WASHINGTON: Republicans vowed Wednesday to tackle the \u201cstunning\u201d US national debt, as lawmakers began work on President Donald Trump\u2019s plan for the most radical downsizing of the federal government in decades.
\nThe House of Representatives Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee will be the legislative arm of tech billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s efforts as Trump\u2019s right-hand man to save $1 trillion by attacking fraud and waste.
\nIts first hearing \u2014 \u201cThe War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud\u201d \u2014 featured testimony from a former FBI agent and the head of a welfare fraud watchdog.
\n\u201cThis committee will be laser-focused on bringing full transparency to waste, fraud and abuse within the federal government, and presenting the plans to fix the tremendous problems we expose,\u201d chair Marjorie Taylor Greene said in her opening statement.
\nThe hearing was convened with government workers staging demonstrations against deep staffing cuts ordered by Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
\nCritics say the world\u2019s richest man has enormous conflicts of interest as a major government contractor, although Trump \u2014 without producing any evidence \u2014 claims his \u201cefficiency czar\u201d has uncovered tens of billions of dollars in fraud.
\nRepublicans have largely backed the DOGE agenda, although funding cuts at the National Institutes of Health have been met with mild dissent.
\nA prominent voice on the party\u2019s hard right with a history of bigoted comments, Greene has been brought from the fringes into the center of Republican politics as Trump\u2019s influence has grown.
\n\u201cWe, as a country, are $36 trillion in debt. That is such a stunning amount of money,\u201d she told the panel.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely staggering to even comprehend how we as a people, we as a country, found ourselves here.\u201d
\nMusk, newly emboldened by a Trump executive order giving him a veto over government hiring and firing, told reporters in the White House on Tuesday that DOGE was \u201cmaximally transparent.\u201d
\nAnd Trump\u2019s spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, accused district courts \u201cin liberal districts\u201d of abusing their power \u2014 although DOGE\u2019s defeats have been delivered by judges nominated by presidents from both parties.
\nDemocrats, initially open to the concept of DOGE, have soured on Musk over his efforts to dismantle federal agencies, which they say are unlawful and shrouded in secrecy.
\nMelanie Stansbury, the panel\u2019s top Democrat, mocked Republicans for making strident pledges to save money while proposing a budget that would lift the national borrowing limit by $4 trillion.
\nTrump and Musk are facing multiple legal challenges, however, as they try to lift emergency orders blocking the dismantling of federal agencies, holds on grants and the firing of government watchdogs.
\nThe White House lost an appeal in Boston on Tuesday upholding a decision to block Trump\u2019s freeze in federal grants and loans.
\nOn the same day, Trump fired an inspector general overseeing USAID, after the nonpartisan official filed a report critical of efforts to close the agency.
\nAs with all his firings of inspectors general, the move looks on its face to be illegal as Congress is supposed to be given 30 days\u2019 notice.
\nMeanwhile the Homeland Security Department fired the Federal Emergency Management Agency chief financial officer and three other employees for approving payments for migrant housing in hotels.
\nDefense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is in charge of a budget of almost $900 billion, told Axios he plans to welcome Musk and \u201cthe keen eye of DOGE\u201d to scrutinize its spending \u201cvery soon.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: Republicans vowed Wednesday to tackle the \u201cstunning\u201d US national debt, as lawmakers began work on President Donald Trump\u2019s plan for the most radical downsizing of the federal government in decades. The House of Representatives Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee will be the legislative arm of tech billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s efforts as Trump\u2019s right-hand man …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76997"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77006,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76997\/revisions\/77006"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}