Marjorie Taylor Greene mum on Musk ahead of first DOGE hearing
Fresh from a White House meeting with Elon Musk, conservative provocateur Marjorie Taylor Greene is preparing to launch her Congressional subcommittee to complement the tech giant's Department of Government Efficiency — and downplayed the task force's drastic spending cuts that are putting thousands of federal employees out of work.
"Those are taxpayer-funded jobs. Those only exist because people that pay taxes, their money is being used for grants and all kinds of funding, right? Those aren't real jobs,' the Georgia lawmaker said in an interview Tuesday on the eve of the first hearing from the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, which she chairs.
'Real jobs are manufacturing, construction, all kinds of private businesses,' Greene continued. 'Those are real jobs, and those are the jobs that matter, because they produce income, that produce taxes and revenue for the federal government.'
Her comments, which followed a meeting Monday with Musk and Speaker Mike Johnson , could set the stage for her subcommittee hearing Wednesday morning, titled 'The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud.'
Greene said it would be the first of about four hearings the panel will convene over the next two months, though declined to preview other topics.
'This is really about improper payments,' Greene said of the panel's mission and mandate. 'We're looking at hundreds of billions of dollars annually … to anyone from dead people to criminal rings that are operating out of foreign countries and the gamut in between."
She insisted, 'this isn't really a partisan issue,' and dared Democrats to politicize it.
'If [Democrats] want to come in a hearing and yell about Elon Musk and DOGE — that is trying to save the American people their hard earned tax dollars — let them do it,' said Greene, 'because I can tell you right now, Americans will not be happy with it, and if they want to make that their issue, I'd love to win the midterms.'
While it's highly unlikely the DOGE Subcommittee will rise above the political fray, Greene is under some pressure to rebrand herself as a serious legislator in charge of a high profile subcommittee. Four years ago, she was stripped of her committee assignments for peddling dangerous conspiracy theories, and recently some Republicans expressed concern that her position atop the high-profile panel would be a political issue.
The DOGE Subcommittee could also ultimately be integral to her brand's rehabilitation: just this month, in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she left the door open to running for Senate or governor.
So now, rather than boast of her connections with Musk on Tuesday, Greene refused to discuss the details of her meeting with the billionaire and Johnson.
Nor would she engage on questions about her relationship with Musk, his far-reaching executive branch task force and what information she may be given about DOGE's activities.
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