NewsNation host Chris Cuomo confronted Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts on Tuesday over his opposition to the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) ongoing cost-cutting endeavors.
DOGE claims on its website to have cut an estimated $65 billion in government spending, including fraud. However, Moulton argued on “CUOMO” that DOGE’s actions were not improving efficiency, prompting Cuomo to say it seemed like he was “defending the status quo” rather than pushing for real reforms.
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“DOGE is not making government more efficient. It’s making government nonexistent. It’s completely unaccountable. They can’t get out of their own way,” Moulton said. “They just had to retract their top four or five big savings because they were fraudulent on their own website. In other words, they were posting fraudulent numbers, and so this is not the way that you make the government more efficient.”
“But it makes it seem like you’re defending the status quo and not wanting to find all of the pork that people hate,” Cuomo retorted.
Moulton immediately tried to interrupt Cuomo before stammering and saying the NewsNation host’s response was “not fair,” noting that he had listed “a whole bunch of examples” of cuts he would make earlier in the segment, focusing on the Pentagon.
“There are a lot of places where I’m perfectly willing to modernize our government, to make it more efficient, to make a lot of cuts and save taxpayer money,” he added. “We should all be in favor of that.”
Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett also told radio host Charlamagne Tha God on Friday that she does not believe there is vast amounts of waste, fraud and abuse within the federal government.
“I’m not going to say that there’s a lot — I’m going to say that it does exist,” Crockett said. “I’m going to say that it exists. I don’t think that there’s a lot.”
However, the Government Accountability Office has determined that the federal government could be hemorrhaging between $233 and $521 million to fraud each year, according to its website.
Cuomo asserted on Feb. 19 that Democrats denouncing all of President Donald Trump and DOGE head Elon Musk’s actions indicates that they have not “learned” from their 2024 election losses.
“It seems like anything that Trump or Musk does, they have to condemn, and they have to condemn it on the basis of the people personally,” he said at the time. “Trump is a Nazi. Musk has apartheid roots … And to me, it just proves they haven’t learned their lesson yet, that they should be in the better idea business.”
“And they do seem like they’re defending the status quo. They’re just defending the establishment,” he continued. “And I don’t think that’s where you want to be right now. You want to be in the business of better, and they seem like they’re still in the business of painting the other side as worse.”
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