DOGE will go on: Hill pork hawk says rooting out government waste will continue after Elon

"Our caucus, with 110 members, is laser-focused on delivering real solutions for the American people, reining in wasteful spending, demanding oversight, and ensuring every taxpayer dollar is spent wisely."

Bean said his panel's work rooting out government waste and streamlining the bureaucracy will continue on-track, with a major effort planned next week to change the Treasury's payment system to curb improper disbursements.

The House DOGE Caucus will continue to advocate to "enact the cuts found by DOGE," Bean went on.

Republicans faced criticism for moving too slowly on DOGE's proposed cuts, but GOP leadership sources said they needed either a formal request from Vought or separate bills outside the Big Beautiful Bill Act to avoid jeopardizing its eligibility for Senate reconciliation.

"Taking on Crazytown is no easy task," Bean quipped to Fox News Digital last November when he launched the House DOGE Caucus.

On the Senate side, DOGE caucus chairwoman Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, scrutinized a recent government report on COVID aid fraud and has already launched an effort to head off what she called easily-determinable signals that an application for government emergency aid is likely falsified or ineligible.

Ernst this week flagged an analysis from the Pandemic Resources Accountability Committee - led by federal inspectors general - that randomly sampled nearly 700,000 identity records from 67.5 million applications for PPP, EIDL and other COVID-19 relief programs and found nearly $80 billion in potentially fraudulent payouts.

Ernst said much of the likely fraud could have been prevented if officials had simply verified Social Security numbers, matched them with SSA records, and confirmed whether applicants were still alive.

In turn, she informed Fox News Digital exclusively that she would be launching a bill Friday to prevent this kind of easily-avoided oversight issues in the future.

The DOGE in Spending Act would prevent "con artists," she said, who, during COVID-19, "raided America's piggy bank."

The bill's name also signaled that the Senate, too, would continue its Musk-inspired work long after the mogul has left.

"There is nothing more frustrating than losing billions of dollars to preventable fraud," Ernst said, calling the illicit payouts during the pandemic "unprecedented."