Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst (R) is set to lead the newly created Senate DOGE Caucus — a nod to President-elect Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which will work outside the government to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump said in a statement.
“Proud to be the top watchDOGE in the Senate,” Ernst wrote in a post on the social platform X on Friday.
“It’s a bad time to be waste, fraud, or abuse in Washington!” she added in the post.
Ernst’s announcement comes as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is set to chair a new subcommittee within the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, called the Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) Subcommittee. She will work in conjunction with the White House commission — also with the same acronym — that is led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Musk and Ramaswamy laid out their plans for the new department in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this week, where they described the panel’s purpose, which will be to identify “thousands” of regulations for President-elect Trump to eliminate, which they argue will justify “mass head-count reductions” across government.
The op-ed seemingly seeks to address widespread skepticism about the ability of Musk and Ramaswamy’s panel to enact change.
“The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings,” they wrote. “We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”
They also referenced several Supreme Court decisions that have taken aim at the power of the administrative state, saying that a “plethora of current federal regulations” exceed agency authority and could be eliminated.
