• It's not just Elon Musk's planned step-back. DOGE-related initiatives are stalling in Congress, too.
• The DOGE caucus hasn't met in months, and the DOGE committee held an off-topic hearing.
• "The DOGE caucus in Congress is dead, it's defunct," one lawmaker said recently.

Everywhere you look in Washington, DOGE is beginning to slow down.

It's not just that Elon Musk is preparing to scale back his involvement in the project and devote more time to Tesla. Nor is it merely that Musk's estimated $2 trillion in cuts to the federal budget have shrunk to less than $200 billion. DOGE-related initiatives on Capitol Hill — where decisions about government spending are ultimately made — are also losing steam.

"That's one of my big frustrations right now," Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee told BI. "The president's DOGE agenda is all through executive orders, and not through anything else."

A House caucus established to provide cost-cutting ideas to DOGE has had little interaction with the Trump administration. On Wednesday, a House panel created to support government efficiency efforts held a hearing on transgender athletes in fencing. And plans to vote on making DOGE cuts permanent have stalled as well.

Despite the shock and awe of Musk's first several weeks in government, time has shown that DOGE is still subject to the laws of political gravity. Musk has become unpopular, DOGE has faced massive blowback from the public, and Tesla — the source of most of Musk's wealth — has become the target of protests.

The substance of Musk's project is also at risk. Though Congress has largely taken a backseat to the executive branch in the initial months of President Donald Trump's term, the legislative branch will have to act to ensure that any changes made by DOGE aren't reversible by the next administration.

'We're not even going to call it the DOGE subcommittee anymore'

For months, the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency — aka, the DOGE subcommittee — has been the main forum for Republicans and Democrats to hash out DOGE-related topics in a public forum. It's held hearings on improper payments, USAID, funding for NPR and PBS, and whether the federal government should downsize its real estate portfolio.

On Wednesday, the subcommittee departed from that course, holding a hearing on transgender athletes participating in fencing competitions.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the chairwoman of the subcommittee, said ahead of the hearing that the topic was tied to government efficiency because Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring transgender women from competing in women's sports.

During the hearing, several Democrats on the committee argued that the hearing was off-topic.

"We're not even going to call it the DOGE subcommittee anymore. This is called the fencing oversight committee," Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the panel, said mockingly. "Welcome to the fencing oversight committee."

Republicans on the subcommittee largely demurred when asked about the apparent off-topic nature of the hearing. "Yeah, I don't know," Burchett said. "You know, people are concerned about it."

Meanwhile, the House DOGE caucus — a bipartisan group that boasts nearly 80 members — has been far less active than originally envisioned. Leaders told BI in January that the group planned to release a report at the end of the first quarter that compiled cost-saving suggestions for the White House and Musk.

But the group hasn't met in months, and Republican Rep. Blake Moore of Utah, one of the group's three co-chairs, told BI that the plans for a report had been delayed.

"There just hasn't been a lot of interaction with us and the administration," Moore said.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida, one of a handful of Democrats who had joined the group, went even further in a recent CNN interview. "The DOGE caucus in Congress is dead, it's defunct," Moskowitz said. "It met twice, I was there, it never met again. They weren't included in any conversations."

As of now, Moore said, members have been left waiting for the White House to submit a request asking Congress to withdraw funding that lawmakers had previously approved, known as a "rescission."

The administration had planned to ask lawmakers to cut funding for USAID, NPR, and PBS, according to various reports. But now that's also been put on hold, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment on when the recission request would be made.

"Our focus is just, at this point, going to be on what rescissions ultimately come," Moore said. "But there's been a major delay in that, so it's kind of waiting to see what legislative action happens."

• In a hearing on Wednesday, Democrats suggested that Marjorie Taylor Greene engaged in insider trading.
• It caused the hearing to be suspended for 20 minutes.
• Greene's trades during the April tariff dip have drawn scrutiny from Democrats.

Democrats suggested that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene engaged in insider trading at a House hearing on Wednesday, derailing the proceedings for roughly 20 minutes.

The DOGE subcommittee, which is chaired by the Georgia Republican, was holding a hearing on transgender athletes competing in fencing and other sports.

As Democrats on the panel criticized Greene, two of them — Reps. Greg Casar and Jasmine Crockett, both of Texas — brought up recent stock trades made by the congresswoman.

"We're here because Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks that if she picks on vulnerable people like trans folks, she can avoid having a discussion about the allegations of insider trading against her," Casar said.

Greene purchased tens of thousands of dollars in stock in an array of companies between April 2 and 9, when President Donald Trump's tariff announcement and subsequent pause led to large shifts in the stock market. The congresswoman has maintained that the trades were made by an independent financial advisor.

"That's something that my portfolio manager does for me, and he did a great job," the congresswoman told the Georgia Recorder last month. "Guess what he did? He bought the dip."

Democrats have argued that Greene and other Republicans close to Trump may have known about the president's tariff moves ahead of time, allowing them to profit from non-public information.

When Crockett brought up Greene's trades, she displayed a poster featuring the congresswoman's face.

"Let's look at fraud," Crockett said. "We could investigate whether the White House and members of this subcommittee engaged in insider trading and market manipulation. Maybe it's a coincidence that the chairwoman brought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock the day before Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, but I guess we'll never know."

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina then asked to take Crockett's words down, saying the Texas congresswoman was "alleging a criminal act." That led to the committee suspending its business to review Crockett's remarks.

Eventually, Greene called the meeting back to order.

The Georgia Republican asked Mace to withdraw her motion, saying the Texas Democrat's remarks were "borderline" and that it was important to move on "in the interest of making sure that we stay on track, instead of getting sidetracked by Democrats' non-stop fake accusations."

• When DOGE was first announced, GOP lawmakers expected to be at the forefront.
• One month into Trump's presidency, they're largely in the backseat.
• One key DOGE-focused lawmaker says he wants to see lawmakers get more input.

When Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy made a splashy visit to Capitol Hill in December to tout their new "Department of Government Efficiency," the excitement among Republican lawmakers was palpable.

GOP leaders moved to set up a DOGE subcommittee led by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Lawmakers established DOGE caucuses in both chambers to serve as the focal point for legislation, and in the House, it was even bipartisan. "If this is where that conversation is going to happen," Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida told BI at the time, "I'm happy to be at the table."

Two months later, it's clear that Congress is not where the most consequential DOGE conversations are happening, or where key decisions are being made.

Instead, even Republicans who broadly support DOGE's mission have been left watching from the sidelines as Musk's team has shuttered entire agencies, frozen federal funds, and asserted control over the federal workforce, spurring a flurry of lawsuits and fears of a constitutional crisis along the way. At the same time, those same lawmakers are still bearing the brunt of the public outcry over DOGE cuts, with some now public suggesting that the effort should slow down.

Rep. Blake Moore of Utah, one of the three GOP co-chairs of the House DOGE caucus, recalled on Tuesday feeling "very encouraged" when Musk visited the Capitol in December, when lawmakers took the microphones in a subterranean auditorium to offer up the variety of ideas that they'd spent years developing around government efficiency and eliminating waste.

"There was just very much an interest in taking and collecting input for stuff that we've already been working on," Moore told BI. "I want to see more of that."

Musk's shock and awe campaign across the federal bureaucracy has made parallel efforts in Congress feel quaint. Later on Tuesday, a handful of members of the House DOGE caucus held a "DOGE Day" press conference, where they highlighted various bills aimed at clamping down on government waste. When it was time for questions, those lawmakers weren't asked about any of those bills — they were instead pressed over the cuts that Musk's team has already been making.

Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida, another co-chair, told reporters that the "uncomfort factor" for members of Congress came from the speed of it all.

"A lot of members of Congress haven't seen this speed," Bean said. "But I can tell you, it has to be done."

Republicans on Capitol Hill have continued to assert that they remain behind the steering wheel when it comes to the flow of federal funds and the structure of the federal bureaucracy, even as they're increasingly in the back seat. Others blame the perennially slow pace of congressional legislating.

"Congress will have its time," Rep. Greg Murphy, a North Carolina Republican who's in the DOGE caucus, told BI. "But as slow as Congress moves, and as difficult as it is to get 535 opinions, this is one thing where the executive branch has come in."

Some argue that the administration's moves to withhold congressionally approved funding and fire thousands of workers merely constitute a "review," and that Congress will have the final say. Others, such as Republican Rep. Michael Cloud of Texas, say their main concern is the longevity of the executive actions driven by President Donald Trump and Musk.

"We've got to codify what President Trump is doing," Cloud, a member of both the DOGE caucus and the DOGE subcommittee, told BI. "Otherwise, it's just a great blip on the radar."

Sen. Rand Paul is urging the administration to send a rescission bill to Congress, arguing that it would be "messier" to attempt impoundment, which would "likely be challenged in court" and take some time to resolve.

"Rescission won't be challenged in any way," the Kentucky Republican told BI. "It's a much cleaner way of doing it."

Congress played second fiddle to DOGE yet again on Wednesday, when Greene's DOGE subcommittee held a hearing centered on the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. Over the course of nearly two hours of testimony and questioning, few of the panel's Republican members acknowledged the elephant in the room — that the agency is already shuttered and nonfunctional.

After the hearing, Greene insisted that Congress remained at the forefront of DOGE.

"We're actually filling our role here on the DOGE subcommittee," Green said, "looking into the waste, fraud, and abuse, making our recommendations, and hopefully putting that into legislative actions."

• The House's DOGE committee held a hearing on Wednesday about improper payments and fraud.
• In reality, it was all about Elon Musk.
• Democrats used the hearing to spotlight Musk and DOGE's recent antics in the executive branch.

The official reason for Wednesday's hearing, convened in a cramped, pastel-walled room in the second floor of a labyrinthine House office building, was to examine improper payments and fraud.

In practice, it was mostly about Elon Musk.

Over the course of two hours, the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency met for the first time against the backdrop of a DOGE-led blitz across the federal government that's spurred numerous lawsuits and ignited Democratic resistance.

"We can't just sit here today and pretend like everything is normal, and that this is just another hearing on government efficiency," said Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the committee. "While we're sitting here, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are recklessly and illegally dismantling the federal government."

The House's DOGE subcommittee was established to support the Musk-led "Department of Government Efficiency" in the executive branch. While some Democrats have expressed an eagerness to work with Musk, those lawmakers didn't end up on this committee. Instead, the party selected some of its most ostentatious brawlers to prosecute the case against Musk.

For Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the committee's chairwoman, it was a high-stakes moment. Four years ago, a bipartisan majority of the House voted to bar the Georgia Republican from serving on any committee for the entirety of her first term, owing to her history of violent and conspiratorial rhetoric. Now, she's chairing one of the most high-profile committees in the House.

As she led the hearing, Greene largely eschewed the theatrics for which she's known, using her opening remarks to offer a relatively boilerplate disquisition on the national debt.

"This is not a Democrat problem. This is not a Republican problem. This is an American problem," Greene said. "We, as Republicans and Democrats, can still hold tightly to our beliefs, but we are going to have to let go of funding them in order to save our sinking ship."

Democrats on the committee took a decidedly different approach, using the forum to attack Musk, DOGE, the machinations of the billionaire businessman's young lieutenants, his potential conflicts of interests, and President Donald Trump's recent firing of inspectors general across the federal government. Stansbury even invited Musk to testify before the committee, alluding to his eagerness to "engage with members of Congress on social media."

The most dramatic moment of the hearing came when Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California, referring to Greene's display of nude photos of Hunter Biden during a 2023 hearing, unveiled what he called a "dick pick" — a posterboard plastered with Musk's face.

"This is not about working with the richest man on the planet," Garcia said. "This committee wants to empower the richest person in the world to hurt people."

Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas grilled witnesses on Trump's recent firing of inspectors general, the independent officials at agencies throughout the government whose jobs include investigating waste and fraud.

"If this committee were serious about rooting out waste from our federal government, then today's whole hearing would be about how Musk and Donald Trump are firing the independent watchdogs who've done this work for decades," Casar said.

Both sides of the dais largely agreed on the substance of the hearing: that improper payments and fraud in the federal government are worth addressing. But as with most congressional hearings, the testimony and questioning were largely for the cameras, and Greene found herself in the unusual position of bemoaning that Democrats had decided to "make a political theater of the whole thing."

"If they want to make this a place to create partisan attacks and future campaign ads, they're really going to be on the losing side of the issue," Greene told reporters.

Toward the end of the hearing, Republican Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas bemoaned the direction that the proceedings had taken.

"All we've heard about for most of this hearing on the other side of the aisle is Elon Musk, Elon Musk, Elon Musk," Gill said.

• The House's DOGE subcommittee has scheduled its first hearing.
• It's entitled "The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud."
• The committee, separate from the organization Elon Musk is running, is likely to see lots of fights.

The House's DOGE committee has scheduled its first hearing for Wednesday, February 12, according to a notice obtained by Business Insider.

The House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, chaired by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, is set to hold a hearing entitled "The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud."

The subcommittee, though separate from the Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk in the executive branch, is set to be one of the main public forums on Capitol Hill for Democrats and Republicans to clash over the Trump administration's efforts to reorganize the federal government.

There are also "DOGE" caucuses in both the House and Senate, where lawmakers in both parties have been discussing legislative proposals to improve government efficiency.

A spokesperson for Greene did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, Greene sent a letter to the CEOs of PBS and NPR asking them to testify at a hearing in March about whether they should continue to receive government funding.

• It's starting to become clear how Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene plans to use the DOGE subcommittee.
• She's asking the CEOs of PBS and NPR to testify in a hearing in March.
• Greene says she wants the organizations to justify why they receive public funds.

The House DOGE subcommittee has found its first targets: NPR and PBS.

In letters sent to both media organizations on Monday, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the chairwoman of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, requested that their CEOs testify in a hearing on March 3 or 24.

In the letters, the Georgia congresswoman accused both NPR and PBS of producing "systemically biased" content, pointing to NPR's handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story and PBS's reporting on a gesture that Elon Musk made at an Inauguration Day event.

"As an organization that receives federal funds through its member stations, PBS should provide reporting that serves the entire public, not just a narrow slice of like-minded individuals and ideological interest groups," Greene wrote.

In a statement on Monday, NPR said that the organization would "welcome the opportunity to discuss the critical role of public media in delivering impartial, fact-based news and reporting to the American public."

A spokesperson for PBS also said they "appreciate the opportunity to present to the committee how now, more than ever, the service PBS provides matters for our nation."

NPR says it receives less than 1% of its annual budget from the federal government on average. PBS, meanwhile, says it gets 15% of its revenue from the government.

Separately, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, launched an investigation into NPR and PBS over sponsorships.

The DOGE subcommittee, while intended to pursue similar goals to Musk's DOGE team in the executive branch, is a separate entity — and it's likely to be a forum for televised clashes between Democrats and Republicans over the federal government.

Later on Monday, Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico — Greene's Democratic counterpart on the subcommittee — sharply criticized the letter in a statement to BI.

"While funding for public media has long been a target of GOP leaders, we have never seen such blatant attacks on the media and institutions as we've seen the last two weeks, including this effort to intimidate and undermine public media as with this DOGE hearing called by our colleagues," Stansbury said.