Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) questioned during a podcast appearance why Democrats are acting as if Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) panel is “legitimate.”

“I watched Trump during his first term when nothing was real, right, when everything was a feint or a fake – it was never an infrastructure week, was it? After Parkland, he was never serious about gun control again. “Why are we suddenly deciding to take this government efficiency task force seriously?” Murphy said on a Thursday episode of The New Republic’s “The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent.”

“Like why are we pretending this is legitimate?” he added.

Trump said last month that Musk and Ramaswamy would serve as heads of DOGE, which aims to “cut excessive regulations, reduce wasteful spending” and restructure federal agencies.

DOGE will “provide advice and guidance from outside the government” and work with the White House Office of Management and Budget, the president-elect said.

“It may become the ‘Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump added. “Republican politicians have dreamed of the goals of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.”

Murphy said on the podcast that DOGE is “not a department” and is “run by two billionaires, people who have no idea how important basic government services like Medicaid, Social Security, and veterans benefits are to regular people.”

“But there are a lot of Democrats who openly say, ‘I (want to) work with them.’ … I want to sit down with this group and make it seem like this is something other than either just a TV show or an attempt by the billionaire class to privatize government for their own benefit,” Murphy added.

The Hill reached out to Ramaswamy, the Trump transition team and the social platform X, which Musk owns.

A number of Democrats have expressed openness to working with DOGE, particularly as they consider defense spending cuts.

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