House Speaker Mike Johnson said House Republicans "want to be willing partners" in assisting the Department of Government Efficiency after Elon Musk said the DOGE intends to cut 75 percent of all federal agencies.
“We certainly hope” to cut the number of federal agencies from 428 to 99, as Musk has vowed, Johnson told Fox News host Martha MacCallum in an interview Wednesday night.
Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the duo President-elect Donald Trump chose to head up DOGE, have already laid out their plans. Along with a substantial reduction in the number of federal agencies, they also are identifying “thousands” of regulations for Trump to eliminate.
“We have the opportunity to go in and really take back control from the administrative state,” Johnson told MacCallum.
Government agencies, Johnson said, have "for a long time been acting as judge, jury and executioner on the rules that they make on industries and small business owners and the rest. We have the ingredients, we have the conditions right now to actually be able to make really dramatic change.”
Johnson said dismantling the agencies will be part of “the playbook to unleash and unroll in January.”
Johnson added on X on Wednesday night: “Under President Trump, we will take a blowtorch to the administrative state and reduce the size and scope of government,”
He conceded in the Fox interview: “We've got to build consensus to have the votes to do that. Where Congress is involved, that’s where it takes the hard work of legislating and getting everybody on the same page.”
But Johnson emphasized that some of the work can be accomplished by executive order. Trump “has a broad authority to do a lot of that,” he noted.
The speaker said he aims to cut all federal funding for PBS and Planned Parenthood.
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