With a Friday deadline to fund the government looming and Republican lawmakers at loggerheads over House Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposed stopgap spending bill, the conservative House Freedom Caucus is touting a plan to slash federal spending that conveniently leaves the bloated Pentagon budget untouched.
On Wednesday night, the House Freedom Caucus lampooned Johnson’s bill in a post on X, calling it a “Cramnibus” and enumerating demands that include a vote on the Disaster Offset and Government Efficiency Act, or DOGE Act: a piece of legislation introduced Tuesday evening by Republican Representative Chip Roy of Texas.
The DOGE Act would cut nondefense discretionary spending—which, per the Congressional Budget Office, “funds an array of federal activities in areas such as education, transportation, income security, veterans’ health care, and homeland security”—by roughly $114 billion, from just over $710 to $597 billion.
Stephen Semler, a policy analyst and co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, posted that the proposed DOGE Act would shrink these necessary programs, but curiously “reduces Pentagon spending by $0.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Roy appeared on Fox to criticize Johnson’s spending bill, which he said was too expensive.
“How is that a signal to the world that we’ve pulled our financial thing together as a country? It’s not,” Roy said, before promoting the DOGE Act as the solution. “We’ve offered all sorts of opportunities,” he added. “For example, we have a bill that I filed yesterday—it’s called the DOGE Act—that would cut nondefense spending by 13 percent to pre-Covid levels. That’s $113 billion. That would pay for all of this. We just wanted to get a vote on that.”
Responding to the DOGE Act, the antiwar organization Code Pink wrote on X, “Republicans are suddenly interested in ‘government efficiency,’ but they refuse to touch the Pentagon budget. The Pentagon is the ONLY government agency that has never passed an audit and can’t account for TRILLIONS in public resources.”
