Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, told Newsmax on Friday that he's "thankful" for the transparent way that Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are going after waste, fraud and abuse in the federal bureaucracy.
"One of the things that we should be very thankful for is that President Trump and Elon Musk are being straightforward with the American people, which is that if they cut somebody who should be coming back, they're admitting it and they're admitting it very publicly, and they're bringing these people back in," Gill said on "National Report." "But, let me remind you, we have 2.4 million federal workers, and that's excluding military and that's excluding the postal service.
"Remember, we have a $37 trillion debt. We're running $2 trillion annual deficits. We have to get this under control and the best way to do that, the best way to begin that process, is to go after a bloated, wasteful bureaucracy, and that's exactly what President Trump and Elon Musk are doing. So, I'm excited to see our work continue and put the pedal to the floor and to get our government under control."
Gill also took aim at the questioning by some in the media over why Musk is even involved in oversight that should seemingly be reserved for members of Congress.
"To the criticism that they're perhaps usurping power that should be in the legislature, I'd remind everybody that for years, in fact, for decades, Congress has asked these various agencies, particularly during the Biden administration, for information about where our tax dollars are actually going and these agencies have stonewalled Congress," Gill said.
"They've done everything they can to obfuscate what they're actually doing. We are bringing the government back to the American people. We're bringing accountability back to our government, which has been gone for so long. This is exactly what the American people want. They want a government that is responsive to their needs and actually listens to their elected representatives. And, you know, sometimes to get that under control, you got to do things a little bit differently. And that's what Elon Musk is doing."
Asked if he would support returning some of the savings Musk's team has uncovered to Americans in the form of a DOGE dividend, Gill said he didn't "want to get ahead of things" and cautioned that "this is a process."
"We've got to first qualify all of these wasteful programs, figure out what they are, then we've got to quantify them," he said. "Then we've got to categorize them and figure out, are these fiscal year 2025 or fiscal year 2026? And then we can start looking at slashing them from our budget. Only then can we start figuring out where this money is going to go."
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