The news moves so fast that people may not fully remember that just a year ago, fanboys of Elon Musk barely out of adolescence were running amok inside the federal government. The DOGE operation was such an awful failure on its own terms that it’s been written out of the story of Trump’s second term to some degree. But the damage to government functions was never addressed, and Republicans in Congress who jumped aboard the DOGE train with both feet have never been held accountable.
That could change with the midterms. In particular, a bill that originated as a DOGE talking point, and was embraced by several House Republicans in tough races this fall, would put around $500 billion in yearly spending at risk. The bill would invalidate over $100 billion in veterans’ health care spending, $48 billion for basic research into cures to diseases, over $40 billion in several programs for housing, $35 billion for combating violence against women, $29 billion for education, $9 billion in workforce development, $7 billion for the Federal Aviation Administration, and more—all over what amounts to a technicality.
The spending at risk would total nearly one-third of all nondefense discretionary spending that the government makes annually. And several Republicans at risk of losing re-election are on the record supporting it, which is sure to show up on television screens imminently.
“It makes just as much sense as DOGE made, which is to say none at all,” said William Lawrence, the Democrat challenging Rep. Tom Barrett (R-MI), a co-sponsor of the bill, in a toss-up seat in Michigan. “It’s a completely ideological move based in a desire to cut public programs for the sake of it, without any regard for the people impacted or worthiness of the program.”
The spending at risk would total nearly one-third of all nondefense discretionary spending that the government makes annually.
The bill, known as the Unauthorized Spending Accountability (USA) Act, would automatically sunset any federal spending on so-called “unauthorized” programs after three years. These are programs whose specific authorization has expired, but through waivers appropriators continue to advance funding. The Congressional Budget Office identified thousands of such programs worth $500 billion as of fiscal year 2025, but again, all of them have been legally appropriated funds by congressional appropriations committees and had those appropriations signed into law.
The Congressional Budget Office actually scored the bill as saving no money because aggregate spending levels for appropriations were already set in place, which seems like a dodge; clearly, $500 billion per year in current spending would be eliminated over time without the passage of authorization bills.
Elon Musk used this “unauthorized spending” talking point early in his DOGE tenure; the bill essentially puts that into legislative language.
While authorization bills are generally a good practice to assess program effectiveness, the punishment of canceling hundreds of billions of dollars without clearing the high bar of passing an individual authorization bill seems unusually harsh. Critics see it as a backdoor way to hack away at federal spending, a holdover from the DOGE era dressed up as a “fiscal discipline” measure. In theory, Congress could draw up a specific reauthorization for every affected program, but in practice, given the institution’s paralysis, it would never get through them all, and many would be taken hostage by lawmakers demanding cuts.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote back in 2016 that proposals like this “would mostly create more hurdles to enacting appropriations,” by creating more “funding cliffs” that could be used “as leverage to force action on other matters … that may generally lead to more brinkmanship and impasses.”
The USA Act passed the House Oversight Committee on a 25-19 vote last December. The House has left town until the elections without giving the bill a floor vote. Every Republican on the Oversight Committee except the now-departed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) voted for it, including Republicans in races being contested this fall like Reps. Mike Turner (R-OH), Scott Perry (R-PA), Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), and Eli Crane (R-AZ). In addition, Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Byron Donalds (R-FL), who are running for governor in Arizona and Florida, respectively, voted for the bill.
After that vote, Barrett, who is running in a toss-up seat in the Lansing area of Michigan, signed on as a co-sponsor of the USA Act, just one of three Republicans to do so. This came months after the DOGE effort fizzled and government spending fell off the radar screen as a concern. Donald Trump in his two terms has run up almost half of the current $40 trillion national debt.
Turner, Perry, Luna, Crane, and Barrett did not respond to a request for comment.
Barrett, a former Army officer, has faced heat at home over his support for the bill, particularly due to its impact on veterans’ health care. The unauthorized legislation at issue, the Veterans’ Health Care Eligibility Reform Act of 1996, finances primary and specialty care, mental health services, and operations at VA hospitals for nine million enrolled veterans.
Barrett has defended his support in official congressional emails to constituents, town hall meetings, and local media. “It doesn’t mean these programs don’t have merit,” Barrett told WLNS News. “It just means we ought to be doing the job we’re elected to do, to look at these programs and make sure they’re being done in the way that we would all expect.” But given limits on floor time and the inability to get consensus on much of anything in Washington, the real-world impact of the legislation would be existential for critical services.
Lawrence, Barrett’s opponent in November, held a veterans roundtable event in the district on Wednesday, hearing from patients and provider staff about stresses on the VA system amid persistent privatization efforts from the Trump administration. “These veterans know that the VA is under attack,” Lawrence said. “They’re clear that this is a privatization agenda pushed by the Trump administration with the support of Tom Barrett.”
The impact of DOGE, which cut workers and dismantled entire agencies but did nothing to limit or mitigate federal deficits, is still being felt in the district, Lawrence said, whether by VA workers or researchers at public universities (Michigan State University is a notably large college in the district). One worker at an understaffed VA facility told Lawrence about being fired by email and then asked to come back two weeks later, without ever receiving an apology.
The threats to workforce development programs from the USA Act, which includes apprenticeship initiatives and classroom training, fit what the record shows as a pattern of anti-labor actions by Barrett. In Congress, he voted against the legislation to speed up first contracts, which passed the Republican House in June. He voted to uphold a Trump executive order that stripped collective-bargaining rights from federal employees. In the Michigan legislature, he supported “right-to-work” laws that damage unionized shops by allowing members receiving benefits of unionization to opt out of paying dues (Michigan repealed its right-to-work law in 2023). He also voted to diminish Michigan’s minimum-wage and paid sick leave laws.
“He’s never stood with working people in his career,” Lawrence said. “He votes with the bosses and the billionaires and his president every single time.”
Polling has been extremely tight in the district. Barrett has identified his vulnerability by repeatedly voting to end the Iran war, including once again this week.
Lawrence, a former co-founder of the Sunrise Movement who beat two establishment candidates in the August primary, was recently named to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Red to Blue list for challengers seeking to flip Republican seats. He was the last candidate in a toss-up race to get added to the list, after resistance from the Congressional Black Caucus over resurfaced comments from a podcast. And House Majority PAC, the super PAC for House Democrats, this week released a television ad highlighting Barrett receiving $2 million from corporate PACs and special interests. The ad has $500,000 in funding behind it over the next week.
Prior to that, Lawrence was facing a $1.6 million deficit on the air in terms of outside super PAC spending.
