The co-leaders of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are meeting with Republicans on Capitol Hill.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said this week that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will discuss DOGE with GOP lawmakers in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Members of both the Senate and the House are expected to attend.
In a press conference ahead of the meeting, Johnson says that this will be a "return to accountability.
President-elect Donald Trump has tasked Elon and Vivek with trying to cut out massive amounts of federal spending, fraud and abuse. The entrepreneurs have vowed to also scrap some entire government agencies through the DOGE initiative, which they anticipate will conclude by July 4th of 2026.
John Hart, CEO of Open The Books, a national transparency organization centered on government spending, said this meeting is a good way to get government officials on the same page with federal spending and national security.
"It's an effort to think through how we get our heads wrapped around this massive problem of the administrative state and government growing," he said.
Musk and Ramaswamy want DOGE to be of assistance in identifying waste and unnecessary regulations. Ramaswamy called the new department and it's goals a "once-in-a-generation project."
"We don't want to do this to just expose the problem, we want to solve the problem," he said in a recent interview on Fox News.
One way of solving the problems once they are exposed is to have the American people have a say in things. Hart said DOGE will be as transparent as possible in order to succeed.
"None of the other freedoms we enjoy are possible without transparency," Hart said. "They want the input of really any American that interacts with the government."
Some things Musk and Ramaswamy will need help from Americans in having their eyes and ears on to locate fraud and waste include defense, health care and Medicare.
"I think DOGE is going to put a lot of pressure on individual members to step up and identify their perfect areas of savings," said Hart.