Lawmakers eye 'low hanging fruit' for government efficiency after first DOGE Caucus meeting
Some lawmakers in the new Congressional DOGE Caucus are eyeing a crackdown on federal agencies work-from-home policies when Republicans take over the levers of power in Washington DC next year.
The group’s name is an acronym for Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency, coinciding with the Department of Government Efficiency – also DOGE for short – a new advisory panel commissioned by President-elect Trump and led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
The caucus held its first meeting on Tuesday, which lawmakers described to Fox News Digital as largely "organizational."
DOGE Caucus co-chair Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital the room was full of interested lawmakers.
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"We had 29 sign up to come, so we met in a small conference room. But it was packed – we had over 60 members attend," Bean said.
That included three Democrats – Reps. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., Val Hoyle, D-Ore., and the first Democrat to join the DOGE Caucus, Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla.
Documents given to attendees and shared with Fox News Digital encouraged lawmakers to think of what kind of DOGE goals would be "worthwhile lifts," "quick wins," "lower priority," and "low-hanging fruit" and other ways to organize and prioritize initiatives.
Asked about what some "low-hanging fruit" for the panel would be, Bean said, "People going back to work."
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"We have a problem," Bean said. "[Federal workers] do a large amount of work from home. Which, that’s a debate – whether or not they’re productive working from home. But if they are working from home, we have between a 6 and 15% occupancy of billions of square foot of commercial buildings that we are spending billions on to upkeep and whatnot. Do we still need that much space if people aren’t using their offices?"
That was echoed by Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Texas, who also attended the meeting.
"You know, when you take out security, you’ve got one percent of the federal government workers who are going in to work on a regular basis, and we’re paying for 100% of them all to have office space," Van Duyne said. "There’s lots of low hanging fruit. I just hope we can identify what those are."
Bean also dismissed accusations from critics of Musk and Ramamswamy’s DOGE push that it was a way for Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits
"That is not the intent," Bean emphasized. "It is not the intent [to be] cutting benefits, of either health or [veterans] or Social Security. But those benefits…have limited shelf life, unless we make reductions elsewhere. So the purpose is not to cut those things, but to safeguard them."
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Other lawmakers who attended said they came away enthusiastic about the group’s cost-cutting and efficiency goals.
"It was a good introductory meeting of the caucus, kind of challenging us all to think about our expectations and how we can help, you know, take ideas and move them in to bill form and work through the normal committee process to do that," Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-N.Y., said.
"I’ve even gotten a lot of ideas from constituents…I think this is a really great grassroots effort."
House GOP Conference Vice Chair Blake Moore, R-Utah, another DOGE Caucus co-chair alongside Bean and Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said "there’s a billion and a half ideas, and we need to make it so it’s actually actionable for Vivek and Elon."
Both Bean and Moore indicated that the next steps for the caucus would be to split up into working groups targeting various aspects of DOGE’s mission.
The next caucus meeting is expected in January, Bean said.