Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, the co-chair of the congressional Department of Government Efficiency Caucus, wants to push ahead on efforts to comb through government spending to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.
The government-slashing DOGE unit has received criticism for hoovering up sensitive government data and conducting mass firings of government employees across agencies. Billionaire Elon Musk left the effort in the spring and then had a public falling out with President Donald Trump over the tax and domestic policy bill that was signed into law in July.
Since then, some high-profile DOGE allies and associates have also departed the government, but others remain inside agencies and have even been placed within their top levels as chief information officers.
Sessions said that the work is ongoing.
“DOGE is an active component in the government. They meet on a regular basis. They are made up of professionals who have a mission,” he said Tuesday during a Politico event in response to a question about who is leading the effort. He added that he last spoke with Musk in March or April.
DOGE associates “are people who sincerely want to change a system,” said Sessions, pointing to difficulties they’ve faced with government legacy systems and “political attack[s]” on their work.
Moving forward, Sessions said he’s zeroed in on government data and fraudulent payments, referencing a 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office that estimated that the government loses between $233 and $521 billion to fraud annually, or 3% to 7% of average federal obligations.
The lawmaker called data siloes a “key question that we have to answer,” saying that “too many times, we’ve got almost a Rube Goldberg effect of trying to figure out where you get data and how you do that.”
Data and artificial intelligence can help verify people receiving benefits, including those already on the rolls, said Sessions.
“We still estimate we have a large number of people who are receiving benefits, despite what DOGE has done today,” he said, referencing “people that do not exist” and “those people who were receiving benefits are dead and gone.”
Identity theft is indeed a threat vector bad actors use to try to siphon off government money, and better data sharing and identity verification are tools that anti-fraud experts say could help the government make sure that the right people are getting benefits.
Still, DOGE’s approach of gathering up sensitive government data has been criticized and faced several lawsuits. And much of that work has been in the name of the administration’s immigration priorities, not fighting fraud.
The Social Security Administration’s former chief data officer, for example, submitted a whistleblower complaint last month outlining how DOGE employees uploaded a copy of confidential SSA information to a vulnerable cloud server, skirting laws and security controls in the process.
Some of DOGE’s claims about fraud in government systems and benefits have also turned out to be false or misleading, including the claim that SSA’s rolls are riddled with improbably old people receiving benefits.
Sessions lauded the data analytics capabilities of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, which recently got a lifeline as part of Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill,’ as a helpful tool moving forward.
He also pointed to identity verification as a fix, referencing a problem with government dollars going to “people that aren’t who they say they are.”
“We really have to get to the bottom line, who is receiving that benefit. And that was seen politically as a difficult thing to challenge someone who is receiving a government benefit,” the lawmaker said. “So this is a work in progress.”
