House Speaker Mike Johnson, speaking ahead of his meeting Thursday with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the leaders of President-elect Donald Trump's planned Department of Government Efficiency, told reporters that there will be a "lot of change" coming in the new year and the new Congress to make the government work better.
"It's what the DOGE effort will be about," the Louisiana Republican said in the press conference, which aired on Newsmax Thursday afternoon. "You're going to see a bicameral cooperation. And it will be, by the way, bipartisan."
Musk, the CEO of X and Tesla, and Ramaswamy, an Ohio businessman, attended several closed-door meetings with Republican members of Congress to discuss their plans to cut what they called $2 trillion of waste from the federal budget, reports ABC News.
"I think we should make sure we spend the public's money well," Musk said while heading between meetings.
On X, Musk said in a post that one of DOGE's key issues involves the number of federal employees who work from home rather than in person in the nation's capital.
Johnson, in his remarks to reporters, said that there have also been several Democrats in the House and Senate who have said they want to be part of shaving back government costs.
Meanwhile, he also commented that he supports cutting back some of the federal funds the Biden administration is spending in its last weeks, including to companies such as Rivian, a Tesla competitor, in response to a reporter's question.
"We're very frustrated by what the Biden administration appears to be doing right now, and that is, as you said, shoveling money," Johnson said. "As someone said on a hidden camera on a clip that I saw someone in the administration who's charged with distributing the funds said, it's like we're dumping gold bars off the Titanic here at the end.
"We take over in January, and until then, the big-government Democrats are still in charge. And they're spending money, in our view, recklessly."
There have been "a lot of discussions" about what authority Congress will have to claw back some of that money, he added.
"It's a serious challenge, and we need to stop it and expose what's happening," Johnson said. "That's what this effort will be about going forward. There is an enormous amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in the government, and I think everyone knows that intuitively."
He added that with the House subcommittees that are being created to work with DOGE and efforts from the Department of Justice, such spending will be investigated and revealed to the American public.
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