MSNBC host Rachel Maddow broke out in laughter at a Republican congressman’s seemingly contradictory claims that Elon Musk’s cost-cutting task force is not responsible for the Trump administration’s mass layoffs in the federal workforce—but that anyone who thinks a layoff has been made in error should contact the billionaire White House adviser’s team.
During Wednesday’s broadcast of her The Rachel Maddow Show, the liberal host played a clip from a hastily put-together Facebook Live town hall put on by Derrick Van Orden (R-WI).
The Republican had come under fire after constituents alleged he cancelled meetings with the public in order to avoid their concerns about the Trump administration’s federal cuts.
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In the clip, Van Orden claims that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Musk-led task force charged with overseeing billions in cuts to federal agencies, has “nothing” to do with the tens of thousands of government workers who have been laid off under the Trump administration.
“All the people that you’ve heard about being released from different agencies, that was on the agency itself, it had nothing to do with DOGE,” he said, offering that Musk’s group merely acts in an advisory role to the agencies.
He immediately followed that up by stating that, if any of his constituents believed a federal worker had been laid off in error, they should “get ahold of the DOGE folks directly or through us, and we’ll help try to rectify that.”
Maddow delighted in mocking Van Orden‘s that DOGE had “nothing” to do with the cuts and, at the same time, was apparently responsible for addressing them when they go wrong.
“So first of all, all these firings of people who have federal government jobs, that has nothing to do with DOGE, it totally wasn’t them," she deadpanned.
“Also, there’s a system that if you think somebody has been fired who shouldn’t have been—and the system is that you should call DOGE," Maddow added, before cracking up with laughter.
“You should get ahold of the doge folks directly. He says, ‘Go ahead!’”
Musk, meanwhile, has both denied and admitted DOGE’s responsibility for cuts.
Last week, Van Orden reported that Musk told GOP lawmakers that it “wasn’t a DOGE decision” to axe 70,000 positions at the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to CNN. He said decisions about cuts ultimately rested with “individual departments”
However, he also acknowledged his task force’s role in some cuts, including ones that were later deemed to be in error.
Musk told Republican House members he “can’t bat a thousand all the time,” multiple attendees of the meeting told Politico.
“He said he’s making mistakes,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said at the time. “He’ll correct them, but his mission is to uncover where our tax money is. Let the chips fall where they may.”
