A Republican congressman clashed live on-air with a CNN host during a discussion on Tuesday about an effort led by President Donald Trump to cut government waste.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) argued with CNN host Pamela Brown after she essentially accused Trump and his surrogate, Department of Government Efficiency boss Elon Musk, of making reckless moves to dramatically curb federal spending amid a ballooning $36 trillion national debt.
Brown repeatedly pressed Burchett on the Trump administration’s efforts to cut government waste, specifically questioning whether the approach was “clumsy rather than methodical.” Brown further argued that the administration was making “high-stakes mistakes” in its execution.
“Humans will make mistakes, ma‘am. But currently, these are bloated programs. You have no-show employees that are angry that they‘re having to go back to work, that they‘ve moved and they‘re not even in the distance of where their original jobs were,” Burchett said as Brown acknowledged that “no one” was disagreeing with getting rid of waste.
“Well, then, why are you all not exposing it?” Burchett asked, leading Brown to claim that her network was following where the money was going “at length.”
“All y‘all do is run down Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and you continuously do this. And that‘s why your ratings are in the tank, ma‘am,” Burchett said.
The two continued their fiery back-and-forth, with Burchett asserting that Brown was attacking the messenger rather than addressing the message.
“There are fair questions to be asking, congressman, about these unelected people going in and having access to private information from Americans. How can you not be asking those questions? Those are very fair questions,” Brown said.
“How many people at the IRS are elected? How many of those are elected, ma‘am? You‘re proving my point. You‘ve got all these people, and this is a very porous agency. We know that,” Burchett pushed back.
In a column for the Washington Examiner, Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) chastised Democrats and their media allies now complaining about the Trump-Musk cost-cutting initiative, reminding them that their party was all in favor of streamlining government spending until the current president undertook the effort.
“The United States is $36 trillion in debt, and Washington, D.C., continues to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars. Instead of efficiency, people have gotten an ever-growing bureaucracy that wastes taxpayer dollars and is unaccountable to the public,” he began.
“This is exactly why President Donald Trump’s initiative to implement the Department of Government Efficiency represents a bold step toward draining the bureaucratic swamp, forcing federal agencies to streamline, modernize, and justify their spending,” Webster continued. “But the biggest irony of the backlash against DOGE is who is leading the resistance.”
He noted that DOGE is actually a derivative of the United States Digital Service, which was created by Obama in 2014.
“For years, Democrats praised it. They had no problem when Obama and Joe Biden’s USDS embedded Silicon Valley insiders deep in our federal agencies, including giving engineers access to Medicare’s mainframe, which processes billions of dollars in payments every year,” Webster wrote.
The USDS expanded into a bloated bureaucracy with little oversight, yet its access to sensitive government systems was never questioned because its agenda aligned with the Democratic Party, he explained. Now, with Trump rebranding USDS as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and appointing one of the most visionary innovators of our time, Elon Musk, to overhaul Washington’s inefficiencies, the same individuals who once championed USDS are now rallying in protest outside the Treasury Department, he added.
“The same people who let USDS tinker with Medicare’s billion-dollar payment system now want to block Trump from cutting waste,” said Webster.