‘Waste, fraud and abuse’: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hypocritical attack could expose DOGE’s true intentions

Marjorie Taylor Greene is on a roll.

Following up on her self-incriminating tweet where she suggested that if Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter, she and the entire Republican Party should receive a pardon for unconfessed crimes in kind, Greene has once again returned to say the quiet part through a megaphone. This time, Marjorie has accidentally shed light on the true intentions of DOGE—the government agency to-be championed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as a federal cost cutter. Marjorie Taylor Greene has pointed out that that people’s government benefits will be on the chopping block.

In an interview Marjorie Taylor Green said that as the subcommittee chair responsible for overseeing DOGE, she and her colleagues will be focusing their efforts to combat “waste, fraud and abuse” across government agencies. Considering Greene’s penchant for spreading fraudulent conspiracy theories, abusing her platform to bully minorities, and wasting her colleagues’ time by engaging in name calling matches on the house floor, her statement is a particularly rich irony.

In this comic irony, Marjorie Taylor Greene exposes the cruel punchline of DOGE—an agency named after an internet joke. According to Musk and Ramaswamy, the pair are composing a “naughty” and a “nice” list of government employees. Any worker deemed “nice” is in support of DOGE’s slashes to social services, while workers relegated to the “naughty” list are the ones who disagree. Given that Christmas is the season of charity, it’s a particularly uncharitable act—a needlessly mean parody of the holiday spirit used to threaten people’s livelihoods.

Government employees’ lives aren’t the only ones that Musk and Vivek intend to trifle with. The pair have touted a plan to cut over $2 trillion from the U.S. government’s spending budget, which is about a third of the budget entire. In doing so, they would slash mandatory government spending on Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, and numerous other social programs that everyday Americans depend upon to survive.

While Musk and Ramaswamy’s holiday cruelty is sure to offend even the grinch, it’s possible that their plans may never get off the ground. Musk and Ramaswamy are hardly the first hopefuls to believe that government can be run by a business. That line of thinking can trace its lineage back to the 1980’s , where Ronald Reagan promised to do the same. His dreams of cost-cutting were crushed against his own promises of tax cuts and military strengthening, two much-touted Republican talking points of 2024. Like Reagan before them, DOGE will need to jump through quite a few hurdles that its predecessors failed to clear. If DOGE is anything like the like stubby-legged meme dog from which it gets its name, it may find itself similarly unprepared to vault those hurdles.

Despite the fact that internet meme agency has yet to become an official (and may never) many of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Republican colleagues are eager to get in on the joke. GOP legislators have spent part of their holiday season in closed door sessions with Elon Musk. According to legislators behind those closed doors, group is preparing to “gut the fish” in reference to the American government’s social services budget. That is naughty list behavior, one deserving of a lump of coal as a stocking stuffer. Though considering that Republicans are also intending to roll back fossil fuel regulations in the upcoming Trump administration, I don’t think that they’ll mind.