Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Tuesday publicly nudged tech titan Elon Musk to delegate at least some of his DOGE cutback efforts to Trump administration officials “better attuned’’ to the task.
The top Senate Republican said Musk should defer to top Trump aides that the upper chamber confirmed into key spots when it comes to major decisions and warned about the toll of the Department of Government Efficiency’s impact on “real people.”
“I think that he’s kind of going about business as he would in a private business,” the South Dakota pol told CNN. “What he is trying to achieve is to try and figure out ways that we can make government cost less, run more efficiently, modernize it with technology.”
But while lauding DOGE’s efforts to modernize the federal government, including through cutbacks to staff and programs, Thune stressed that “how they go about it matters.
“DOGE is going about this and doing the big scrub,” he said.
“We worked so hard to get cabinet people in place. Hand it off to these leaders, these managers who are going to be making decisions,” he said of Musk. “And they’re going to be, I think, probably better attuned.”
The Trump administration has been forced to claim in court that Musk is not a DOGE employee or even technically the official leader of the cost-cutting initiative.
Instead, the administration has described him as a senior adviser to President Trump who is functioning as a special government employee. Trump has tapped Amy Gleason as his acting administrator of DOGE.
Still, in practice, Musk is widely seen as the man pulling the strings on DOGE, which Trump announced him as the leader of in November.
DOGE has pushed the Trump administration to let go thousands of federal employees and has barreled ahead with other efforts to trim spending.
Some Republicans, including in the Senate, have begun pushing back at some of the tactics that DOGE has deployed.
Several GOP lawmakers such as Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) have faced backlash during town hall meetings with constituents railing against DOGE.
Other Republican pols such as Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) have raised concerns about DOGE’s cuts to agencies including the National Institutes of Health.
Democrats have sought to capitalize on the anger of government workers who are peeved at the lack of stability as DOGE tears through the vast federal bureaucracy.
Thune insisted that DOGE’s “overall goals and objectives are the right ones.
“I think having somebody who has created jobs, changed and transformed businesses in the real world is a useful perspective, and a scrub of our federal government that we haven’t seen in a long time, frankly, was overdue,” he said.
Still, “anytime you do this, you also have to pay attention to the aftermath of that and how it impacts people. I mean, these are real people, and they need to be treated that way,” Thune said.
The Trump administration has offered many government workers the chance to step down and receive pay through the end of September as a means of reducing the workforce. More than 75,000 employees accepted, but the courts have pumped the brakes on the plan.
DOGE and the Trump administration have faced dozens of lawsuits over the department’s efforts.
Thune’s nuanced remarks about DOGE are in contrast with those from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has been a staunch backer of the project in the public eye and has courted Musk.
“Elon has cracked the code,” Johnson told Fox News’ “Fox’s Life, Liberty and Levin” last month.” “He is on the inside of the belly of the beast … and he is unveiling and revealing all these things that we knew intuitively were happening but we didn’t have the evidence.
“This is a game changer. It is truly revolutionary.”
