House Republican and Democrat on DOGE: Cabinet secretaries should have more power
A House Republican and Democrat agreed that Cabinet secretaries should play a larger role in making decisions about their employees once the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) commission identifies the waste and excess spending.
In separate interviews on NewsNation's "The Hill" on Monday, Reps. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) and Ami Bera (D-Calif.) praised tech billionaire Elon Musk's objective to make government more efficient but suggested he route his ideas through the secretaries so that they can implement them in ways that work best for their respective departments.
“Look, I agree that secretaries run their departments. And DOGE, while very helpful, it should be viewed as a resource, not the operating system for the entire federal government,” Davidson said, when asked how he views DOGE and its efforts.
Davidson said that DOGE has “highlighted some very important things,” pointing to the activity at USAID as “exactly right,” adding, “They highlighted problems with USAID, and then [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio took over USAID. He decided what he was going to do to scale down USAID.”
Davidson encouraged Musk to work with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to implement the recommendations.
“The idea that you're going to run all this from Elon Musk's Twitter feed, or X feed, you know, really isn't good,” Davidson said. “And I think that Elon Musk and Susie Wiles would do well to sit down and have a little heart-to-heart and run things through the secretaries, in my opinion.”
The interview comes amid confusion surrounding Musk’s latest push to make government more efficient. On Saturday afternoon, an email sent at Musk’s direction asked all federal employees to respond by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Monday with five things they accomplished the previous week. Musk said failure to respond by the deadline would be understood as resignation.
Soon after, however, several departments emailed their employees instructing them not to respond to the email. Subsequent guidance from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Monday clarified that responses to the email were voluntary and that a lack of response would not be considered resignation.
However, Musk appeared to ignore that guidance later on Monday and doubled down on his previous position, saying federal employees would "be given another chance" and that "failure to respond a second time will result in termination."
Davidson heaped praise on Musk in the interview and said sending that email is often a “useful tool” to expose layers of management that might not be necessary or to see which employees are underperforming.
He said it gets more difficult in such a massive bureaucracy, and it's valid to question how officials would even sort through all those email responses.
“It's a valid point to say, unless you've really built the architecture out, there's no way to read that many emails. So why are we doing this?” Davidson said. “So, you want people to be productive. That is sort of the point of DOGE. And I think the best way to do that is to take the good ideas and route them through the secretaries.”
In an interview that followed, Bera said he mostly agreed with his colleague from Ohio but said the email approach was “somewhat sophomoric,” adding, “That’s not the way you go about justifying someone’s job.”
He advocated for Cabinet secretaries to take a larger role.
“I agree with my colleague from Ohio, who was just on: Give it to the Cabinet secretaries, the folks that are in charge of running the agencies. They're Donald Trump's hand-picked folks, and let them go through their agencies, see what programs are relevant, which ones aren't, where you might be able to downsize.”
Asked whether he would be satisfied with the large cuts and layoffs of federal employees if the Cabinet secretaries spearheaded those steps, Bera said, “I hope the secretaries work with us in Congress. As Congressman Davidson said, you've got to pass legislation.”
“I'm not here arguing that there isn't some waste, that there aren't inefficient programs, but work with us. And again, if Elon Musk identifies stuff, you know, he's obviously a technology wizard: Modernize government, make it work better and more efficiently for the American people,” Bera said.
“But again, on the layoffs, the human resources side, that's best left to the agencies,” he added.
The Hill is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which also owns NewsNation.
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