The U.S. national debt is more than $36 trillion and counting — and Republican Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, Chattanooga’s representative in the U.S. House, has a lot to say about it.
Fleischmann, soon to enter his eighth term as representative for Tennessee’s 3rd Congressional District, has long railed against Washington’s wasteful spending. On his campaign site, he calls for a constitutional amendment to prohibit the federal government from spending more money than it collects.
“Our country is drowning in a sea of debt with uncontrolled government spending,” Fleischmann claims on his campaign site.
Exiting campaign season, the representative is making moves to rein in spending. This week, he announced he’s joining House caucus DOGE, an informal group of House representatives supporting Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency. (Yes, the stunningly unfunny billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk named a White House task force after a decade-old internet meme of a dog.)
Musk and DOGE co-head Vivek Ramaswamy, another billionaire and former presidential candidate, have been tasked by President-elect Donald Trump to use the new department — an entity with no actual authority since it isn’t actually an official government department — to slash so-called wasteful spending within the federal bureaucracy.