Mark Amodei, Nevada’s only Republican in Congress, has some choices to make • Nevada Current

Rep. Mark Amodei is confident that Washington’s annual game of December Budget Chicken will end without a government shutdown, he told a Reno right wing talk radio show Monday. 

“But the other good news,” added the only Nevada Republican in Congress, “is we’ve got this wild card out there now with this – Musk and Vivek – that frankly, I think the play is going to be, we want those guys to save enough so that at the end of the day when we’re doing the priorities, we can still go back and say it’s less, and we’re on the road to much more fiscal responsibility.”

Amodei was referring to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-chairs of a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) that doesn’t exist yet but that Donald Trump says will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Will Congress be having any say in that?

I’m asking for a Nevada congressman.

Early items on DOGE’s Nevada chopping block

Amodei is a subcommittee chair on what is typically described as the most powerful committee in the House, the Appropriations Committee, which controls spending for all the things Trump says DOGE will dismantle, slash, cut, and restructure.

How does Amodei envision the relationship between the Appropriations Committee and a new quasi-governmental panel co-chaired by the world’s richest man and a sidekick known chiefly for mounting a PR stunt masquerading as a presidential candidacy?

Is the congressman concerned that DOGE will encroach on the committee’s authority (as bestowed upon it in the U.S. Constitution)? If not, why not?

Amodei’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

But some of Amodei’s fellow Republican members of the Appropriations Committee have indicated they may not share Amodei’s characterization of the Musk-Ramaswamy Show as “good news.”

Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said committee members are taking a wait and see approach, POLITICO reported last week. 

“Look, what are we even talking about?” added committee member Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.). “Is this something real?”

It’s a fair question. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a popular media celebrity in the Trump-worshiping ecosystem who has a side hustle as a Republican member of the U.S. House from Georgia, has been tasked by the House Oversight Committee to help Musk and Ramaswamy, an encouraging sign for those who hope the second Trump administration will be as ramshackle as the first. 

If past performance is any indication of future results, Greene’s role will be primarily performative. 

But somewhat less silly congressional Republicans are already making recommendations to the so-called DOGE. 

Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst issued a press release masquerading as a letter to Musk and Ramaswamy identifying what she claimed was a trillion dollars worth of savings, ranging from reining in “legendary” Defense Department overpayments to making pennies out of cheaper metals.

Of more tangible and immediate significance to Nevada, several Republicans are rooting for DOGE to severely curtail or just cold ax the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office.

In October, that program finalized a $2.3 billion loan to Lithium Americas for its Thacker Pass mine in Nevada.

Two other DOE loans for Nevada clean energy transition projects are still in the conditional stage – a $700 million loan for Ioneer’s Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine, and $2 billion in financing for Redwood Materials’ battery component recycling and production facility.

They are among many DOE loans nationally that the Biden administration is trying to rush over the finish line before Trump’s inauguration.

Tesla got a $452 million loan from the program in 2010. But that was then. Now Ramaswamy is threatening to have DOGE go after loans given to Tesla’s competitors.

Trump this year has promised to cancel unspent money that was authorized for DOE loans. Project 2025 calls for eliminating the loan program altogether. 

What’s the fate of the Nevada projects if the loans aren’t finalized before Trump takes office?

Neither Redwood Materials nor Ioneer responded to requests for comment.

Is Amodei concerned that if those DOE loans aren’t finalized before Biden leaves office, the loans won’t be finalized at all? And has he communicated with Redwood Materials or Ioneer about what it would mean to their respective activities in Nevada if the DOE loans aren’t finalized?

As noted above, Amodei’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Suddenly Nevada’s most consequential member of Congress

Loans to a lithium mine and a battery recycler – projects that have been hailed as important economic development achievements by Nevada officials, including Gov. Joe Lombardo – are far from the most pressing issues that will be facing Nevada during a second Trump administration.

Neither, for that matter, is providing broadband service to rural Nevada, another federal initiative Lombardo has hailed but that Trump and DOGE are eying for the chopping block.

Far more consequential could be Amodei’s role in a second Trump administration in his capacity as chair of the Homeland Security subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.

The governmental cost of mass deportations will be, well, massive. So will the economic and social costs to Nevada. 

Congress, presumably guided by the powerful subcommittee Amodei chairs, will have to sign off on those costs.

It is still unclear how sweeping and “mass” Trump’s mass deportations will be.

To Amodei’s credit, he has not echoed the Trump campaign’s “mass deportation now” mantra.

Amodei was Trump’s Nevada campaign co-chair in 2016, but not in 2020, and there is little indication their relationship, inasmuch as they have one, is close or warm.

Amodei is also something of a congressional institutionalist, and over the decades he has been (too generously to be honest) described by the press as a moderate.

Of Nevada’s two U.S. senators and four U.S. House members, Amodei is arguably now the most influential and powerful Nevadan in the U.S. Congress.

That makes him the Nevada member of Congress who is best-positioned to help safeguard Nevada from Trump policies, actions, and/or fever dreams – including those involving Musk. 

For at least the next two years, the choices being made by Amodei will likely be more important than those made by any other member of Nevada’s congressional delegation.

Cheering a Musk-Ramaswamy congressional end-around as “good news” is not an auspicious start.