WASHINGTON — As Elon Musk hits the exit from the Trump administration, the top Democrat on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) DOGE — Delivering Government Efficiency — Subcommittee is laughing off the billionaire as a “fraud” and “poser” who squandered his shot to streamline government.
“Turned out that literally everything Elon Musk said on TV was just bullsh—t,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), the ranking member on the DOGE panel, told Raw Story in an exclusive interview at the U.S. Capitol.
Stansbury also divulged secrets about her GOP counterpart, including a recent moment during a particularly tempestuous hearing when she felt the need to slide Greene a snack.
“I tried to slip her some Cheez-Its because I was like, ‘Maybe she's hangry?’” Stansbury said.
While she’s only on her third term in the House, Stansbury knows the ways of Washington from her time as a staffer on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under President Barack Obama.
At OMB, Stransbury worked for the United States Digital Service — the federal technology unit Musk and President Donald Trump upended and renamed the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
After a federal judge granted Musk and his secretive DOGE team access to sensitive Treasury Department data this week, Stansbury is sounding the alarm, warning that as Musk leaves town, he’s likely taking Americans’ personal data with him.
Raw Story’s interview with Stansbury has been edited for length and clarity.
RS: How has it been for you sitting across from MTG on the DOGE subcommittee?
MS: “Uneventful. Well, I say that … She's actually fairly collegial to me. When I first decided to take this on, I went and met with her in her office with the committee staff, and it was southern hospitality. She was very nice, very warm and we agreed that we’d tried to do bipartisan stuff, and then it devolved into madness very quickly.
“We had a crazy hearing at the start of May where they were attacking trans athletes, and she was just so out of control. Later — that was the week she announced she wasn't running for Senate — I knew something was wrong with her that day, because she was acting so stressed out.”
RS: Interesting.
MS: “Even halfway through that hearing, I tried to slip her some Cheez-Its because I was like, ‘Maybe she's hangry?’ I'm like, ‘I don't know why she's acting this way.’
“The thing that's interesting about her, too, that I noticed, is that the media is so obsessed with her, it's like she could sneeze and it'd be front page news. Anything she does generates news.”
RS: Sometimes I let her walk past without interviewing her, just so she feels what it’s like to not have the spotlight on her.
MS: “I think the biggest takeaway is that I was skeptical that that committee was going to actually do real stuff in the beginning, and it devolved and unwound so catastrophically, so quickly. That last hearing on trans athletes was such a disaster for them. I still see Heritage Foundation affiliates trying to plant stories in the media and I’m like, ‘You guys f—d up. Sorry. You can't redeem yourselves.’”
RS: GOP leaders gave her the subcommittee because they wanted to placate her, right?
MS: “That I don't know … I could not tell you the inner workings of the Republican conference. It's an interesting ecosystem. In fact, right after the committee got created, I had a Republican member come to me on the floor and say, ‘Did you know that Marjorie didn't put any women on the committee?’ And I'm like, ‘Okay.’ There's a lot of dysfunction there.”
RS: Is it all men on there?
MS: “It is. I mean, reportedly, [House Oversight Committee Chair James] Comer told me this, she wanted the best members so she handpicked the seven men she wanted …
“At the beginning, I think they honestly all bought the hype of Elon Musk. I think they thought, like, ‘Oh, this guy is a tech guy, and he's so smart and he made all this money so he must be super smart.’ And the dude's just a bullsh—ter. He had no idea what he was doing. And also, apparently he's an as—hole too, so he's very difficult to work with. And then he started doing stuff that pissed off the cabinet secretaries and apparently all the West Wing people didn't like him, but he's a major donor so they couldn't push him out.”
RS: Do you communicate with him? MTG told me she communicates with him some.
MS: “The only communication I ever had from him is that he tweeted at me relentlessly for 24 hours, and I literally said to him on national television, ‘If you'd like to engage, you can come into our committee under oath.’”
RS: Yeah?
MS: “He never did.”
RS: Do you think Musk stepping out of the Trump White House and pulling back from political spending will change the dynamics of the DOGE subcommittee?
MS: “I've been around this place a long time, from when I was a staffer. People will parse their words, and what I heard Musk say was that he was going to do less donations. Does that mean he's gonna do less political activity? I don't think so. I think he stole that data, and I think he's gonna use it for his own fundraising.”
RS: Americans' private data?
MS: “Yes. Why wouldn't he? This is the thing, it's all indefensible. They're drunk on power right now. But this is one of their cardinal sins because it will come back and bite them, and it's going to bite them hard because they overplayed their hand.”
RS: With Musk on his way out, is that going to change the dynamics? Have you felt his presence in the subcommittee or is it MTG’s show?
MS: “The very first hearing was, if you accept their premise of the case, a legitimate hearing. They were like, ‘Let's look at improper payments in the Medicaid system.’ But now it's, like, completely decoupled, right? What they're doing to Medicaid has nothing to do with what they claimed they were gonna do, and it turned out that literally everything Elon Musk said on TV was just bullsh—t.”
RS: Does that make you feel like a pawn? Or are you and the other five Democrats — three men, two women — doing important work?
MS: “I'm a former OMB employee. I knew [Musk] was a fraud from the second I laid eyes on him. When he stood up that fake-a— Twitter account to show his receipts, I was like, ‘Do you know how to use Excel?’ For real, because that's how we put together budget spreadsheets and none of this adds up.
“I'm genuinely interested in making the government work better. My background is in the sciences and I'm really into big data. I actually helped stand up the U.S. digital program that DOGE took over. I was interested from its inception, and I helped set it up when I was at OMB.”
RS: Does it hurt to see DOGE upend it and claim it?
MS: “No. Again, I think they were so stupid — and by they, I would pin this on just the administration in general. Had they just spent six to nine months putting together a concrete plan, identifying what they wanted to end, how they wanted to restructure these agencies, and then brought it to Congress, they have a majority, they could have done it legally. But it was sloppy, stupid, uncoordinated and ineffective.”
RS: Musk admitted with a shrug on live TV they accidentally erased Ebola research funding!
MS: “Elon Musk's fall from grace publicly with the Republicans was after he tried to buy that Wisconsin judicial race. I think their bravado was that they could break everything and then buy their way out of it and then people start marching in the streets and they're like, ‘Oh, oops, I guess we broke it.’
“I think the big challenge will be what gets rebuilt and how. For me, again, because I am interested in the modernization of government coordination, I think that they've been so norm-breaking and destroyed so much, whereas the bureaucracy is incremental, right? Like, Congress passes a law to fix a problem. Then they pass another law to fix a different problem, and so the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts.
“It's just a bunch of random sh— that got tied together, and so does it create a new space to kind of wholesale rethink things in a modern way? I actually think it does, if we can ever find the time away from this insanity to do that.”
RS: That's where bringing AI and tech and streamlining government would come in?
MS: “Yes!”
RS: But it doesn't seem like they've done that — or have they, just in the background?
MS: “No. This is where I'm like, ‘They're idiots. Literally.’ I saw an interview where Musk was going on and on and on about how his DOGE people were at the Internal Revenue Service and, ‘They didn't even have the search button in a standardized location.’ It was like April 5, and he was like, ‘We couldn't even get an IT person to move a button on the web page.’
“I'm like, ‘No sh–t Sherlock, it's tax season. You think they're gonna f—k with the federal IRS website as people are filing their taxes?’ That's just dumb.”
RS: So it was just that common sense was lacking?
MS: “Yeah. That's his idea of government efficiency. And so the thing to me that makes Elon Musk such a poser, he comes out of the tech bro world and those guys, what do they do? They figure out how to monetize a customer experience through mostly an app interface, right?”
RS: Yeah?
MS: “That's what he's selling. He's selling you an experience. And so, yeah, they could have just come in, which is actually what OMB’s digital service department was designed to do, to deal with the user interface. But he thought he was gonna transform it the way he did Tesla, right? Total overhaul and then put all the pieces back together, because he didn't understand the law and how the government worked and its vital functions.”
RS: Right.
MS: “I think if he had stuck to user interfaces and improving government websites, he probably could have built some cool stuff. But he did not. Instead, he broke everything, and then became the most unpopular modern political figure and got his feelings hurt.”
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