Senate Department of Government Efficiency Caucus (DOGE) founder and chairman Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) challenged President Donald Trump and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought to take full advantage of the government shutdown and take actions that will save taxpayers as much as $2 trillion.

“While Senator [Chuck] Schumer, House Minority Leader [Hakeem] Jeffries and congressional Democrats have decided shutting down the federal government over pipe-dream political priorities is productive, in practice, they are providing the Trump administration an amazing opportunity to save taxpayers from footing a $400 million daily bill by eliminating ‘non-essential’ federal workers, trimming wasteful federal programs, and taking critical steps in curtailing Washington’s out-of-control spending that put our nation $37 trillion in debt,” Ernst wrote in an eight-page October 3 letter to Vought.

“There’s no better symbol of Washington’s wasteful spending than paying non-essential bureaucrats $400 million a day not to work. As of today, the bill to provide ‘do nothing pay’ for federal employees furloughed by Schumer’s shutdown is $1.2 billion,” Ernst told Vought.

The Iowa Republican who is not seeking re-election in 2026 was referring to the approximately 750,000 federal workers who go on unpaid furlough during a government shutdown because they are not essential to the daily functioning of official business.

The federal government closed its doors October 1 after Congress was unable to agree on a continuing resolution (CR) that would have kept offices open for seven weeks while Capitol Hill negotiators worked to finish nine major appropriation bills for Fiscal Year 2026.

The House of Representatives passed the CR before the shutdown despite strenuous objections from Democrats. The Senate, however, requires 60 votes for spending measures to be approved, and only three of the needed eight Democrats voted with Republicans as the CR has failed on five floor votes.

The previous government shutdown was in 2018 and lasted five weeks.

Ernst’s eight-page letter to Vought included 18 examples of waste, fraud, and abuse that she believes the Chief Executive and Vought, who is the president’s key day-to-day federal manager, should seek to eliminate. First on the Ernst list is the $65.6 billion recently identified by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) in funds appropriated by Congress to fight the COVID-19 pandemic that were never spent.

Her second example was highlighted by OMB in a technical summary of Trump’s proposed 2026 budget revisions and focused $1.6 trillion Congress appropriated for no specific purpose. “With trillions of dollars stashed away in secret slush funds, why is Washington borrowing another dime? These accounts should be thoroughly scrubbed, with unnecessary funds canceled,” Ernst told Vought.

A third example from the Ernst list was a $40 billion waste and fraud problem uncovered by the Senate DOGE Caucus in which it was found that “federal employees leaving their job, [often] without having their charge cards and accounts tied to official duties properly deactivated and closed.” The Senate DOGE Caucus identified more than 11,000 transactions on such federal workers government charge cards that were used in casinos, night clubs, and bars.

“Deactivating these accounts and declining these absurd payments is long overdue. We must ensure when federal employees stop working, associated government-issued credit cards do, too,” Ernst said in her letter.

Wasteful Pentagon spending did not escape Ernst’s notice, as she reminded Vought that the Department of War (DOW) has not passed an audit and continues multiple practices such as over-paying for spare parts, including “a nearly 8,000 percent off-the-shelf mark-up for a soap dispenser and $1,220 for a coffee cup.”

And Ernst wondered why the federal workforce’s project managers too often ignore sound common sense business management practices.

“For every $1 billion Washington spends, $102 million is wasted as projects go over budget, are delayed, or fail to deliver. Implementing the most basic management systems could have saved taxpayers $688.5 billion from the $6.75 trillion the federal government spent this past year.29 The fix is straightforward: require every project to have clear objectives and measurable benchmarks, just as any responsible business would,” Ernst wrote.

A spokesman for Vought has been asked for comment by The Washington Stand.