Vance reveals DOGE’s ‘most important’ undertaking: ‘I don’t even think it’s the cost savings’ 

Vice President JD Vance argued Wednesday that the “most important” aspect of the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is the program’s ability to identify bureaucratic hurdles that get in the way of President Trump being responsive to the country’s needs. 

“DOGE is going to save money, it has already identified a lot of cost savings,” Vance said of the cost-slashing initiative, headed by Elon Musk, during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. 

The cost savings DOGE has identified less than two weeks into Trump’s second term, however, is not what has impressed the vice president most about the newly-minted department. 

“The most important thing that it’s going to do, I don’t even think it’s the cost savings, it’s making the bureaucracy responsive to the elected president,” Vance explained. 

“DOGE has identified grants that were going to be made in violation of an executive order, and stopped them right before the money was wired,” he continued. “We’re talking about making the people’s government responsive to the people’s elected president.” 

The vice president may have been referring to $37 million in taxpayer money that was about to be sent to the World Health Organization before Trump’s executive order breaking ties with the global health body.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt revealed earlier this week that the funds bound for WHO were discovered by DOGE and the Office of Management and Budget. 

Vance argued that DOGE will “unleash innovation” and “unleash economic prosperity” by removing the “crushing bureaucracy that answers to nobody sitting on top of the American people.” 

“We’re going to get it off and we’re going to actually make it responsive to our economic growth needs, to our needs to buy the right weapons for the next generation of warfare,” the vice president said.  “And I think that is the most profound thing that DOGE is going to do.” 

DOGE aims to cut as much as $500 billion annually in wasteful spending across the executive branch departments.

Last November, Trump, 78, likened the effort to the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb and quoted Musk, 53, as saying: “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!”

Trump said DOGE will “drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.”