In March 2025 Barr told a Commerce Lexington luncheon that Musk had assured him 'face to face' that University of Kentucky research was safe and there'd be no broad federal workforce cuts. UK was already facing a $40 million hit, and 317,000 federal workers were gone by year's end.
Bean and Pete Sessions launched the House DOGE Caucus in November 2024 calling the national debt a wakeup call. Twenty months later the debt is $3.9 trillion higher, the caucus has stopped meeting, DOGE itself expired, and Bean's plan to revive it is unused office space.
In February 2025 he told Ohio business leaders Trump's executive orders were 'getting out of control.' Within a day his office said he was 'mischaracterized.' Four months later he voted to let the president cancel $9.4 billion Congress had already approved.
He said it on a Republican Study Committee golf podcast during Masters Week. He sits on the DOGE subcommittee — the body that was supposed to be watching DOGE, not cheering for it.
Tennessee is losing an estimated $7 billion from TennCare and has nine rural hospitals at risk. Burchett's DOGE subcommittee spent July 21 on Smithsonian exhibits, with witnesses from the Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College.
He represents the district where more than half of Alabama's federal workers work. He told them Space Command and the Iron Dome would make up for whatever DOGE took. Then 279 senior Marshall employees were listed to go.
DOGE fired all 10 federal predator-control workers in Oklahoma and 15 of 61 scientists at the El Reno research station. Frank Lucas got them their jobs back — then went to a breakfast in Washington and praised the program that fired them.
Three days into the shutdown he went on public radio and asked the president to cut up to 200,000 jobs. A week later the firings started. And back in 2019 he was one of only seven members of Congress to vote against guaranteeing federal workers their back pay.
In February 2025, with DOGE dismantling federal agencies, Alabama's most senior House Republican publicly invited Elon Musk to take on the USPS — the agency rural north Alabama depends on most.