The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is “not going to get railroaded by lobbyists,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said during an interview Tuesday on Breitbart News Daily.
When asked by host Mike Slater if lobbyists could ruin the efforts of DOGE, Blackburn said she does not believe that will be the case at all.
“No, it’s not going to get railroaded by lobbyists. And I find it very interesting that so many companies are now raising their hand and saying, ‘Hey, we want to work with you on this,’ because they’re really tired of the overreach, of compliance and the excessive cost of compliance,” she said before delving into her DOGE Act.
She described it as a “compilation of bills” covering items they have discussed for over a decade.
“It is across-the-board spending cuts, one, two, and five percent across-the-board spending cuts on everything except law enforcement and national security. And you know, when you look — and I know people know of the one percent cut as the penny plan. Anybody can save a penny out of $1, and they’re lying to you if they say they can’t,” Blackburn said.
“Another of my bills is freezing federal hiring and salaries on day one. And what this would do is put a cap on what the federal government could pay and what they — who they could hire. And we have attrition in retirements, about 80,000 people a year in the federal government. So this would give us the opportunity to kind of cap that and then start to work those numbers down,” the senator explained, noting that her legislation would also do a study on moving non-defense federal agencies “out of D.C. and putting them across the country.”
“I also have a return-to-work and a merit-based promotion policy so you’re not paid more just because you’ve been there longer. You are paid for serving the American people well. This is something that needs to be done with the federal government. If we had policies like that, the Veterans Affairs Department, the VA would not have a case backlog for benefits in health care of a million cases. So it is time for us to do these things. They’re common sense. They’re things the American people want to see done, and it is time for us to move forward on this,” she added.
When asked about lobbyists threats against these moves, Blackburn said they have “thousands of whistleblowers over the — across the country that are now saying, ‘You need to look here because this is money being wasted,’ or ‘You need to look here because this is money being wasted and you need to do this.'”
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“You know, only six percent of the federal employees are working in the office five days a week. You know that the Pentagon has failed the last seven annual audits. Right now they cannot find, pardon me, $824 billion, and I tell you right now, Pete Hegseth will get in there and he’ll say, ‘You’re not getting up from that desk until we find this money.’ We’ve got to figure out where these dollars are, how this is being spent,” she added.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.