Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, are rallying support for President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. The bipartisan interest in DOGE underscores growing momentum for cutting federal spending and increasing accountability in government operations.
Khanna told CNN that Democrats are open to collaborating with DOGE to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in the defense budget. He pointed to the Pentagon’s repeated audit failures and proposed expanding competition among major defense contractors.
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“We need to address inefficiencies that hurt taxpayers and national security,” Khanna said.
On the Republican side, Ernst has pitched $2 trillion in savings through reforms such as consolidating federal office space, reducing payments to the United Nations and adjusting the composition of pennies to save production costs.
Ernst also announced the formation of a Senate DOGE Caucus to work alongside Musk and Ramaswamy.
“It’s long past time to put the federal government on a permanent diet,” Ernst said in a statement.
DOGE has also drawn support from a growing roster of private-sector leaders, including Marc Andreessen, Bill Ackman,and Travis Kalanick. These Silicon Valley and Wall Street heavyweights will assist with technical challenges such as data collection on federal employees and identifying inefficiencies.
“We are entrepreneurs, not politicians,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed outlining their plans.
Critics, however, have raised concerns about the transparency and oversight of DOGE, given its reliance on private-sector volunteers rather than traditional government officials.
