Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) struggled to explain how the billionaire face of the Department of Government Efficiency verifies that his recommended cuts actually came from government waste, fraud, or abuse.
During a Thursday interview on C-SPAN, host Pedro Echevarria noted that Burchett and other DOGE subcommittee members recently met with Elon Musk.
"If he says the things that DOGE has found and the savings they found, how do you verify that other than the fact that it's the word of Elon Musk?" the host wondered.
"They document it," Burchett replied. "There is a, um, paper trail and a computer. It's computer-generated. I have a 17-year-old daughter that shows me how stupid I am with my computer every day."
"But he had another gentleman there with him who verified everything that he said," he insisted.
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Burchett then veered into recalling how Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) had appointed him to sit on the DOGE subcommittee.
"And we are actually delving into all that, and I don't want to disclose too much of it because that means that most of the time that those folks will try to close up that paper trail," he claimed. "But it's very well documented, and I'm very confident in what's going on."
The lawmaker also accused the government of paying Social Security benefits to people "that were even older than our country."
"You have to wonder, is that just a computer glitch?" he suggested. "So there's quite a lot there, and I think my biggest fear is that we can stay focused. There's just so much corruption, and it goes so deep."
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Burchett said he told President Donald Trump that "the war pimps" in Congress would try to redirect any savings into Pentagon spending.
"They're wanting to soak it up at the Pentagon with some new weapons defense system, and a lot of these things, as soon as they come off the production line, are mothballed," he remarked.
Watch the video below from C-SPAN.
