Good afternoon from Capitol Hill,
There is a renewed sense of purpose and focus in Washington, D.C., as the Trump transition kicks into gear and Donald Trump’s cabinet picks prepare for confirmation.
Pete Hegseth, the nominee for the Secretary of Defense, and Elise Stefanik, the nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations, sat for in-depth, one-on-one conversations with Senators in order to gain their support. Senator Joni Ernst has been attempting to walk back her criticism of Pete Hegseth’s nomination for Secretary of Defense, following days of intense online criticism. Ernst, who voted for controversial Biden nominations to cabinet positions in 2021, including Merrick Garland for Attorney General, Pete Buttigieg to Secretary of Transportation, and Lloyd Austin to be Secretary of Defense, was reportedly waging a private war to replace Hegseth with herself for the top position at the DOD.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy met with lawmakers to discuss the Department of Government Efficiency Committee (DOGE), a task force they will be heading with the sole purpose of dismantling a weaponized and wasteful bureaucracy. DOGE will work with Russ Vought, nominated to lead OMB, to slash budgets and make the federal government operate along constitutional lines, and remove power from the administrative state to punish and drive up costs for taxpayers. Ramaswamy and Musk met with House Republicans and select Senate Republicans for a closed-door meeting on Thursday, where members shared their own ideas for cutting wasteful spending and reining in the bureaucracy.
After hours of hearing members boast about their spending cuts, according to reporting from Mollie Hemingway, Congressman Chip Roy told them that “they’d met the enemy, and it was right there in the auditorium—and they all should collectively acknowledge the problem and agree they were not going to do that kind of thing any more.” In other words, government has become so large and unwieldy not in spite of Congress, but in many ways because of it. Members of Congress keep voting for bloated omnibus spending bills, supplemental spending bills, and regular appropriations bills that create the waste and grow the bureaucracy they now decry. If Donald Trump is going to be successful in shrinking the scope of government, Congress has to get on board—not with words, but with actions.
Roy’s comment exposes the greatest challenge that DOGE and OMB will face in their ambitious goal of downsizing government by July 4, 2026 (also America’s 250th anniversary), which is the special interests and respectability politics that drive conservative politicians who campaign on slashing spending but come to Washington and do the opposite. DOGE’s goal has attracted bipartisan support with Democrats in the House even lobbying to join the committee. Yet, the most important goal of DOGE must be to permanently eliminate the government’s power to monitor and control its citizens, censor and manipulate elections, and spend money on endless and unnecessary bureaucratic processes.
Two days after this reportedly hours-long conversation on cutting wasteful spending, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees released the text of the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, an 1,800-page bill with spending totaling $895.2 billion. Speaker Johnson praised the package that incorporates some conservative wins: it does not expand IVF coverage, it includes language to permanently ban transgender mutilation on minors, provides National Guard support at the southern border, freezes hiring for new DEI positions, and increases the pay of junior enlisted service members by 14.5 percent. Johnson is expected to pass the bill by adopting a rule that will allow the bill to move forward with a simple majority vote this Thursday, and Senator Schumer has promised to file cloture on the bill as soon as it’s received, so the Senate will likely vote on the bill by early next week.
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- Remember this? The Judiciary Committee still has not received the January 6th Report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz that he promised to release back in September.
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