Republican rep reveals why DOGE was a 'waste of time' — and delivers warning shot to Social Security

One Republican in the House of Representatives is now openly criticizing Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

On Monday, Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) told CNN host Dana Bash that he felt DOGE was a doomed effort as it didn't go far enough in cutting government spending. Joyce argued that DOGE's execution was flawed in that it didn't allow input from the public on how voters felt the national debt could best be reduced, and added that if it were up to him, DOGE would have focused on earned benefits programs that constitute the bulk of "mandatory" (versus discretionary) spending.

"DOGE would have been much better served if they would have taken on the true drivers of our mandatory debt. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid," Joyce said.

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Bash reminded Joyce that President Donald Trump repeatedly promised voters that he would leave those programs alone. The Ohio Republican then responded that those cuts could still have been made had DOGE "take[n] the time to explain to the American people" why it was recommending cutting earned benefits.

"We didn't do that. So I think that was sort of a waste of time," Joyce said. "Because we're lying to the youth of our country if we're telling them we're collecting Social Security and it's gonna be there for them."

However, despite Joyce's characterization of DOGE as being too gun-shy about cutting Americans' earned benefits, it's worth noting that Musk himself was vocal about his goal of cutting Social Security to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. During a March interview with Fox Business, Musk insisted without evidence that there was at least $500 billion worth of Social Security fraud per year that he intended to cut.

"That's the big one to eliminate," Musk told host Larry Kudlow. "That's, sort of, half trillion, six or seven hundred billion a year."

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Watch the clip of Joyce's remarks below, or by clicking this link.