WASHINGTON — As billionaire Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy began meeting with Congressional Republicans on Thursday for a brainstorming session on how to cut federal government spending, House Speaker Mike Johnson said government “does too many things and it does almost nothing well.”

The Department of Government Efficiency that President-elect Trump announced last month, with Musk and Ramaswamy at the helm of an effort that technically operates outside of government, represents a “new day in Washington and a new day in America,” Johnson said during a news conference at the Capitol. The two DOGE heads were scheduled to give remarks but instead only walked by the podium.

Musk and Ramaswamy are meeting with congressional decision makers for the first time Thursday to discuss ways to reduce federal spending, 46 days before Trump is inaugurated. Musk and Ramaswamy have said they’d like to cut the federal budget by $2 trillion — or roughly a third.

On Thursday, Johnson said DOGE “should be a bipartisan effort” and praised Democrats in the House and Senate who have stepped forward to join the DOGE subcommittees that are forming in the legislative branches. He said their plan is to make government more efficient without cutting programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

“There is an enormous amount of waste, fraud and abuse in the government,” Johnson said, “so the efforts here, both with our subcommittees that are being created here and with the DOGE effort itself, will be to explore that, to investigate it and lay it bare for the American people to see.”

One of the group’s first efforts is likely to be a sweeping return-to-office mandate for federal workers, the House speaker said, citing a survey released Thursday that said 1% of federal workers do their jobs in their office.