Weighing in on a Thursday evening Fox News interview with Elon Musk and members of his Department of Government Efficiency team, Rep. Eric Burlison said that he would like to see DOGE focus on reforming the Department of Energy.
“The Biden administration’s energy policies created massive inefficiencies, driving up costs for American families while stifling domestic energy production. DOGE should target wasteful programs that prioritize political agendas over real solutions,” Burlison, R-Mo., told The Daily Signal.
“We need to cut the red tape, stop rewarding bureaucracy, and unleash American energy—focusing on solutions that reduce energy prices and support domestic jobs, not foreign interests,” said the Missouri lawmaker, a member of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency.
Another member of that panel, Rep. Mike Cloud, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal, “One way the D.C. apparatus keeps growing is through these so-called “studies” that get quietly slipped into must-pass bills or sail through without much scrutiny.”
“We’re talking billions of dollars that either get bogged down in red tape or wasted on projects that don’t produce anything useful,” Cloud contended.
When asked by Fox News host Bret Baier about the role Congress was playing in the DOGE process, Musk emphasized that the DOGE team was keeping lawmakers up to date.
“We try to keep Congress as informed as possible,” he said, adding, “It is not contrary to Congress to avoid waste and fraud. It is consistent with the law and consistent with Congress.”
Cloud said he had communicated with Musk.
“Elon has met with both our DOGE Subcommittee and the DOGE Caucus, and I look forward to continuing to work together to cut waste, fraud, and abuse wherever it hides in the federal government,” the Texas congressman said in a statement to The Daily Signal.
Burlison expressed a similar sentiment.
“Their team keeps us well-informed, which is vital, but it’s their fearless leadership that truly stands out. The more courage they show in driving this effort, the simpler it becomes for Congress to build on their momentum and deliver results,” the Missouri lawmaker said.
“History proves Congress often needs that kind of push to shift the dial,” Burlison said.
Cloud said that he was concerned about wasteful government “studies” that simply become part of Washington business as usual.
“And once that [so-called “studies”] money starts flowing, it becomes part of the status quo that most in Congress are too afraid—or too comfortable—to challenge,” he said.
In the Baier interview, other members of the DOGE team weighed in on the impact the reforms were having.
Joe Gebbia, an entrepreneur and designer who co-founded Airbnb, like the other members of DOGE, took time off from his daily life to serve his country’s government. He discussed in the interview how federal retirement is still dealt with through paper processes that take orders of magnitude longer to file than it would on a digital system.
“It’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching your show tonight,” Gebbia explained to Baier. He said DOGE is working to digitize the federal retirement process in the coming months.
Brad Smith, a former health insurance executive, is working on the Department of Health and Human Services and articulated the DOGE priorities for that department.
“No. 1, making sure we continue to have the best biomedical research in the world, and No. 2 making sure, which President Trump has said over and over again, that we 100% protect Medicare and Medicaid, but there’s a lot of opportunity [for reform],” he declared.
Smith also said that DOGE was working on putting more National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant money to research scientists directly into their hands. The current state of affairs, according to Smith, is that the researcher who gets the NIH funding gets about 60% of the grant for indirect costs, while their university gets about 40 percent. The goal is to turn that into about an 85% to 15% ratio in favor of the individual scientist.
According to Burlison, taxpayer funding could be used more efficiently by universities. He noted to The Daily Signal that taxpayer dollars “meant for research are instead propping up bloated bureaucracies and ideological agendas, rather than advancing scientific discovery.”
“The move to cap indirect costs at 15% is a step in the right direction, ensuring more funding goes directly to research, rather than university administrators,” he said.
Musk emphasized that necessary government functions would not be adversely affected by DOGE.
“America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work,” he said.
