POLITICO - Robert Garcia is in the DOGE house

THE BUZZ: BARKING BACK — Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia says Democrats trying to play nice with Elon Musk on his crusade to slash federal government spending are kidding themselves.

Garcia has a different strategy: go on the offensive against the Trump administration’s Musk-led effort from the outset. He is the only California Democrat appointed to a new House Oversight subcommittee on the upstart Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, and will be central to his party’s response to proposed spending cuts. The panel is charged with evaluating proposals from DOGE leaders, Musk included, to overhaul federal agencies.

Playbook spoke with Garcia over the phone from his office in Washington about why he’s deeply skeptical that Musk, a confidant of Trump, is truly interested in efficiency. Garcia argues the true aim of the project is to slash funding for safety-net programs and the Department of Education.

“Their goal,” he said, “is to destroy our agencies, eliminate the Department of Education, and no state has more to lose in this DOGE fight than California.”

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the subcomittee’s chair and a Trump loyalist who has frequently clashed with Garcia, called Trump’s DOGE effort a “mandate from the American people” to “eliminate waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement within federal agencies.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Do you think the committee’s aims are entirely destructive? Or are there areas where you think it could be successful in finding unnecessary spending?

Look, I would welcome a conversation on government efficiency. But I have zero confidence that Marjorie Taylor Greene or the Republicans on this committee are interested in that. They’ve been pretty clear in what they want to do: roll back the social-safety net. They’re talking about how to make Medicare work better — we know what that means, it means making Medicare provide less benefits to people. They’ve said they flat-out want to eliminate the federal government’s role in public education.

It sounds like what you’re saying is that ‘government efficiency’ is a guise for broader political aims. Is that fair?

That’s right. This committee is their way of trying to essentially forever damage our institutions and take away benefits from hard-working Americans. They are using terms like ‘government efficiency,’ which basically means eliminating departments and eliminating services, especially for working-class people.

A handful of Democrats — California Rep. Ro Khanna comes to mind — have talked about finding a way to work with Musk on spending that Democrats consider wasteful. Do you think that’s the right approach?

I think we need to be very honest about [Musk’s] intentions. You just have to read his social media platform to see what he wants to do. He wants to cut trillions of dollars from the federal government. There’s no way of doing that without essentially changing the way we deliver Social Security benefits to the public. There’s no way of doing that without eliminating or reducing benefits for veterans. We should be very clear that we should not be giving the reins to benefits for working-class people over to the richest man on the planet. I think it is insane to start with the premise that we’re going to work with Elon Musk, Marjorie Taylor Greene and, quite frankly, Donald Trump on their scheme to remake the federal government.

Californians pay a disproportionate share of the federal government’s revenue relative to the benefits the state receives …

Well, the most. We’re essentially giving more to the federal government than taking back — dramatically more. Yet, we have the most to lose as it relates to our public school students, our veterans and so much more.

Where does California stand to lose the most?

People are asleep at the wheel in understanding the threat to public education that we’re about to face over the next four years. I don’t think people understand how dependent schools are — especially K-12, but also community colleges and universities — on federal funds. When it comes to helping the most vulnerable students, it’s almost completely federally funded. This worldview that you take care of your own kid … does not take into consideration the needs so many kids and families have.