Democrats "once stood for trying to cut waste, fraud, and abuse," but now they are "throwing an absolute hissy fit and temper tantrum" over efforts being made by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash spending, Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said on Newsmax Friday.
"Bill Clinton and Al Gore worked diligently to put together a report and slash government workers," Burlison told "National Report."
"Under the Clinton administration, they eliminated about 400,000 federal employees," he continued. "There was a time when they were being elected, they were winning the popular vote. They also embraced making government more efficient." Now, the Democrats are attacking Musk "instead of attacking or discussing. They're defending this wasteful spending," said Burlison.
During a congressional hearing this week on DOGE cuts, Burlison played a video from 1997 showing former President Clinton and former Vice President Gore outlining a report on how to cut waste and red tape while streamlining the bureaucracy, and he said Friday that their comments would be hard to distinguish from what's being said now.
"You could probably play the game and say who said it, and a lot of people would assume that [those] were the words of [President Donald] Trump or Elon Musk," said Burlison.
The Democratic Party, he added, "has strayed very far from their roots or even just from sanity, and it's sad."
"That's why I said in the hearing that I would love it if we had some help from the Democrats to find and root out some of this wasteful spending," said Burlison. "Instead, they're just dragging their heels, and they're fighting us along the way."
There has also been a series of protests popping up outside government agencies, where lawmakers and others are saying that nobody voted for Musk, and that is "absurd," he added.
"No one voted for Alejandro Mayorkas," said Burlison. "No one voted for Merrick Garland or all of the people that the Biden administration put in who did damage and destroyed this country."
Further, agencies from the EPA to the Department of Transportation "were shoveling money out the window as Trump was coming in and [former President Joe] Biden was leaving," Burlison said.
"The president has the authority to hire who he wants, and I can't think of a better hire than Elon Musk," he added. "We have got the most talented, you know, successful individual in the world, and he is working for free, and he's bringing his geniuses with him. There's not a single governor or single CEO of a Fortune 500 company that would turn that away."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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