In town hall meetings and recent media appearances, members of Oklahoma’s all-Republican Congressional delegation have voiced support for federal spending cuts from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and other initiatives backed by President Donald Trump. We used government data and other sources to fact-check some of their claims.  

Claim: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has provided services for immigrants who are in the country illegally. 
Source: “You asked about 1,000 employees that are being cut from the VA, and my response to that is that there have been instances where the VA … has been processing payments for the HHS Office of Refugee Settlement. That’s not their mission and they shouldn’t be doing that,” U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice told a constituent during a February town hall meeting. 
Fact check: True but misleading

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been processing payments for medical care for illegal immigrant detainees through an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement since 2002. The work resulted in $124 million in fees and revenue for the Department of Veterans Affairs in the 2023 fiscal year. Bice was responding to a constituent’s question about the Trump Administration’s recent firing of 1,000 Veterans Affairs employees.

But medical claims processing for federal immigration detainees involves work from no more than 10 Veterans Affairs employees, a federal official told the New York Post in January. 

A spokesperson for Bice said money from job cuts will go back into providing services for veterans.
-Clifton Adcock

Claim: DOGE has identified over $55 billion of waste and fraud in the federal government. 
Source: “Take care of your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves. Every business owner knows that. Within only four short weeks, we’ve already identified over $55 billion of waste and fraud,” U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Fact check: Mixed

The Department of Government Efficiency previously claimed it saved $55 billion by detecting fraud and canceling government contracts, among other efforts, according to the DOGE website. That number has since been raised to $105 billion. 

However, DOGE hadn’t accounted for about 70% of these savings as of March 2. DOGE’s “wall of receipts,” a compilation of DOGE findings, only amounts to an estimated $18.6 billion of the total $105 billion savings claimed, according to the website. The DOGE website, updated twice weekly, states it isn’t a complete list.

Several of the terminated contracts were earmarked for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and initiatives, including over $100 million slashed from the Department of Agriculture. Other cuts include contracts for climate change response, data collection and reporting and research.

Mullin’s claim that DOGE saved money by identifying fraud is also unsubstantiated. The Government Accountability Office states fraud “involves obtaining something of value through willful misrepresentation” and is determined after a legal process.
-Maddy Keyes

Claim: USAID funded a “transgender opera” in Columbia and spent $2 million on “sex changes and ‘LGBT Activism’” in Guatemala,” among other wasteful projects. 
Source: “DOGE found that USAID has been funding all of these insane leftist pet projects…”U.S. Rep. Joshua Brecheen said in a Facebook post that included a list of projects allegedly paid for with  U.S. foreign aid. 
Fact check: Mixed 

The U.S. State Department, not USAID, awarded a grant to a Columbian university to increase “transgender representation through the opera.” Of the $47,020 total award amount, $22,020 was given in nonfederal funding. 

USAID did award a $2 million grant to Asociación Lambda, a Guatemalan LGBTQ advocacy group, to help support trans-led organizations delivering gender-affirming healthcare. But it’s unclear how much of that funding, if any, has paid for “sex changes.” 

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, gender-affirming care consists of a variety of services that can include medical, surgical and behavioral healthcare for trans and nonbinary people. 
-Ari Fife

Claim: Republicans don’t plan to cut Medicaid and federal officials found $100 billion in fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Source: U.S. Sen. James Lankford made these claims during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press in response to a question on whether he would vote for cuts to Medicaid.
“No one’s talking about cutting benefits on this. They’re talking about how do you actually cut fraud, Lankford said. “Between Medicare and Medicaid we have, according to government records right now, the Government Accountability Office, almost $100 billion in what they’re call[ing] either fraud or waste, or just we don’t know where it went. $100 billion is a lot of money.”
Fact check: Mixed 

Trump and Republicans have said they don’t plan to cut Medicaid benefits. But House Republicans have adopted a budget resolution that seeks to find at least $880 billion in mandatory spending cuts over the next 10 years. Experts say this will be difficult to achieve without touching Medicaid, which is one of the biggest sources of federal spending. The program provides health care coverage for millions of low-income people, pregnant women, children, seniors and people with disabilities. 

It’s true that federal officials identified more than $100 billion in improper Medicare and Medicaid payments for the 2023 fiscal year.
-Brianna Bailey

Rating system: 
True: A claim that is backed up by factual evidence
Mostly true: A claim that is mostly true but also contains some inaccurate details 
Mixed: A claim that contains a combination of accurate and inaccurate or unproven information 
True but misleading: A claim that is factually true but omits critical details or context 
Mostly false: A claim that is mostly false but also contains some accurate details False: A claim that has no basis in fact