On November 19, 2024, Aaron Bean and Rep. Pete Sessions launched the Congressional DOGE Caucus. Bean's founding statement was about one number:

"Our national debt has surpassed a staggering $36 trillion and should be a wakeup call for all Americans. We must take action to avoid diving headfirst off the cliff of fiscal ruin. I'm thrilled with President-elect Trump's appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead DOGE."

He was right about the number. The Treasury Department's Debt to the Penny records the total public debt on November 19, 2024 as $35.99 trillion.

As of August 6, 2026, that same Treasury ledger puts it at $39.89 trillion.

The debt Bean founded a caucus to fight has grown by roughly $3.9 trillion in the twenty months since he founded it.

He didn't just fail to stop it. He voted for it.

The caucus Bean co-chairs published a platform in January 2025 with eight principles. Principle three:

"The national debt is a threat to our nation's economic strength. Members of the Congressional DOGE caucus are dedicated to finding ways to cut spending, not increase it."

Six months later, on July 3, 2025, Bean voted Aye on final passage of Trump's budget bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It passed 218–214, with every Republican but two voting yes.

The Congressional Budget Office's final score of that bill, released July 21, 2025, found it would "increase the budget deficit by $3.4 trillion over the 2025-2034 period" and "increase the number of people without insurance by 10 million in 2034."

$3.4 trillion added to the deficit. From the man whose caucus platform says its members are "dedicated to finding ways to cut spending, not increase it."

You cannot found a caucus about the debt, vote for the single largest deficit increase of the decade, and then keep citing the debt as your reason for existing. Bean does exactly that. In December 2025, he told Fox News: "We're still $38 trillion in debt, that's growing."

It's growing partly because of his vote.

The caucus stopped meeting

Bean's caucus was pitched as bipartisan. It didn't stay that way long.

On February 5, 2025 — less than three months in — Rep. Val Hoyle of Oregon announced she was quitting it. Her statement was not subtle:

"It is impossible for us to do that important work when unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his lackeys are set on burning down the government—and the law—to line his own pockets and rip off Americans across the country who depend on government services to live with dignity."

By December 2025, Fox News reported that the caucus's meetings "have since wound down." Bean's own comment to the reporter is the whole story:

"DOGE is alive. It certainly is not on the front burner as it needs to be."

He said he hoped to hold more meetings "just to let everybody know DOGE is not dead." The specific idea he floated for restarting the caucus was unused federal office space: "I'm not saying it's mismanaged, I'm just saying it's not the most efficient use of taxpayer dollars to maintain all this space where people still work from home."

That is what a $2 trillion promise had shrunk to by the end of 2025 — a possible meeting about empty cubicles.

The thing he built a caucus to support no longer exists

Bean's caucus page still carries a note explaining that it is "separate from the DOGE Service, which operates through the Office of the President and is advised by Elon Musk," and directs readers to DOGE.gov.

Musk's tenure ended without ever reaching the $2 trillion he promised, as Fox News noted in the same story. And DOGE's charter expired on July 4, 2026 — the termination date written into Trump's own executive order. There was no final report and no accounting. It had promised $2 trillion in savings and claimed roughly $215 billion, a number that has never held up: the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service estimated the paid leave, rehiring, and lost productivity DOGE caused would cost taxpayers $135 billion in fiscal 2025 alone.

The savings claims themselves were never verifiable. GAO auditors found DOGE "did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings" for grants.

Bean was still telling reporters "DOGE is alive" seven months before its charter ran out.

His bill to make DOGE permanent went nowhere

In March 2025, Bean signed on as the lead cosponsor of H.R. 2006, the DOGE Act, sponsored by fellow Florida Rep. Cory Mills — legislation to write DOGE permanently into federal law. Bean's office announced it as "Bean, Mills Introduce Bill to Codify DOGE."

It picked up 8 cosponsors total. It was referred to the House Oversight Committee on March 10, 2025, and in the seventeen months since, it has had exactly zero further action.

He also filed the "DRAIN THE SWAMP Act," which would force nearly a third of federal workers to relocate out of Washington. That went nowhere either.

What did pass, Floridians paid for

The one piece of the DOGE agenda that actually became law was the clawback of money Congress had already approved. Bean voted for the Rescissions Act of 2025, which cancelled $9.4 billion that had already been appropriated for foreign aid and public broadcasting. He voted for it 214–212 in June 2025, then again to send the final version to the President's desk, 216–213, in July.

That's the ledger. A caucus that stopped meeting. A bill with eight cosponsors and no hearing. One law that cancelled money for public broadcasting. And a national debt $3.9 trillion higher than the day he said it was a "wakeup call."

He won't take the question in person

If you want to ask Bean how the DOGE Caucus is going, you'll have a hard time finding him.

When constituents organized their own town halls in Fernandina Beach in the spring of 2025 — during the height of the DOGE firings — Bean announced he "will not be attending any of the fake 'town hall' meetings sponsored by the Democrat Party and their cohorts," even though the organizer said the events were open to everyone. More than 200 people came to the first one. Neither Bean nor any staffer showed up, and he had not held an in-person town hall since the Trump administration took office.

He does hold telephone town halls where, critics say, the questions are screened first.

Bean's own DOGE Caucus platform ends with an eighth principle: "Engaging with the American people is necessary to ensure our success."

Source

"DOGE is not dead," defiant House caucus leader declares in push to revive Musk-era cuts — Fox News Digital, December 8, 2025. Photo: Fox News.