What a week for U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. It began with what were, even for the congresswoman from the 14th district, provocative words.
“For my Republican colleagues in the House and Senate, If we are going to release ethics reports and rip apart our own that Trump has appointed, then put it ALL out there for the American people to see,” she wrote in a social media post, the lines broken into short bursts like a rap lyric.
“Yes.. all the ethics reports and claims, including the one I filed, all your sexual harassment and assault claims that were secretly settled paying off victims with taxpayer money, the entire Jeffrey Epstein files, tapes, recordings, witness interviews, but not just those, there’s more, Epstein wasn’t/isn’t the only asset. If we’re going to dance, let’s all dance in the sunlight. I’ll make sure we do.”
The possibility that the public really will get to know what its taxpayer money has hushed up evaporated Thursday when President-elect Donald Trump pulled the plug on U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz’s attorney general appointment, rendering moot, for the moment anyway, the question of his congressional ethics report.
But for Greene, her spirited defense of Gaetz was just a warmup. By Friday, she had vaulted into what could be the most high-profile congressional position in the new administration, chairing the subcommittee, which would have oversight over the budget-cutting project of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
You’ve got to be really rich to own your own acronym. DOGE, the soon-to-be-created Department of Government Efficiency, shares its name with Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency product, dogecoin. Greene’s subcommittee will be the Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee. Musk and Ramaswamy are planning a podcast, to be called the Dogecast.
None of this is coincidental. Musk, whose companies have received billions in federal subsidies, has recently voiced alarm at the ballooning federal deficit, and cryptocurrencies have been advanced as a means of averting this “crisis.” It would do this apparently by outrunning the inflation rate in a race that would make current prices look cheap.
It’s questionable whether Greene will be able to manage any real oversight over DOGE and its billionaire team, but that doesn’t appear to be her job.
Whether Greene’s fierce defense of Gaetz figured directly in her selection or not, her willingness to pick fights in public obviously did. DOGE has not been designed to do its work quietly.
In a Fox News interview Sunday, Greene mentioned several potential DOGE targets for spending cuts, which gave a sense of her real mission.
“We’ll be looking at everything from government-funded media programs like NPR that spread nothing but Democrat propaganda. We’ll be going into grant programs that fund things like sex apps in Malaysia, toilets in Africa, all kinds of programs that don’t help the American people,” Greene said.
These are all classic conservative talking points. The problem is that Musk has boasted that he can find $2 trillion in government waste, and that’s a lot of sex apps, toilets and news programs. The total appropriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is NPR plus all the public stations around the country, was about $525 million this year. That sounds like a lot, but to reach $2 trillion, you’d have to cut that amount 3,810 times.
Meanwhile, Musk and Ramaswamy have outlined plans to use a compliant U.S. Supreme Court to bypass legal roadblocks to make sweeping cuts in government programs and brought together several billion dollars worth of corporate egos plus hired staff to plan a “lean, mean” approach to all the ways in which you, the taxpayer, come into contact with the federal government. What could possibly go wrong?
Opinions appear to be divided over whether DOGE is going to be a serious effort by the Trump administration to reduce the size of the deficit, which includes things like Medicare, Medicaid and the military that haven’t been mentioned yet, or just a diversion for Musk and the other tech billionaires who helped him get elected.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be either one. Keep a close eye on the cryptocurrency connection, which could emerge as more than just a subplot in this mystery.
