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MAGA’s Marjorie Taylor Greene said that federal employees “don’t deserve their pay checks” while defending Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Speaking at a House committee hearing Tuesday, the Georgia representative unleashed on her “Democrat colleagues pitching tantrums” over Musk’s dismantling of the federal government.
Greene, a Trump loyalist, said that protests over Musk’s mass firings being “unconstitutional” were “an outright lie” because the billionaire has been appointed by the president as a special government employee.
“You can protest all you want, but the American people disagree with you,” Greene said. “Those jobs are paid for by the American taxpeople who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes and then pay these federal employees. Federal employees do not deserve their jobs.”
Green added: “Federal employees do not deserve their pay checks. And these are jobs that can be fired at will.”
She accused Democrats of “protecting the bureaucracy.”
A clip of her rant was posted on social media platform X, where some users pointed out that Greene herself is a federal employee.

“Someone give her a mirror, quick,” one person responded.
“Who’s gunna tell her,” another quipped, while someone else asked: “Who pays you Ms. Greene?”
Greene’s defense of DOGE follows the unofficial department’s move to delete the five biggest “savings” from its website’s “wall of receipts” after multiple media investigations pointed out a series of serious errors.
The “wall of receipts,” the list of government savings following Musk-led cost-cutting efforts like staff cuts and contract terminations, is the “only public ledger [DOGE] has produced to document its work,” reported The New York Times, which noted it was “riddled with mistakes.”
They included major accounting errors, incorrect assumptions and outdated data, while some contracts closed and claimed as savings by DOGE actually ended during the Biden administration, the newspaper noted.
DOGE’s estimated savings were $65 billion as of Tuesday — a $10 billion increase from Friday, despite the fact that the list no longer includes the top five savings, the Times reported.
The largest point of savings allegedly stemmed from cutting an $8 billion contract at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The contract in question was, in fact, $8 million.
In the wake of the article, Musk wrote on X that the Times’ reporting was “inaccurate,” and claimed the number was initially incorrectly noted by the agency, but was corrected by DOGE last month.