Elon Musk put on notice that his pet program could become a 'cheap public-relations stunt'

A former Republican lawmaker warned Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, must go "full founders mode" — or risk being remembered as a "cheap public-relations stunt."

Former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), who resigned in April, made his case in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday that DOGE — tasked with slashing trillions from the federal government budget — needs to focus on more than just executive orders. Otherwise, he said, "it will pump water out of the swamp only to deposit it back in."

"DOGE will be remembered as a cheap public-relations stunt," he added.

Instead, they ought to focus on reforming Congress’s budget process, said Gallagher, and do so the way the tech companies attack problems — going "full 'founders mode,' Silicon Valley slang for a maniacal effort to fix the hardest problems at every level of an organization," he said.

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This means reverting Congress to the "original vision" of Article I powers, said Gallagher, noting his old chamber has regularly failed to pass a budget since the late '90s — forcing more than 130 stopgap measures and leading to multiple government shutdowns.

Gallagher advocated for two bills to help address the problem: the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act and the Trust Act.

The former aims to prevent government shutdowns by implementing an automatic continuing resolution when Congress fails to pass full-year spending bills by the start of the fiscal year.

The act requires that "if appropriations work is not done on time, all Members of Congress must stay in Washington, DC, and work until the spending bills are completed."

The Trust Act, meanwhile, purports to establish a process for improving the solvency and operation of critical social programs, including Social Security, Medicare, and federal highway programs.

"Unlike other proposals to tackle entitlement spending, the bill would create discrete rescue committees for each of the federal trust funds that are at risk of insolvency—Social Security, Medicare Part A and highways," noted Gallagher, adding that each committee could then bring its solutions to chamber floors for a vote — and congressional leaders can't kill them "merely to shield members from making tough votes."

"If DOGE harnesses the American people’s dissatisfaction with Washington, lays out a bold package of congressional reforms and uses Mr. Musk’s unique platform to push legislators to vote on that agenda, we could realize the DOGE vision of 'a federal government that would make our founders proud,'" Gallagher concluded.