The subcommittee is led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency’s first hearing later this month will address the issue of fraudulent and improper government payments, specifically those involving Covid relief, National Review has learned.
Subcommittee Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) is holding the hearing, titled “The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud” next Wednesday to examine how the federal government has lost $2.7 trillion of taxpayer dollars to fraudulent payments since 2003.
“Fraudsters, organized criminals, malign foreign actors, and even corrupt government employees are filing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of fraudulent claims each year — and getting away with it. Every taxpayer dollar that goes to these criminals is one dollar less for hardworking Americans, who expect and deserve more from their government,” Greene said.
“The DOGE Subcommittee will work hand-in-hand with President Trump to root out waste, fix broken payment systems, and investigate fraud schemes. This hearing is a first step towards creating a government that actually works for the American people.”
Expert witnesses at the hearing will include Stewart Whitson, the senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, Haywood Talcove, the CEO of Lexis Nexis Risk Solution, and Dawn Royal, director of the United Council on Welfare Fraud.
The hearing will specifically address the deluge of Covid-19 related fraud involving pandemic-era relief programs and the Biden administration’s significant increase in Medicare spending. The Small Business Administration’s emergency loan programs and the Department of Labor’s pandemic unemployment benefits were ripe with fraud to the tune of billions of dollars, an issue federal prosecutors have attempted to address.
The Justice Department said last year that its Covid-19 fraud task force recovered $1.4 billion of fraudulently obtained funds, a fraction of the roughly half a trillion of waste and fraud that occurred during the federal government’s delivery of over $4 trillion worth of Covid-19 assistance.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) formed the DOGE subcommittee to partner with the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to root out federal government waste and streamline the administrative state.
Billionaire Elon Musk is overseeing DOGE’s effort to examine where federal agencies are putting their money and ending line items that advance left-wing ideology or needlessly waste taxpayer dollars. Trump created DOGE on day one through an executive order months after announcing it in the wake of his resounding electoral victory over former Vice President Kamala Harris. Former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy initially paired up with Musk to lead DOGE until he stepped away last month before a possible run for Governor of Ohio.
Thus far, Musk’s most high-profile action target has been the U.S. Agency for International Development and put an end to its ideologically driven spending worldwide. The Trump administration is also attempting to buyout federal employees and bring them back to working in-person to bolster productivity and trim the workforce.
House and Senate Republicans have launched corresponding DOGE caucuses to work with the DOGE team on trimming the federal budget and reorganizing federal agencies. The GOP’s support for limiting the size and scope of the administrative state is born out of conservatives’s longstanding belief in the importance of small government combined with President Trump’s difficulties with the bureaucracy throughout his first term.