As the House GOP works on its spending package and the government budget, it will also be working to "codify" the efforts of Elon Musk's DOGE at rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse of American taxpayer dollars, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.
"We're going to need a few more weeks, maybe a month or more, to qualify and quantify and then codify what Elon Musk and the DOGE effort is all about, and that is eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse in the government," Johnson told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.
"He genuinely believes they may be able to find as much as $1 trillion, and that is going to make a big difference, obviously, in the budgeting for the federal government and the appropriations process going forward."
Johnson told CNN's Dana Bash that Musk is exposing egregious abuses of taxpayer funds unlike anyone in American history.
"He's shown me many of the examples of the outrageous abuses," Johnson said. "And I'm telling you, Dana, when the American people understand what has been happening with our taxpayer dollars that Congress has been unable to discern even with our best oversight efforts – Elon has been able to crack the code. He's inside the belly of the beast of the bureaucracy.
"And the algorithms are crawling through the data constantly. And what they're finding is incredible."
Critics of Musk and President Donald Trump, mostly Democrats and those benefiting from wasteful government spending are eventually going to get Congress to pass legislation to sign off on the cuts and reforms, but for now it is up to the Cabinet heads to dig into everything deeply to see what is under the hood.
"What you're going to see is a very careful attention paid to ensuring that the essential programs of the federal government, the things that make sense to American taxpayers and that follow common sense, will be sustained and supported and funded, but that the fraud, waste, and abuse will not," Johnson told Bash.
"Elon himself has acknowledged, there's no playbook for what's happening right now. This has never been done before.
"And that's kind of the point. It's why it's so exciting. He understands that some mistakes will be made along the way, but they will be immediately corrected.
"And you have seen that, for example, with USAID. There were enormous abuses there that enraged the American people, but at the Department of State under Marco Rubio's leadership, they're going through literally with a line by line – on the line items of USAID and they're giving waivers for the programs that do need to be continued, for example, the things that confront Chinese aggression around the world.
"Those are the kinds of efforts you're going to see in every agency of the federal government. And that is a great thing for American taxpayers and for the future of our country."