[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 95 (Wednesday, June 4, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3214-S3216]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Department of Government Efficiency
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, one of the most important innovations that
President Trump has brought to the Nation is the Department of
Government Efficiency. And, of course, this has been headed by Elon
Musk, during his term as a temporary government employee. But the good
news is that the work of the Department of Government Efficiency--or
DOGE, as it is called around here--lives on, and that is reflected in
the fact that the Office of Management and Budget has sent its first
rescissions package to Capitol Hill.
For those who don't follow the process of procedures here in
Washington, DC, the rescissions package is important because it allows
Congress to codify the important progress that the Department of
Government Efficiency has made in identifying and starting to eliminate
waste, fraud, and abuse within the Federal Government.
And what DOGE found under the leadership of Elon Musk is a target-
rich environment. During the last several months, DOGE has uncovered
numerous examples of blatant government waste and abuse. These range
from commonsense efficiency reforms to canceling programs that are
outright nonsensical uses of the taxpayers' hard-earned money.
According to the website, the Department of Government Efficiency
estimates that they identified $175 billion in savings, or
approximately $1,100 per taxpayer.
I know some in the media have said: Well, that is peanuts; that
doesn't count.
Well, tell the taxpayers who have to pay $1,100 in additional taxes a
year to fund an inefficient government that has waste and fraud within
it.
The truth is, we have more work to do, and this is just a start.
That, to me, is the most important point to make. This is just a start.
President Trump and Mr. Musk have changed the culture here in
Washington, DC, and changed the conversation.
We know that our national debt has now surpassed $36 trillion, and
that is an amount of money that I know no human mind can fully
comprehend. But here is how I begin to get at it: when we start to
think that we are spending more money on interest on the national debt
than we are to defend the Nation, our most important job. That to me is
shocking, and it is a mandate to get our spending under better control.
This isn't a matter of not taxing the American people enough. There
isn't enough money to tax people for. It is a spending problem, and we
need to get spending under control. We have multiple opportunities, and
one of those is with this rescissions package.
DOGE started out with an ambitious goal of a 15-percent reduction in
government spending of about $1 trillion. Again, this is what the media
has pooh-poohed and said: Well, they haven't come anywhere near their
target.
But, again, the most important point I can make is this is just the
beginning. I don't see the work of DOGE being finished but, rather,
being a starting place. Again, I think, perhaps, the most important
contribution is it has changed the conversation here in Washington, DC.
When people realize the egregious expenditures of their hard-earned tax
dollars, then they say: Well, what more is there? Is this just scraping
the surface?
And the fact of the matter is, it is.
When I look at some of the items included in this rescissions package
from the Office of Management and Budget, I think this package will
sell itself--or should sell itself--to people with any common sense.
It rescinds $67,000--a small amount, but small amounts add up--for
testing insect powder nutrition on children in Madagascar--whatever
that is.
Similarly, it rescinds more than $1 million for LGBTQI+ programs in
places like Uganda and the Western Balkans. Why are we spending tax
dollars in Uganda and the Balkans for programs and projects like that?
Surely, it doesn't seem like a priority to me.
And if that were not enough, the DOGE recommendations, now embraced
within this rescissions package, cut millions of dollars for Green New
Deal-style programs, not in America but around the world. The bill
rescinds $6 million appropriated for ``net zero cities'' in Mexico,
half a million dollars for electric buses in Rwanda, and $2.1
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million for climate resilience in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and
East Africa.
Again, budgets are about priorities, and I can't imagine a world in
which these would be the most urgent priorities for the Nation, as our
debt exceeds $36 trillion.
But just when you thought these programs couldn't be more absurd,
they become more absurd as you look further. It rescinds $4 million for
``legume systems research'' and $3 million for Iraqi Sesame Street.
Well, I think if we were to ask my constituents back home in Texas if
they want their hard-earned dollars spent for ridiculous projects like
including creating cartoon shows in the Middle East, they would say
``no'' loudly and emphatically.
In many respects, DOGE has shown a bright light on what, for a long
time, has been a black hole in Washington, DC. Taxpayers know they send
a lot of their hard-earned money to Washington, DC, and I think most
Americans--patriotic Americans--if they thought this money was
necessary and put to good use, then they would say: OK, that is part of
the price we pay for living in the most prosperous, safest, strongest
country in the world.
But when they see their money spent like this, they know something is
terribly wrong.
So as I say, perhaps, the most important contribution that President
Trump and Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have
made is to shape the conversation, both on and off Capitol Hill, about
government waste.
Many of the incredibly impressive team members who were hired as part
of the DOGE initiatives have been hired on more permanently in various
Agencies. So DOGE is not going away, even though Elon Musk has returned
back to do work on his companies and is no longer on the Federal
Government payroll.
I am not sure he ever got paid, by the way. I think he volunteered
his time.
If you think about this for a minute, it is quite a momentous, but in
some ways paradoxical, achievement. The nature of bureaucrats in
government is to grow and grow and grow. And, over time, our Federal
Government has simply become so large and unwieldy. We needed something
like the Department of Government Efficiency to come in and begin to,
No. 1, identify the problem and to, No. 2, begin to help us chip away
at some of the outlandish spending, some of which I have mentioned a
moment ago. But the good thing about this change in the conversation
and this change in the culture here in Washington, DC, is that the
efforts of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, will continue
even after the current occupants of those positions move back to the
private sector.
What DOGE has done is to have hired a team of people of incredible
accomplishment in the private sector to help eliminate waste, and these
cost-cutting efforts have become a quintessential, whole-of-government
effort within the Trump administration.
The efforts to get our spending under control, though, do not begin
or end with DOGE. We need to play our part in Congress to make sure
this work does not go to waste. The way we do that initially is by
taking up and passing this rescissions package. Since Congress holds
the power of the purse, through the appropriations process, we have the
power to rescind these funds when they are shown to be not
appropriately expended or used. So this rescissions package from the
Office of Management and Budget is a gift on a silver platter, and I
look forward to taking up the bill and passing it soon.
But when it comes to eliminating wasteful Washington spending and
trying to chip away at this incredibly large debt and the interest
payments we are having to make on the debt, which jeopardizes
everything else important in the government, including our national
security, in addition to the rescissions package, we have the budget
reconciliation bill, which was passed by the House and is now being
considered here in the Senate--what has come to be known as the Big
Beautiful Bill.
This bill is important, as I learned from small businesses in Texas
last week as I traveled around the State. I asked them: What was the
impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that we passed in 2017 during
President Trump's first term? They said the impact was pretty dramatic.
It allowed them to hire new employees, to invest in new equipment, to
grow their businesses, and to provide more job opportunities for hard-
working Texans.
The truth is that unless we extend those expiring provisions soon,
all of that will go away, and they will have to begin to cut
employment, they will no longer be able to grow their businesses, and
they will no longer be able to provide additional benefits to their
employees.
So the tax cuts that we will implement in the Big Beautiful Bill will
allow those small businesses and individuals to prosper and, in turn,
grow our economy, which will benefit everybody.
We also have savings opportunities in the Big Beautiful Bill, things
like eliminating the Inflation Reduction Act, which was inappropriately
named. I don't know from what Agency or corner of the Capitol--behind a
door that is unnamed--these names come from, but the idea of the
Inflation Reduction Act from its inception was laughable because it did
nothing to reduce inflation. In fact, it made it worse by pouring
gasoline on the fire.
The fact of the matter is, Bidenomics resulted in an incredible
amount of additional spending, which created 40-year high inflation,
and now that is sort of baked into the cake in everything we do here in
America--when you go to the grocery store, for small businesses in
terms of their inputs and the things they need in order to produce
their products. If you ask folks in the agricultural sector, everything
they use for inputs to grow a crop or to produce livestock has all gone
up thanks to the wasteful spending of the Biden era.
So we need to begin to cut back on some of these wasteful spending
projects, and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act is an important
place to start.
We also need to do smart things when it comes to some of the other
expenditures of the Federal Government--for example, so-called means-
tested programs. We sometimes refer to that generically as
``welfare''--in other words, the safety net to help people who need a
helping hand.
Government does have a role to play, but these are means-tested
programs, which means that only people below certain economic levels
qualify. Over time, we know that able-bodied adults who should be
working and contributing to the economy, contributing to their
families, to their communities, and to the Nation are receiving these
benefits and are not working at all, and that has to change. That has
to change. So particularly in our means-tested programs, there has to
be a work requirement for able-bodied adults.
Plus, if you talk to employers around the country, as I have in
Texas, they say: One of the biggest problems we have is a shortage of
people willing and able to work. We have good, well-paying jobs, but we
can't find the workforce to fill these jobs.
Well, the third means by which we are going to begin this process of
controlling our out-of-control spending and our national debt is in the
appropriations process. Of course, this is an annual process where we
consider how to fund the Federal Government, and, like everything else
in the budget process, it is a matter of choosing our priorities. But
this is only 28 percent of what the Federal Government spends.
Historically, we have ignored the other 72 percent when it comes to
spending, but we are going to deal with that in the Big Beautiful Bill.
In addition, Congress has traditionally passed, as part of that 28
percent, 12 individual appropriations bills to fund the Federal
Government. No. 1, of course, on that list of priorities is national
security.
Of course, under Senate Democrats, we frequently punted this
responsibility and passed something called a continuing resolution,
which was on autopilot, instead of full-year funding measures that were
debated in the Appropriations Committee, with bipartisan support, and
then debated here on the floor and passed into law. Instead of that, we
just passed continuing resolutions, which is an abdication of our
responsibility as the holder of the purse strings under our government.
But while we often think of the appropriations process as strictly a
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spending process, it does not have to be that way. We can also use this
appropriations process to enact further spending reductions, and I
think we should.
So we have three bites at the apple, at the spending apple:
rescission, reconciliation--the Big Beautiful Bill--and then
appropriations. I hope the House and Senate will take full advantage of
each of these three opportunities to begin the process of reducing our
deficit and debt because, as former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff Mike Mullen said maybe about 10 years ago or so, ``The biggest
threat to our national security is our national debt.'' That prediction
at the time has come true when we are spending more money on interest
on the national debt than we are on defense.
There is no better time than the present to begin to remedy this
situation, and it is up to Congress. We can't look over our shoulder or
look around the room and say: Who else will protect us and save us from
this unsustainable trajectory? It is up to us.
While the formal Department of Government Efficiency Task Force may
have concluded, the work of DOGE lives on. As a founding member of the
DOGE Caucus, I will keep doing my part, along with all of my
colleagues, to bend the spending curve. I urge all of my colleagues to
join us in that effort, particularly by passing this rescissions
package and then eventually, in the coming weeks, the Big Beautiful
Bill.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. McCormick). The Senator from Texas.