With just a week until inauguration, three forces are converging. They’ll all impact the federal workplace. The Trump Administration is promising a stack of one hundred executive orders. The external Department of Government Efficiency will start to dig in. And after breakfast pleasantries, a chaotic Congress will join the battle. WTOP Capitol Hill Correspondent Mitchell Miller shared the outlook with the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And I guess it’s safe to say, as you reported, that the nation got through January 6th. Okay. Now everyone’s thinking about January 20th. What will Congress do first here?

Mitchell Miller Right. This is a really, really busy time, as you well know. Let’s start out with looking at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). There is a lot of talk around here, especially, of course, among Republican lawmakers, about what they’re going to do to really cut into the meat of the federal bureaucracy. Now, what’s interesting is after a lot of loud talk and social media postings about slashing federal spending and the government workforce, Elon Musk did temper some of his earlier claims related to DOGE. Last week in an interview on ABC’s, he said cutting $2 trillion would be a best case outcome. He had previously said DOGE could save at least $2 trillion. He now thinks DOGE has a quote, “good shot at saving $1 trillion,” which would still be a massive undertaking, of course, given that Republicans have said that cutting Medicare and making changes to Social Security are off the table. There are leading lawmakers on this effort. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in the upper chamber, and Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in the House are both leading these DOGE panels. So we’ll see what kind of progress they actually make in the coming months after the President is sworn in next week.

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Tom Temin Yeah, maybe $1 billion for every mile that a Tesla can go on a charge. That might be a good goal. That’s my contribution here. Well, one of the agencies they’re looking at is the IRS, which has been gaining employees under some of that Inflation Reduction Act money that has been coming its way. This is something that’s in the crosshairs.

Mitchell Miller It really is. Republicans have their budget scalpels out right now. As you know, the IRS has been receiving a lot of additional resources from Congress. Its workforce is now over 100,000 employees. That’s the highest level in nearly three decades. But the IRS has had $20 billion cut from the continuing resolution that averted a government shutdown. And that’s on top of another $20 billion that was cut in the 2023 negotiations related to the debt limit, which, by the way, will be an issue in the coming months as well. IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel has said the IRS is going to have to limit hiring. The national Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins said in her report to Congress last week that these financial challenges for the agency are going to hinder training, hiring and basically holding on to experienced workers. And then if we look at back to the office, you mentioned the fact that President-elect Trump does have these plans to have dozens of executive orders that he’s wanting to put into place. And of course, the big one for federal workers is he says that he will order them, mandate them to come back into the office. And he has said if they do not return, that they’ll be dismissed. Now, of course, unions are really pushing back on this, as well as lawmakers from the Washington area saying that there are various union agreements that guarantee work-from-home policies, contracts that were extended by the outgoing Biden administration officials because they knew about President-elect Trump’s plan. So we’ll have to see how all of that is sorted out.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with WTOP Capitol Hill Correspondent Mitchell Miller. And the other thing they need to sort out is the budget. Of course, for 2025, there’s still no appropriations. And we have the March 14th deadline for the current CR. And there seems to be disagreement even among Republicans about whether to do this. And I think Trump’s word was a big, beautiful bill, a single bill versus splitting it up.

Mitchell Miller Right. And this has been an ongoing discussion. It’s happened over this past weekend. Republicans were down at Mar-a-Lago once again trying to sort it out. President-elect Trump came here to Capitol Hill and met with Republican senators last week. And it really is a tug of war right now, essentially between the House and the Senate. While everybody is trying to say they’re open to options, the House prefers that budget reconciliation and be this one big, beautiful bill where they would combine major immigration reforms with extending the tax cuts that were, of course, implemented under then-President Trump in his first term. But the Senate is concerned that if they try to put it all in one bill and it doesn’t make it, then what happens? Does it just fall into a bunch of different pieces? They believe that splitting the two issues under budget reconciliation, which of course is a very complicated process that they could take on immigration first. And then when they get that through, then they could say they got that done and then the tax issues would come up. And of course, there will be Democrats proposing to not extend a lot of the tax cuts or having amendments that they will add to that. So it’s going to be very, very complicated over the next few months. And as I mentioned, there’s also the talk about extending the debt ceiling. President-elect Trump has made it clear that he does not want this on his watch, but that’s going to be part of the negotiations as well. So there’s going to be a lot of scrapping up here on Capitol Hill over the next few months.

Tom Temin Correct me if I’m wrong, but the last CR did include a disaster aid package, primarily, I guess, for North Carolina. And now you’ve got what’s going on in California, the cost of which could dwarf what happened even in North Carolina, which was extensive. What’s the outlook for disaster relief there? Even the home insurance is nonexistent for a lot of these people.

Mitchell Miller It is. And the cost of the wildfires is just going up by the tens of billions of dollars. President-elect Trump has said that FEMA no longer has any money, but that is actually not true. FEMA, as you mentioned, Congress did approve $29 billion in disaster aid as part of that CR. There’s, according to FEMA, about $27 billion left. But that is going to quickly evaporate when they address some of the issues that are going on in California. Obviously, the estimates haven’t been totaled yet because it’s such an ongoing, fluid situation. But lawmakers are saying that they believe that they’re going to either have to pass a separate supplemental for disaster aid or it may be wrapped into the continuing resolution, which would, of course, be yet another complicating factor as you try to get all these pieces of legislation together. But there’s no question that that’s going to be a big priority in the coming months.

Tom Temin And while we have you, you were covering the state funeral and some of the activities peripheral to it for Jimmy Carter last week. I just want to know your commentary on the moment; we saw it on camera of all of the ex-Presidents, most of the vice presidents, various wives and second gentleman together. Nobody brought knives or baseball bats.

Mitchell Miller No, it was really an extraordinary only-in-America moment and really an only-in-Washington moment where you have people that have actually been politically at each other’s throats, all sitting in this very tight area. It was almost to me like a mini drama within the funeral itself. I think that overall, of course, the state funeral for former President Carter went extremely well and everybody had a lot of nice things to say. But there’s no question, as you see, President-elect Donald Trump, who once said that Barack Obama was not even a U.S. citizen and then became President, that they’re both chitchatting and looking like they’re okay with it, talking to each other. And then you had a frosty handshake between President-elect Trump and his former vice president, Mike Pence. And along with them, of course, you have Bill Clinton there. And then another interesting juxtaposition, I thought, was that Mike Pence was actually sitting next to Al Gore, former vice president, who was himself involved in one of the closest U.S. presidential races in history, but was able to say, okay, you know what, George W Bush won. Obviously, the result was not as good for Mike Pence.

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Tom Temin No, it’s like everybody’s always 13 years old, eternally, I guess.

Mitchell Miller I think that’s a good way to put it.

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