Sen. James Lankford Offers Sneak Peak Into How Exactly DOGE Will Clean Up Government Waste and Abuse

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped two innovative businessmen—Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—to head the Department of Government Efficiency as the new advisory commission works to eliminate waste and abuse from the federal government.

The Department of Government Efficiency isn’t a government agency, however, and lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate have teamed up to advise DOGE and help craft legislation to enable its cost-cutting plans.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., gave The Daily Signal a snapshot of how Republicans in Congress—joined now by at least one Democrat—aim to assist these essential efforts. Lankford compared the path forward to Boeing’s 10% reduction in its workforce, and he suggested that many past bills he has co-sponsored may be vital to unlocking DOGE’s potential.

“We haven’t done this in decades, to do a top-to-bottom review, and it’s long overdue,” Lankford said in a phone interview Wednesday morning. He insisted that “this shouldn’t be a partisan experience,” and Democrats should work with Republicans in cutting costs and eliminating inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy.

Lankford serves as vice chairman of the Senate Republican Conference.

The House and Senate Caucuses

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, launched the Senate DOGE Caucus last month, aiming to work with Musk and Ramaswamy. Lankford joined Ernst, as did these fellow Senate Republicans: Florida’s Rick Scott, Kansas’ Roger Marshall, Missouri’s Eric Schmitt, North Carolina’s Ted Budd, Texas’ John Cornyn, and Utah’s Mike Lee.

In the House, Reps. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., and Pete Sessions, R-Texas, are leading the effort. Rep. Jared Moscowitz, D-Fla., last week became the first Democrat to join the House DOGE Caucus.

“After waging a lonely fight in Congress for a decade, it is a new day in America now that we finally have the momentum to trim the fat on the bloated bureaucracy and downsize government,” Ernst told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement Tuesday. “I am thrilled to use my experience making Washington squeal to partner with DOGE and the Trump administration to eliminate waste, drain the swamp, and get the federal government back to serving taxpayers.”

“If bureaucrats don’t want to return to work,” she quipped, “I will happily make their Christmas wish come true.”

Ernst released an explosive report on federal waste and abuse last week.

“The American people voted to shake up business as usual in Washington,” North Carolina’s Budd told The Daily Signal in a written statement Tuesday. “That means confronting the billions in wasteful spending that Washington has been engaging in for years. This long-standing abuse of taxpayer dollars represents a betrayal of the public trust, and I am proud to support the DOGE Commission in their effort to root out waste in the federal bureaucracy.”

Sessions’ office highlighted the congressman’s work on a government operations subcommittee, part of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, as the seed for bills that will help DOGE in the upcoming Congress.

“The goal right now is to get ideas and prepare for action,” Eleanor Allison, the Texas Republican’s communications director, told The Daily Signal.

How Does It Work?

In his interview with The Daily Signal, Lankford compared the cost-cutting efforts of DOGE to Boeing’s recent cuts.

The aircraft company, facing billion-dollar losses and an ongoing factory strike, announced a reset of workforce levels to “align” with “financial reality and … a more focused set of priorities,” Forbes reported. Boeing executives will not be immune from these cuts.

“Boeing just did a 10% reduction, trying to be able to deal with the debt issues that they have,” Lankford said. “They’re saying, ‘We’ve got to be able to produce quality aircraft, [but] do we have the right number of people doing the right thing?'”

The Oklahoma Republican noted President Bill Clinton’s Federal Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994, saying it represented the most recent serious attempt to eliminate waste and duplicated work across the administrative state.

Lankford suggested that the DOGE cuts will be made with a scalpel rather than a machete.

“It’s not just a matter of across-the-board, sloppy cuts, where we’re just going to reduce by X percentage every single area,” the senator said. “That’s actually not efficient, either.”

Lankford highlighted the Federal Program Inventory, a searchable online tool designed to explain what government programs do and how successful they are. The Office of Management and Budget under President Joe Biden developed the tool, which Lankford said will be instrumental in rooting out waste and abuse.

The inventory “will allow, for the first time, members of Congress to see how many programs do we do in the federal government,” Lankford said. ” Do we have duplication? How are they evaluated? Are they doing well, are they accomplishing what the goal was? We have never been able to see that in real time.”

He said Congress and the new Trump administration will be able “not to just end a program, but to say, ‘We do the same program in nine different ways.'”

Musk and Ramaswamy already have addressed the issue of remote work. While the taxpayer foots the bill to maintain federal offices, many bureaucrats work from home a large percentage of the time.

Lankford said it’s not realistic to phase out remote work entirely, but he argued that many jobs must be performed in the office.

“Remote and telework, that is definitely a model that will continue” in the federal government, Lankford told The Daily Signal. Yet he also noted that many jobs require in-person work.

In the Social Security Administration, for example, “we need folks who can not just answer the phone” but also those who can “answer a question face-to-face for those who struggle with technology and need a little help.”

The government needs “a blend of the two,” Lankford said.

Legislation

Lankford also highlighted legislation that could help DOGE’s efforts.

He mentioned a bill called the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act, which would require executive branch regulations that heavily affect the economy to receive a vote in the House and Senate.

Lankford also suggested that Congress should pass legislation to determine standards for federal grants, which amount to billions of dollars every year from multiple executive agencies.

“Do those grants meet the national best interest? Is that the best use of limited resources? We have to make those decisions and determine some level of standards for how that should be done,” Lankford said.

The senator noted that both Musk and Ramaswamy understand that they have limited time to achieve their goals, and the new Republican majorities in the House and Senate won’t have much time, either.

Most bills in the Senate require a two-thirds majority vote to move forward, with the exception of reconciliation bills—legislation specifically dealing with the budget.

“You’re pretty limited in what you can do. You can deal with budget and tax matters, debt and deficits, but you can’t introduce new policy,” Lankford said.

He echoed previous reporting in saying that House and Senate Republicans aim to move forward with two reconciliation bills in the new Congress: one focused on extending the tax cuts in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and one focused on immigration and energy issues.

Lankford noted that many parts of the federal infrastructure designed to address illegal immigration are “underfunded right now,” from detention systems to deportation flights to the number of Border Patrol agents at the border and the technology to block the flow of fentanyl into the country.

On energy, the questions revolve around investment, land leases, and permitting. Reforms “will reduce the cost of energy for every American, and they will increase American jobs in manufacturing,” Lankford said.

The Oklahoma Republican urged fellow lawmakers to be “realistic” in terms of “what can and cannot be done,” cautioning that Trump and the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have a mandate from voters, but the margins will be narrow.

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