‘Ridiculous, incredible things’: House Republicans call for codifying more DOGE cuts

At a Republican Study Committee media event Tuesday, House GOP lawmakers said they hope the White House continues to send them bills to codify Department of Government Efficiency cuts to the federal government.

“There’s trillions of waste, fraud, and abuse of dollars in our federal government, if you ask me,” Rep. Craig Goldman of Texas told The Daily Signal.

“We’ve got to curb our spending,” said Rep. David Kustoff of Tennessee. “We did that to some degree in the ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill.’ We’ve done that with rescissions, which the House of Representatives voted on a few weeks ago.”

As the House members spoke to The Daily Signal, the Senate was considering a bill to cut $9 billion in unspent funds from foreign aid and public broadcasting.

The rescissions package, which targets funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development as well as for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, was passed on a vote of 214-212 in the House.

Under law, the president can withhold funding for 45 days, at the end of which Congress must cut the funding or it will have to be spent. That gives Congress a July 18 deadline.

Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas supports rescissions bills, but sees them as a symptom of continued government excess.

“I would love to have a budget that gets sent over that we don’t have to worry about rescissions because it’s such a tight budget that, when it’s sent over, it doesn’t have to be revised,” she told The Daily Signal. “There was a lot of things that I think that the DOGE efforts led to and identified, and that’s what we’re trying to actually codify right now.”

In Goldman’s view, DOGE has served the purpose of beginning a quest for spending cuts, which is now handled by Cabinet secretaries.

“What DOGE was doing, really, before our Cabinet secretaries were established was finding ridiculous, incredible things,” he said.

“Now that the Cabinet secretaries are there, they are finding the waste, fraud, and abuse in all their departments. And so, the government is working together, and then sending that to us for us to codify and make all those cuts permanent. So, again, the One Big, Beautiful Bill was the first step.”

For now, the House is waiting on the Senate to deliver the rescissions bill back to them. However, as of Tuesday, it appeared likely the House version would require amending in order to conform to Republican senators’ concerns about cuts to PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program.

Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., told The Daily Signal that he views these rescissions as reforming, not abolishing, the organizations from which it cuts funding.

“There [is] a lot of work that those agencies did that is good that will continue,” said Murphy. “But there’s also a lot of things that they were doing that were wrong and not in a nonpolitical manner.”

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]