Republican Mike Gallagher urges DOGE to reform Congress' budget process

Former Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, recently penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal urging leaders of the nascent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to focus on cutting spending in Congress if they want to have a big impact.

Gallagher wrote, "if the DOGE men don’t focus on reforming Congress’s budget process, they will struggle to realize their ambition of revolutionizing the federal government and returning America to fiscal sanity."

It's a big win for Trump that a former congressman like Gallagher is already accepting DOGE's legitimacy.

"If the department focuses only on executive orders, it will pump water out of the swamp only to deposit it back in. DOGE will be remembered as a cheap public-relations stunt," Gallagher added.

Gallagher also said that DOGE should advance the Trust Act, "which would empower special committees to force votes on reforms to Social Security and Medicare trust funds."

"DOGE should therefore champion the Trust Act, which was a bipartisan, bicameral proposal in the previous Congress until the Biden administration demagogued it as a ‘death panel’ bill," Gallagher wrote. "The bill would empower each rescue committee to bring its solution to the House and Senate floors for a vote, so congressional leadership couldn’t kill reform efforts merely to shield members from making tough votes."