A Republican congressman with a reputation for taking on Democrats as well as members of his own party is predicting some dire consequences will come from the Trump administration’s chief driver of reform.
In an interview with Forbes published on YouTube Wednesday, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett said Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will not only end up cutting spending, it could end up putting some lawmakers “in handcuffs.”
And he indicated it wasn’t only Democrats he was talking about.
“You’re probably going to see some people in Washington, and possibly some people in Congress in handcuffs over some of this stuff, because of the money and the graft,” he said.
“They think they’re slick, and … there’s no paper trail. But there’s a trail. There’s a trail for every dollar.
“And Elon Musk has got a team together, and that’s why they’re squealing the most.”
Burchett is well established as a fiscal hawk, with political enemies among Democrats, which is to be expected, but among Republicans, too.
Do you think Rep. Tim Burchett’s prediction will come true?
Describing himself in October 2023 as a “friend” of then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, he announced he was joining the effort to oust McCarthy because of McCarthy’s lack of “urgency” in dealing with the nation’s debt crisis.
The “friendship,” however, apparently wasn’t destined to last much longer, as McCarthy seemingly shoved Burchett the next month in full view of an NPR reporter on Capitol Hill.
(“I’ve got a 16-year-old daughter, she’s hit me harder, probably,” Burchett joked at the time.)
Asked who might have the most to fear from the Musk team’s findings, Burchett said federal “bureaucrats” were in line, but it wouldn’t stop there. Members of Congress with ties to non-governmental organizations that get big government funding could be looking at trouble, too, he said.
“The way they set up these NGOs is, you get a rich person to put in a million dollars in something — it has some great name — and then some bureaucrat, unelected bureaucrat, puts maybe a billion dollars in their fund, of our tax dollars.
“And then it flows in a circuitous route back to Washington, to those same politicians, to their campaigns, and possibly just straight to their back pocket, if they have a family member that works there.”
However, despite being given a chance in the interview, Burchett declined to name names.
“I have my suspicions, and it could possibly be in both parties,” he said. “I’ll leave it, I’ll let that to law enforcement.”
Earlier in the interview, Burchett said he’d asked Musk about his motivation for trying to clean up government spending, and the world’s richest man replied, “Honestly, Tim, I just saw all the corruption and people doing without.”
“And he thought about his kids — and, of course, he has a heck of a lot of kids — and where this country was going for them” Burchett said. “And he wanted to change the course of it. And I think he’s done it.”
And Burchett clearly had no sympathy for what he called “the people that are squealing the loudest.”
“You’d think they’d want to get rid of the waste and abuse so that they can free up the money to give to those people that are deserving of it, not the other way around,” he said.
“And unfortunately, that’s what they’re doing.”
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