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AMY GOODMAN: Democratic ranking members of several House committees are calling for an investigation of potential national security threats posed by Elon Musk’s DOGE — that’s Department of Government Efficiency. This comes as The Wall Street Journal reports a 25-year-old DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central payments system resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social media account that advocated racism and eugenics. In another apparent breach of sensitive data, CNN reports Energy Secretary Chris Wright granted a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern and DOGE staffer access to the Energy Department’s IT system.
In a letter Thursday, Democratic lawmakers urged action to stop DOGE by deputy inspectors general at the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the General Services Administration and the Small Business Administration. Also Thursday, House Democrats with the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded Musk be fired from his role in the Trump administration. This is Congressmembers Nydia Velázquez, LaMonica McIver and, first, Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar.
REP. GREG CASAR: And today we’re here to say with one voice: Fire Elon Musk. An unelected, unaccountable billionaire now has seemingly unlimited powers over Americans’ private data and over Americans’ taxpayer dollars.
REP. NYDIA VELÁZQUEZ: Do you trust Elon Musk with your most personal financial information, tax records, your Social Security numbers, your financial security? I don’t trust Elon Musk with this information, and I know the American people don’t, either.
LAMONICA McIVER: He is trying to puppetmaster Trump’s decisions about everything — women’s bodies, immigrants’ futures, our kids’ education, government funding, on and on and on.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee blocked an effort by Democrats Wednesday to subpoena Elon Musk to appear before the panel to face questioning about his ongoing overhaul of the federal government.
Our next guest, Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California, represents Silicon Valley, has called on tech billionaire Elon Musk to be held accountable but was absent from Wednesday’s vote because he says he already had a scheduled meeting with Mexico’s ambassador to discuss Trump’s tariffs. Ro Khanna posted on X, quote “I would have voted yes. They called a procedural vote without notice & I like 8 others didn’t make it there on time. Musk’s attacks on our institutions are unconstitutional. He should be subpoenaed & answer to our committee. They should call the vote again with notice,” he said.
For more, Congressmember Ro Khanna joins us from the Cannon Rotunda at the House building on Capitol Hill. He represents Silicon Valley in California.
Congressmember Khanna, Ro, thank you for joining us again. If you can start off by talking about, well, what happened, the possibility that Elon Musk would have been called on the carpet, or at least before your committee, and what you’re calling for now?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I’m calling for him to be subpoenaed and come before the committee. I put that statement out about 10 minutes after they had the vote, and then went to the committee and spoke out about it. And Elon Musk responded, “Don’t be a [bleep].” And we went back and forth on Twitter. But the reality is that he needs to come before the committee. I actually had said, when DOGE was created, as you know, that if there’s wasteful spending in the Pentagon or if he can expose wasteful spending, then I would work to look at that, as did Bernie Sanders, as did Elizabeth Warren. But what he’s doing now, which is stopping payments, is unconstitutional. And he needs to come before the committee.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking on Instagram Live Monday in a message to fellow Democrats in the Senate.
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO–CORTEZ: No Democrat should be voting to advance Trump’s nominees while all of this stuff is going on. There has to be a political price to pay. And we have a responsibility as a party to block everything that is happening while they’re setting a literal match to the federal government and giving 19-year-olds classified access — potentially classified access to the U.S. Treasury Department. So, we need to start blocking every single procedural advancement on the Senate side in order to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Ro Khanna? Do you support what AOC is saying?
REP. RO KHANNA: I do think we should be putting holds on the nominees, like Brian Schatz has on the secretary of state appointees. And that is because of USAID. And I do think we shouldn’t be voting to confirm these nominees.
But beyond that, the House actually has a lot of power. I mean, the House gets to vote on the debt ceiling. The House gets to vote on government spending. And we should make it very, very clear that until there is an ironclad agreement that everything that the House appropriates and authorizes will be dispersed, we will not vote to increase the debt ceiling, we will not cooperate with Donald Trump on any of the agenda. And I think that will get Trump to fold.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let me ask you about this DOGE youth committee, this youth team of Elon Musk ranging in age between — what is it? — 19 and 26. You have senators not being allowed, stopped by police by going into the Treasury Department, etc. But these young guys are going in and, word is, you know, setting up computers that are downloading servers. The Wall Street Journal reports that the 25-year-old DOGE staff member Marko Elez, who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central payments system, resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social media account that advocated racism and eugenics. Among other posts, he said something like, “I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate,” in reference to a post noting Silicon Valley’s large Indian community. In June, the account also advocated for the annihilation of Gaza, writing, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.” He worked for Musk at SpaceX and later X. You’re an Indian American congressmember from Silicon Valley. So, he was forced to resign. But this is this small team that is allowed to move in and have access to what could be — what? — thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of workers and, just in general, Americans’ most private economic and health information?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, his comments obviously are outrageous. It was totally appropriate that he was fired. I will say, just representing the Bay Area and Silicon Valley for almost nine years now, that that sentiment is not reflective of the vast, vast majority in the Bay Area. There are other problems, believe me, with tech lobbying and overreach. But his comments really were appalling, and I’m glad he’s out.
The broader point, though, is that no DOGE employee should have access to any of Americans’ sensitive, confidential information. And they should not have access to be able to stop payments. Now, my understanding is, just yesterday, the Treasury secretary said that they will not have that access, and they are not going to have any control over the payments. That, in my view, is because we have pushed back so hard on what’s going on — not members of Congress or senators, but the American public — and the administration is taking note. So we need to continue to push back against this completely unconstitutional effort.
AMY GOODMAN: Would you say it’s fair to say you know Elon Musk well? Can you talk about your exchanges with him?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I’ve known him. I wouldn’t say — you know, well is relative. But I’ve known him since 2010 or ’11, after — when I was in the Obama administration. Of course, he was a supporter of President Obama. And he blurbed one of my first books, which I talked about bringing manufacturing back to America. We always had a disagreement about Tesla’s unionization. Tesla is in my district. I have been a very vocal advocate that they should be unionizing, that they should be using union labor. But other than that, I said that — you know, would discuss with him renewable energy, discuss with him issues of climate, discuss with him issues of China, and believe that, in many ways, he was a very, very strong technology entrepreneur.
But it has really been disappointing and concerning to see the overreach and the unconstitutional actions. There’s just no justification for that. And I’ve said to him directly — I’ve said, “If you believe that you found fraud, you found waste, you found and exposed abuse, bring that to the American people. Bring it to Congress. But you can’t make those decisions unilaterally.”
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a Mother Jones interview you did in December, when you said Democrats shouldn’t write off DOGE, that they should work with Musk. Do you still believe that at this point?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, no, not — I mean, look, what I said then, I stand by, which is that the defense budget is bloated. I am often only the vote against a trillion-dollar defense budget, that the five primes have too much power. And if Musk is talking about making the Defense Department more competitive or looking at wasteful spending in the Pentagon, then we should have engaged him. But at this point, until there is an ironclad commitment that he is going to come to Congress, that he is not going to stop payments arbitrarily — even payments to the Pentagon arbitrarily — obviously, we can’t work on anything until then. There has to be first a clear commitment to the Constitution.
AMY GOODMAN: So, there’s been a lot of criticism of Democrats around their inability to challenge Trump’s agenda right now and whether the courts ultimately stop it. Who knows how many federal workers there will be left? Can you talk about what you feel needs to happen at this point?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, one, we need to be willing to speak out, and speak out clearly, and face the consequences. Obviously, I spoke out very, very forcefully on the Oversight Committee hearing. It elicited a response from Musk. But we need to stand up clearly, all of us, and say, “This is unconstitutional. We are going to stand for the separation of powers. You can’t unilaterally stop payments. You can’t unilaterally fire federal workers.”
Second, we need to show that we have a plan, that we’re not going to raise the debt ceiling if they continue to do these kind of antics. That vote is coming up in March. We know President Trump follows the stock market. We know President Sheinbaum and Prime Minister Trudeau actually stood up to his bullying on some of the irrational tariff policy on foods, because he saw that the market was going to fall. We can do the same thing with our leverage in the House.
And finally, we need to show up everywhere, show up on your show, show up on podcasts, show up outside with federal workers to show and stand in solidarity. I do think, Amy, there is a movement now which is pushing back. We did not have that for a couple months, I acknowledge that. But the Democratic Party in this last week has had a new energy and a new resolve to stand up.
AMY GOODMAN: To get your comment on the reopening of Guantánamo for migrants, already the first planeload of migrants sent to Guantánamo. You have Kristi Noem, the new head of homeland security, already going there. Your comments on Guantánamo and then also on the 100 Indian deportees who apparently were shackled in a flight for 40 hours back to India?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, Guantánamo needs to close. I have been saying that for many, many years. And it’s appalling that we would be expanding Guantánamo, where already there are issues of civil liberties. And obviously, anyone needs to be treated with dignity.
But there’s a bigger issue here, Amy. You have President Trump talking about taking over Greenland. You have him talking about taking over Panama. You have him talking about making Canada the 51st state. You have him talking about Colombia and forcing Colombia to take military flights of migrants, totally oblivious to the history of the 1928 Banana Massacre, totally oblivious to the history of the United States’s support of the military regime in Colombia. You have Donald Trump talking about mass displacement in Gaza, with no recognition of Palestinian self-determination. I think he is in the wrong century. The 19th century colonialism and imperialism is what my grandfather stood up to alongside Gandhi in the Indian independence movement. And we need to be very, very clear, not just in condemning these individual actions, but in condemning a project of American expansionism that violates the dignities and self-determination of people around the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Your comments on Netanyahu gifting Trump a golden pager to memorialize the thousands of pagers that blew up in the faces of doctors and other people in Lebanon that Israel booby-trapped?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, it was appalling. And it’s the cruelty that I find so disheartening. You know, I feel an anger, but I feel a sadness as an American, because our best traditions as Americans, though not perfect, is at least standing up or aspiring for human rights, aspiring to stand up for the dignity and worth of every human being. And even where we haven’t lived up to those ideals, we at least strived for those ideals. And this is a total rejection, and almost celebration of killing. And it is a strain in America, but it is not, in my view, the essential strain. And somehow we have to overcome this by standing on principle. But I was truly appalled by that, and I was appalled by denying Palestinians any sense of self-determination. Even if it was done as a joke, even if it’s done as an outlandish proposal, it is so offensive to say to all Palestinians, “Go move, and we’re not going to listen to what you want to do about Gaza.”
AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Ro Khanna, I want to thank you for being with us, Democratic congressmember from California, deputy whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, speaking to us from the Cannon Rotunda.
Next up, we look at the legal hurdles facing Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Stay with us.
