US Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Republican of Georgia, speaks during a campaign rally for former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at Sunset Park in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 9, 2024. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
When she’s not claiming that her opposition controls the weather or accusing her own party of covering up sexual assault, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is gearing up to work in President-elect Donald Trump‘s second term, and she has some novel ideas about bringing down the deficit.
Greene has been tapped by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new House subcommittee working with the pair’s not-yet-created Department of Government Efficiency. During a stop by Fox News on Sunday, Greene gave a glimpse at the sort of line items the government-budget-slashing department would focus on.
“It’s all over,” Greene said of supposed government waste. “We’ll be looking at everything from government-funded media programs like NPR that spread nothing but Democrat propaganda…all kinds of programs that don’t help the American people.”
The statement led “defund NPR” to trend briefly on Musk-owned social media app X. In truth, NPR receives very little of its budget directly from the federal government. How exactly to calculate its funding is up for debate as money granted to local public radio stations via the government-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting is frequently used to pay for the rights to air NPR-produced national programming locally. However, the conception of NPR as an entity that only exists thanks to government largesse is false.
To hear tell from experts, it wouldn’t be the first time that the newly minted DOGE had a surface-level understanding of government programs they hoped to cut. The Center for American Progress’ Bobby Kogan told Salon earlier this week that DOGE leadership’s proposal to cut all programs whose spending authorizations had lapsed betrayed a “fundamentally superficial” understanding of how government budgets work.
‘Let’s get rid of unauthorized spending’ is the sort of thing that you might see in a Facebook meme,” Kogan said.”People have this idea of just huge and absurd amounts of government waste, and it’s just not borne out in the data.”
