CNN Host Wrecked By Republican: ‘That’s Why Your Ratings Are In The Tank’

A Republican lawmaker engaged in a heated on-air exchange with a CNN anchor on Tuesday while discussing President Donald Trump’s initiative to reduce government waste.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) sparred with CNN’s Pamela Brown as she pressed him on Trump’s cost-cutting measures and the role of Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk in significantly reducing federal expenditures amid a mounting $36 trillion national debt.

Brown challenged Burchett on whether the administration’s approach to cutting waste was “clumsy rather than methodical.” She also raised concerns about what she termed “high-stakes mistakes” in how the initiative was being implemented.

“Humans will make mistakes, ma‘am. But currently, these are bloated programs. You have no-show employees that are angry that they‘re having to go back to work, that they‘ve moved and they‘re not even in the distance of where their original jobs were,” Burchett stated, while Brown acknowledged that “no one” opposed eliminating waste.

“Well, then, why are you all not exposing it?” Burchett fired back, prompting Brown to insist that her network had been thoroughly tracking government expenditures.

“All y‘all do is run down Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and you continuously do this. And that‘s why your ratings are in the tank, ma‘am,” Burchett asserted.

Their contentious exchange continued, with Burchett accusing Brown of focusing on personalities rather than the substance of the issue.

“There are fair questions to be asking, congressman, about these unelected people going in and having access to private information from Americans. How can you not be asking those questions? Those are very fair questions,” Brown countered.

“How many people at the IRS are elected? How many of those are elected, ma‘am? You‘re proving my point. You‘ve got all these people, and this is a very porous agency. We know that,” Burchett responded.

WATCH:

In an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) criticized Democrats and media figures for objecting to the Trump-Musk cost-cutting initiative, pointing out that many of them had previously supported government efficiency efforts when led by their own party.

“The United States is $36 trillion in debt, and Washington, D.C., continues to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars. Instead of efficiency, people have gotten an ever-growing bureaucracy that wastes taxpayer dollars and is unaccountable to the public,” he wrote.

“This is exactly why President Donald Trump’s initiative to implement the Department of Government Efficiency represents a bold step toward draining the bureaucratic swamp, forcing federal agencies to streamline, modernize, and justify their spending,” Webster added. “But the biggest irony of the backlash against DOGE is who is leading the resistance.”

He explained that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) evolved from the United States Digital Service, an agency launched by the Obama administration in 2014.

“For years, Democrats praised it. They had no problem when Obama and Joe Biden’s USDS embedded Silicon Valley insiders deep in our federal agencies, including giving engineers access to Medicare’s mainframe, which processes billions of dollars in payments every year,” Webster observed.

Despite USDS growing into an unwieldy bureaucracy with minimal oversight, concerns over its access to sensitive federal systems were largely absent—likely because its goals aligned with Democratic policies. However, with Trump transforming USDS into the Department of Government Efficiency and appointing renowned innovator Elon Musk to streamline Washington’s bureaucracy, the same individuals who had once supported USDS were now protesting outside the Treasury Department, Webster noted.

“The same people who let USDS tinker with Medicare’s billion-dollar payment system now want to block Trump from cutting waste,” Webster concluded.