Elon Musk may be stepping down as the public face of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but his fingerprints certainly remain. Early this week, the president will finally be sending a rescissions package to Congress that makes the first wave of DOGE cuts permanent. And while people will debate long and hard whether the eclectic space genius was the right man for the job, taxpayers may soon have 9.4 billion reasons to be grateful.
Musk’s tenure as a special government employee was always set to expire May 30 — only now, his sendoff will conveniently coincide with the White House’s push to cement his work. After six weeks of back-and-forth with Republicans, President Trump is bundling up $9.4 billion of the waste and fraud identified by DOGE and sending it to Congress to cut. And while that’s just a fraction (5.4%) of the excesses Musk’s team found ($175 billion and counting), this is just the start, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought explains, of many rescission efforts.
“We want to make sure that Congress passes its first rescissions bill, including the DOGE [recommendations], and we will send more if they pass it,” Vought told Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow. “And so, this is the first one, it’s foreign aid, USAID cuts, many of the waste and garbage [programs] that was funding.” He was quick to point out that it wasn’t only “wasteful,” “but hurting our foreign policy.” Also on the chopping block? The left-leaning (but taxpayer funded) Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR.
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To get to the full $175 billion, it could take as many as 20 rescission packages, Vought wanted people to know. “We are doing everything we can to make the DOGE cuts permanent,” the holdover from Trump’s first term vowed. “All of those tools are [things] that we’re going to be looking at over the course of the next several months,” he continued. “And this is going to be playing out. It’s not going to be something [that] we’re going to have in one bill; it’s going to be part of a process over the next several months.”
And remember, Vought pointed out to conservative critics of the House reconciliation proposal, “the one, big, beautiful bill … cannot include discretionary savings to the bureaucracy, procedurally, under the Senate rules and law. So, it is many things, but it is not the vehicle to enact these DOGE cuts, which we will do and which we are in the process of doing.”
The other “R,” rescissions, is similar to reconciliation in that both processes only require a simple majority to pass. As long as Congress moves the package through both chambers within the 45-day window, the Senate’s filibuster won’t be in play. Thanks to a 1970s law, the president would be able to claw back some of the most outrageous abuses of taxpayer dollars, even though they’ve already been approved. Using Musk’s recommendations as a guide, the president can eliminate literally hundreds of unnecessary, woke, and obsolete programs or positions if both chambers cooperate.
And while the rescissions process is far from obsolete (Ronald Reagan used it more than 130 times), the last president to manage it successfully was Bill Clinton. As some people might remember, Donald Trump tried to pass a similar proposal in his first term (2018) — only to be blocked by the Senate.
Now that the House is free from reconciliation (at least for now), conservative leaders are more than ready to make DOGE’s work worthwhile. “When the White House sends its rescissions package to the House,” Speaker Mike Johnson promised, “we will act quickly by passing legislation to codify the cuts.”
Over in the Senate, his counterpart is just as eager. “We’ve all said that we’re anxious to act on rescissions packages and hope they find a way to send them up,” Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) agreed. As fiscal hawk and Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) quipped, “If Congress can’t cut $9 billion, I think most of them should resign and go home.”
In the meantime, don’t expect Musk to fade into the background. As President Trump made clear at a Friday press conference, the SpaceX founder will still be involved. “He’s going to be back and forth, I think,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office as Elon stood beside him, calling DOGE “his baby.” The effort, Musk commented earlier in the week, will now be focused “a bit more like tackling projects with the highest gain for the pain, which still means a lot of good things in terms of reducing waste and fraud.”
For his part, Musk seemed grateful to have spearheaded the historic venture to weed out the government’s outrageous excesses. “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk posted on X Thursday.
Even so, Elon didn’t shy away from the abuse that DOGE took for daring to expose the mountain of waste and fraud. “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he shook his head. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least … DOGE is just becoming the whipping boy for everything,” he said.
During a sit-down with The Washington Post, Musk reiterated the steep cost of his involvement. “So, like, something bad would happen anywhere, and we would get blamed for it even if we had nothing to do with it … People were burning Teslas. Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”
In the meantime, GOP leaders will do their best to make the last four months of scrutiny and personal loss worthwhile. Vought and major Hill players have done their best to map out a path to success. “We’ve had good conversations to make sure they knew it was coming,” Vought said. “They had some input as to some of the changes that could be made to make it something that could pass the House. And we’re excited for that to occur next week.”
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
