Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost had strong words regarding President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) to be run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, calling the pair “two billionaires who are cosplaying as government officials” in a Dec. 5 appearance on MSNBC.
According to The Hill, in Frost’s comments on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show, The Reid Out, he underscored that DOGE is not an official department, despite its name.
“Let’s be honest about DOGE and this whole thing; it’s a joke,” Frost also noted that DOGE is “not an actual department of this government.”
Frost continued, “I’m all for making our government more efficient, but we have to look at the proposition here. The proposition of these two guys is that to make the government more efficient we gotta fire a bunch of people and take away a bunch of funding. And that lack of nuance and actually providing real oversight on how we can make the government work in a better way shows me firsthand that they are not coming at this on the right foot and not coming at it from the right place.”
Many have publicly questioned Musk’s ability to run DOGE and whether he should be privy to confidential governmental information. In fact, in September, following a post that Musk made on X that seemed to advocate for an assassination attempt on either Vice President Kamala Harris or President Joe Biden, Wired posed that Musk posed a significant national security risk.
Later, Musk asserted on Twitter/X, which he owns, “Starlink was barred from turning on satellite beams in Crimea at the time because doing so would violate US sanctions against Russia!”
According to Richard Blumenthal, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, Musk, who has hefty defense contracts through his various business entities, represents a profound threat to national security. Musk is the CEO and founder of SpaceX, the CEO of Tesla, the owner of X, and the co-founder of OpenAI.
“I think it is beyond dangerous. I think it is a profound threat to our national security that Mr. Musk and SpaceX are in this position,” Blumenthal said in a November hearing regarding US technology companies and their ties to China.
Blumenthal continued,
“Those extensive economic ties and China’s willingness to exploit them are a dangerous combination, a real risk to this country,” Blumenthal also said that Musk and Tesla “are far from the only ones in Big Tech facing this situation.”RELATED CONTENT: X Users Answered Elon Musk’s Request, Uploaded Medical Information For His AI Company To Review