Rep. Melanie Stansbury wants to lead her party’s fight against Elon Musk’s attempts to transform the entire federal government, an exercise that will largely be focused on messaging and rhetorical counter-programming.
The New Mexico Democrat is the new chair of the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, also to be called DOGE — the congressional counterpart to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that goes by the same acronym.
“As we ready ourselves for the battlefield, we’re going to have to fight across all three branches of government,” Stansbury said in a recent interview. “Because [Musk and his allies] are violating the law, they’re violating the Constitution, and they’re eviscerating the federal workforce, and we’re prepared to fight back.”
Democrats can do little else other than make noise; they have no power to override Musk’s sweeping alterations to the federal workforce under unified Republican control. Stansbury, a former Office of Management and Budget program examiner during the Obama administration, ultimately sees her job as helping to mount a front of resistance beyond the myriad legal challenges already in the works.
But Stansbury has her work cut out for her, even in that regard. Stansbury’s counterpart on the subcommittee will be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a Donald Trump acolyte and conservative provocateur who on Monday revealed her first target will be going after NPR and PBS for their federal funding.
The larger Republican Conference is also signaling little appetite for challenging Musk’s growing influence within the Trump administration, creating a united front against Stansbury’s plans to draw a contrast between her party and the GOP.
She might even be losing support from fellow Democrats who are openly wondering whether they should even have members serving on the DOGE Subcommittee at all.
“It’s a conversation we should have,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said at a press conference Monday afternoon, cautioning he has not yet spoken to the ranking member of the full Oversight Committee, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.).
Stansbury, in an interview, insisted she was holding out hope there would be opportunities for common ground with Republicans. After receiving the ranking member assignment, she said she huddled on the House floor with her counterpart, Greene, along with Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chair of the full House Committee Oversight and Government Reform of which the DOGE panel is a part.
“We had a professional and pleasant conversation,” she said. “Chairman Comer was very cordial. He shared with me that in his personal perspective, he felt like they were putting some of the more serious Republicans from the Committee on the subcommittee, and that he was hopeful that it would undertake serious work.”
Still, Stansbury added, “We’re not sure what the House Republicans plan to do with the committee … if it is in the service of what Elon Musk and [Office of Management and Budget director nominee] Russell Vought are doing to the federal government right now, Democrats’ sole responsibility on the committee is to fight back and to stop them.”
Reporter Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.
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