Elon Musk takes center stage in first DOGE hearing

Business & Economy

The Big Story

Elon Musk takes center stage in first DOGE hearing

Democrats on the panel took intense aim at billionaire Elon Musk in the first Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, accusing him of breaking the law in his quest to slash spending.

“While we’re sitting here, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are recklessly and illegally dismantling the federal government, shuttering federal agencies, firing federal workers, withholding funds vital to the safety and well-being of our communities and hacking our sensitive data systems,” ranking member Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) said.

She repeatedly said Musk should testify under oath before the panel.

But Republicans on the subcommittee, which is chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), fiercely defended Musk’s actions even in the wake of federal judges attempting to stop some of them.

Greene said a ruling blocking DOGE from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment systems was “absurd.”

And Greene issued a warning: “We will hold this judge and others who try to stop the will of the people and their elected leaders accountable.”

The hearing also got into some discussion of the technicalities of improper payments.

Witness Haywood Talcove, the CEO for Government at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, estimated that implementing front-end identity verification, eliminating self-certification and monitoring the back end of the programs could save $1 trillion annually across federal, state and local governments. That, he said, could take a fraud rating of around 20 percent to around 5 percent.

“The gravy train for a lot of these folks, it’s been on biscuit wheels and it’s about to run off the dadgum tracks,” quipped Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.).

The Hill's Emily Brooks takes it from here.

Welcome to The Hill’s Business & Economy newsletter, we’re Aris Folley and Taylor Giorno — covering the intersection of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

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Tax Watch

Welcome to Tax Watch, a new feature in The Hill's Business & Economy newsletter focused on the fight over tax reform and the push to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts this year.

GOP looks to accounting tactics to address costs of agenda

Republicans are trying to make budget cuts in order to help pay for their tax agenda, core elements of which would cost as much as $4.7 trillion over the next decade, or about as much revenue as the government collects in a year.

But due to the difficulty of passing budget cuts, GOP lawmakers are also considering some special accounting to help lower the price tag. These methods are known as dynamic scoring and working from the policy baseline.

Dynamic scoring means factoring in presumed economic growth resulting from tax cuts, and using the policy baseline means ignoring revenue losses that would show up if current tax rates are considered to be expiring at the end of this year, as is current law.

“The current policy baseline is current law,” Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) told reporters Tuesday.

Neither dynamic scoring nor the policy baseline constitute standard accounting as far as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the official legislative scoring body, is concerned.

Tax experts have told The Hill that dynamic scoring is especially not at play in the current tax debate, since most of what’s being extended is rate reductions for individuals as opposed to corporate deductions, which can spur production increases in the economy.

The corporate rate was reduced on a permanent basis from 35 to 21 percent in 2017, though President Trump has signaled interest in getting it down to 15 percent.

— Tobias Burns

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