DOGE will go on: Hill pork hawk says rooting out government waste will continue after Elon

FIRST ON FOX: While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has departed the Department of Government Efficiency amid a blazing public tiff with the president, congressional DOGE leaders are primed to carry on the legacy well beyond his tenure.

“It’s never easy to see two friends at odds, but DOGE is bigger than any one person,” House DOGE Caucus chairman Aaron Bean, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital on Friday – expressing endearment towards both Musk and President Donald Trump.

“Our caucus, with 110 members, is laser-focused on delivering real solutions for the American people, reining in wasteful spending, demanding oversight, and ensuring every taxpayer dollar is spent wisely.”

Bean said his panel’s work rooting out government waste and streamlining the bureaucracy will continue on-track, with a major effort planned next week to change the Treasury’s payment system to curb improper disbursements.

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The Jacksonville lawmaker said that longstanding issue has led to about $162 billion in wrongful payments every year. During his tenure, Musk also worked with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to fix systemic problems there.

The House DOGE Caucus will continue to advocate to “enact the cuts found by DOGE,” Bean went on.

The panel looks forward to working with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to pass $9.4 billion in rescissions identified by DOGE and presented to Congress for action by OMB Director Russ Vought.

Republicans faced criticism for moving too slowly on DOGE’s proposed cuts, but GOP leadership sources said they needed either a formal request from Vought or separate bills outside the Big Beautiful Bill Act to avoid jeopardizing its eligibility for Senate reconciliation.

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“Taking on Crazytown is no easy task,” Bean quipped to Fox News Digital last November when he launched the House DOGE Caucus.

On the Senate side, DOGE caucus chairwoman Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, scrutinized a recent government report on COVID aid fraud and has already launched an effort to head off what she called easily-determinable signals that an application for government emergency aid is likely falsified or ineligible.

Ernst this week flagged an analysis from the Pandemic Resources Accountability Committee – led by federal inspectors general – that randomly sampled nearly 700,000 identity records from 67.5 million applications for PPP, EIDL and other COVID-19 relief programs and found nearly $80 billion in potentially fraudulent payouts.

Ernst said much of the likely fraud could have been prevented if officials had simply verified Social Security numbers, matched them with SSA records, and confirmed whether applicants were still alive.

In turn, she informed Fox News Digital exclusively that she would be launching a bill Friday to prevent this kind of easily-avoided oversight issues in the future.

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The DOGE in Spending Act would prevent “con artists,” she said, who, during COVID-19, “raided America’s piggy bank.”

The bill’s name also signaled that the Senate, too, would continue its Musk-inspired work long after the mogul has left.

“There is nothing more frustrating than losing billions of dollars to preventable fraud,” Ernst said, calling the illicit payouts during the pandemic “unprecedented.”