Top Oversight Democrat says he’s open to collaborate with the DOGE

That may make for strange bedfellows. But the lawmaker — who recently beat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to be the committee’s ranking member — has long focused on the government’s often-aged technology, a shared interest for both Ramaswamy and Musk. In recent months, Musk has posted about federal IT several times, referencing 2023 congressional testimony on legacy tech from the Government Accountability Office.

“By the way, that was the GAO report I requested,” Connolly pointed out during an interview with Nextgov/FCW. The report also lists former representatives Elijah Cummings, Mark Meadows, Will Hurd and current Reps. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, as requesters.

Connolly said he hasn’t spoken with anyone at the DOGE, but, asked if he was open to working with the advisory effort at all on federal tech issues, he said, “if we can find common ground, I’m always interested.”

Still — “you may know how to make an electric vehicle, but you got a lot to learn about how you're going to remake the federal government,” Connolly said of Musk. “And we can help in that education, or we can end up being at hammer and tong because he's insisting on something that would be injurious to the American people.”

Conolly said the learning curve for Musk and Ramaswamy to get an understanding of federal operations is likely to be “very steep.”

“Elon Musk, for example, has made statements like, we're going to cut $2 trillion in federal spending. No, we're not. That evidences a lack of understanding of the nature of the federal budget, for one thing, how it works and how big it is. You'd be essentially eliminating the federal government itself,” he said, noting that they will have to look at both the revenue and expenditure sides of the ledger to achieve cost savings.

Musk recently said that cutting $2 trillion is likely only a “best case outcome,” with half of that being more realistic.

Connolly may have some new opportunities for collaboration with the DOGE at House Oversight, which is getting a new DOGE subcommittee led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. 

Other Democrats have mocked the subcommittee — established by House Republicans to work on similar initiatives as the advisory effort — but Connolly said that “no matter what, I certainly will be very active in the work of that subcommittee, either, as I said, ex officio, or as a potential member.”

Connolly’s biggest priorities as the ranking member of the larger oversight committee “[remain] to be seen,” said the lawmaker. 

But “obviously Trump has set an agenda for himself that's going to be very much front and center part of our agenda, whether we like it or not,” Connolly continued, noting budget reconciliation, Schedule F, federal workforce relocation, federal unions and waste fraud and abuse in government as parts of that agenda. Connolly also wants to “try to look at legislating a clearer mission for Secret Service” in the wake of assassination attempts on president-elect Donald Trump last year.

Unlike some more contentious issues, the technology underpinning the work of government agencies has often been a bipartisan point of concern and collaboration for lawmakers, albeit not a sexy one getting a ton of political attention on Capitol Hill.

There’s reason for lawmakers to be concerned. As Connolly pointed out, in that report, GAO found a $337 million annual price tag for the government’s ten legacy IT systems most in need of an update, not to mention the cybersecurity risks that come from relying on such old technology.

“My interest in how we manage and modernize federal IT remains a top priority of mine, and it will be elevated given my new role. So it's going to be an issue, no question, that I hope will be elevated to full committee status as we move forward,” said Connolly. “It is one of those issues, historically, that has not divided us on partisan lines... And I think it's a worthwhile endeavor.”

Among the work Connolly has done on federal IT, oversight on the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act, or FITARA, in the form of a biannual scorecard has been central since 2015. GAO has estimated that the law has saved about $31.4 billion. In recent years, the committee has abandoned hearings on the scorecard — something Connolly has said is due to a lack of Republican support, although he told Nextgov/FCW that he recently had a “very productive meeting” with Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. — the chairman of the committee — who was “very receptive to having full committee hearings on the scorecard.”

Ramaswamy has also cited an interest in federal IT as a place for the DOGE to reap cost savings, calling federal IT “low-hanging fruit.”

“When he says, low hanging fruit — where you been? We've been doing this for a while now, and there's plenty more to do… The right thing to focus on is retiring legacy systems. There are cost savings to be had,” Connolly said, calling GAO work a good place to start for both tech and broader, bipartisan good government work. 

An open question still remains on how work to modernize the government’s tech squares with the cost cutting intentions of the DOGE. Seeing cost savings from modernization aren’t necessarily guaranteed or immediate, and modernization takes up-front investment.

“This is an area where, if you want to do something about it, you've got to also invest in it, right?” said Connolly. “We've got mechanisms for doing that — the MGT Act, which created the [Technology Modernization Fund], but Congress hasn't funded it. Are Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk and Donald Trump willing to put some resources into that so we can retire these legacy systems?”