really like. So that’s another major issue that they really got to get done.

Tom Temin I remember signing his first budget. President Trump said at that time, I’m never going to sign a budget like this again. He may end up signing seven of them additionally before his career is over.

Mitchell Miller I know.

Tom Temin We’ll see how that goes. And also, just a quick note about your story this week at WTOP on the black makeup of Congress. There’s a couple of historical footnotes going on there.

Mitchell Miller Right. A lot of attention, of course, is justifiably gone to the fact that Republicans are now going to control all of Congress, the House, as well as the Senate. One thing that’s kind of been a little bit under the radar is the fact that there will be a record number of black lawmakers in Congress in the 119th Congress, 67 black lawmakers. That includes 62 Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as five Republicans. That’s quite a change from back in the early 70s, when the Congressional Black Caucus started back in 1971, it had 13 members. And then one other footnote that’s interesting historically is when Maryland Senator Angela Alsobrooks is sworn in, she is, of course, going to be the first black woman from the state of Maryland to be sworn in as a senator. But also at the same time, a Delaware senator elect, Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) will also be sworn in. And that will actually be the first time that two black women have served at the same time in the U.S. Senate. So a lot of things, while they stay the same in Congress, they gradually make changes. And this is one of the historically significant ones.