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Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, and CNN host Pamela Brown got into a heated exchange over the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk’s inquiries into government spending on Thursday. 

“What specifically is Elon Musk is actually doing within the federal government right now with his tech staffers in the name of DOGE?,” Brown started off the exchange by asking the GOP lawmaker. 

Gill responded by pointing out that the work DOGE is doing, at the behest of President Donald Trump, was mandated by the American people when a majority voted for him in the 2024 election. 

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“Well, the American people delivered President Trump a very clear mandate to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. And, you know, let me tell you, we have been talking about bringing Elon Musk in for months and months and months now. I think my colleagues on the other side of the aisle like to act as if this is something novel, as if this is something that‘s unexpected. This is part of the Trump mandate. Getting rid of wasteful spending,” he said. 

Back in November, Trump said that Musk, through DOGE, will work to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”

The CNN anchor continued to press Gill on the specifics of what Musk and his staffers are working on, while also questioning what government systems they have access to and what they plan on doing with the confidential data they are collecting.

“Elon Musk and his team are not acting as outside advisors. They are acting as employees of the relevant federal agencies. They have security clearances. They‘re complying with applicable federal laws,” he responded. “So they’re doing this entirely above board.”

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He also pointed to some example of spending that he considers wasteful that DOGE has uncovered .

“You saw a great example of this with what Elon Musk has been doing with USAID, for instance. He uncovered that we have been sending millions of dollars for transgender activism in South America, millions of dollars for DEI scholarships in Burma. These are things that the American people largely didn‘t know about until now, and we’re going after them,” Gill said.

Brown then moved onto a different concern she had. House Republicans blocking a subpoena against Musk on Wednesday.

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Gill labeled the subpoena “political theatrics,” and questioned why Democrats didn’t invite Musk to the Oversight Committee’s hearing yesterday.

“They could have invited Elon Musk. Then, once the committee began, they demanded that chairman Comer invite Elon Musk whenever they could have done it to begin with. And then they began this partisan political game of trying to subpoena Elon Musk. This is pure theatrics. Democrats can play political games, but Republicans are focused on rooting out waste, fraud and abuse from our federal government and doing real substantive work to save American taxpayer dollars,” Gill said.

Gill also claimed that the federal government is spending “over $500 million every single year to fund state-sponsored media like NPR and PBS to promote left-wing values that are utterly antithetical to the American experience.”

“It’s journalism,” the CNN host quipped back, adding, “we can agree to disagree on that. I don’t want to get into a tit-for-tat on that.”

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Fox News Digital’s Sarah Rumpf-Whitten contributed to this report.