As Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-leads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill Thursday, the entrepreneurs and other experts are laying out numerous ways to cut wasteful spending and streamline government operations.

DOGE is an initiative announced by President-elect Donald Trump in November whose mission will be to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” The work of the program is scheduled to conclude on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence.

In recent weeks, DOGE has alluded to numerous federal expenditures that could be targeted, including $150 billion spent on illegal immigrants, $1.8 billion that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent on studying racism, $824 billion that the Pentagon “can’t fully account for,” $516 billion in fiscal year 2024 for “programs whose authorizations previously expired under federal law” including “nearly $320 billion of that $516 billion [which] expired more a decade ago,” $100 billion “in estimated improper payments” that were made “in the Medicare and Medicaid programs in Fiscal Year 2023,” and more.

DOGE further observed that the last federal government budget surplus occurred in 2001, with massive deficits occurring every year since. In fiscal year 2023, “the U.S. Government spent $6.16 trillion while only bringing in $4.47 trillion,” DOGE pointed out. “This trend must be reversed, and we must balance the budget.”

On Thursday, Musk and Ramaswamy met with the Senate’s DOGE Caucus and discussed a “60-page cost-cutting proposal.” Senators came out of the meeting with positive impressions without revealing specifics. “I’m very impressed with what Elon and Vivek want to accomplish,” remarked Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.). “It showed a lot of us are on the same page,” added Senator Ted Budd (R-N.C.). “We need to make government serve people again.” Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) further revealed that DOGE has come up with “hundreds of ideas” to achieve a “balanced budget.” “It was just a great conversation,” he exclaimed.

House DOGE Caucus co-chair Pete Sessions (R-Texas) was equally optimistic about Musk and Ramaswamy’s efforts with the new initiative.

“They see where the mismanagement of financial data, of the size of government, of the inefficiency is [an] immediate threat to the greatest nation in the world, and they want to come and add not just their ideas, but their hard work and their good name to this effort,” he told Tony Perkins on Thursday’s edition of “Washington Watch.” “…[W]e were gathering together House members, Senate members, Republicans, and might I add that the DOGE caucus in the House now has three Democrats who have joined with us, who see that government efficiency must be a priority for Congress.”

Sessions went on to point out that while Congress is the ultimate arbiter of how the federal budget is spent, the efforts of DOGE can highlight if that money actually goes toward its intended purpose.

“[W]e may come to an agreement to appropriate billions or trillions of dollars, but it goes into a bureaucracy that is wholly incapable of effective delivery to the United States, to the American people,” he contended. “An example of that is … the largest government building in Washington, D.C. is the Ronald Reagan Building. And yet, in testimony before the subcommittee of which I am the chairman of, the discussions were up to 60% of the employees in that building, not military and not law enforcement, went [there] less than one day a week. … [T]hese government jobs are not solo practices. They are working with people, looking at databases, working at problems, working across agencies. That’s an example of the need that we have to make sure that things work in the congressional district.”

Reports indicate that the issue of unoccupied government buildings is astonishingly widespread. A Daily Wire report on Thursday noted that “[o]nly 6% of federal employees work from an office full-time, and a third are fully remote.” Overall, the current occupancy rate of government buildings is 12%, but the government still spends $16 billion per year to keep them operational. Recently, the Social Security Administration headquarters underwent a $120 million renovation, even though the building is 91% unused.

In addition, numerous government workers were found to be not working at all from their remote jobs, including one woman who held “two six-figure government jobs at the same time, with each employer thinking she was working full-time,” an “SSA employee [who] ran a personal home inspection business for three years while supposedly doing his job from home, having his mother occasionally send emails from his computer,” and a Veterans Affairs manager posting “a photo online showing he was ‘working’ from a bubble bath.”

Sessions related a further example of how government inefficiency is affecting his home state of Texas. “I represent Texas’s 17th district. Four years ago, we received money from FEMA [for] combating wildfires with a fire station … that would be put up … to fight wherever the wildfire was in central Texas. And it was some $478,000. We have yet to even pitch an inch of dirt at this … three years later. Nothing has happened and prices have risen 40%.”

“So the inefficiency of government, the rules and regulations, the way that they are placed, in a way, we’re going to maybe rearrange that stack,” Sessions concluded. “We’re going to look at every single part of government and make it efficient.”