Musk and Ramaswamy are tasked to co-lead DOGE, the president-elect’s proposed government efficiency commission with a name inspired by a meme and cryptocurrency. (Ramaswamy owns a stake in HuffPost’s parent company, BuzzFeed.)
“This group they run, DOGE, has no power to make laws, to cut budget or to do anything — it’s like when you’re a kid and you visit the cockpit, the pilot — you get a set of wings. It doesn’t mean you get to fly the plane,” Kimmel joked.
On Thursday, the pair didn’t respond to questions from the media and made a spectacle out of their D.C. stop as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) referred to the visit as a “brainstorming session” with lawmakers.
“We don’t know all of what went on in the meeting, we can assume that there were a lot of missed high-fives,” the late-night host quipped.
Kimmel went on to mock Musk’s Santa Claus-like plan after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told reporters that the billionaire and Ramaswamy will have a “naughty” and “nice” list for lawmakers.
“Nothing to worry about, there’s just a foreign-born billionaire deciding which of our elected officials get to wake up on Christmas morning and which don’t,” said Kimmel of Musk.
Catch more of Kimmel’s Thursday monologue below.