DOGE Madness: ‘Sweet 16’ bracket set up as craziest federal waste competes for championship

EXCLUSIVE: Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leaders in the Senate will be releasing an NCAA-style bracket of the craziest items of federal waste needing to be cut, as the public will be able to actively vote for their picks in successive Elite Eight and Final Four rounds.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the leader of the upper chamber’s DOGE caucus, told Fox News Digital on Friday that while college basketball’s March Madness only lasts a month, the federal government’s “spending madness” is a year-round, debt-defying event.

“The Senate DOGE Caucus is dividing and conquering to bring waste to a squealing halt,” Ernst said.

“This March, we will be scoring buckets for taxpayers by increasing transparency, stopping the silly spending, and making government actually start to work for the American people it serves.”

Sixteen “seeds” of waste will be posted in a bracket and put up for public polling on X to determine which eight waste items are bad enough to advance; followed by the next-worst four, and championship two.

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The Senate DOGE Caucus presents the 2025 Tournament of Waste. (Office of Sen. Joni Ernst)

Each DOGE caucus member received or picked priority waste items for the tournament. While there may not be any major upsets, like Lehigh University’s 2012 win over #1-seed Duke, each item’s introduction to the public may cause the same surprise.

Sen. Cyntha Lummis, R-Wyo., has her spot on the bracket represented by a Biden administration appropriation of $4.5 million to “combat disinformation” in Kazakhstan.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., who coached Auburn’s football team for many years, will be represented in the tourney by an allocation of $168,000 for an “Anthony Fauci Exhibit” at the National Institutes of Health Museum in Maryland.

A $7.9 million expenditure on teaching journalists in Sri Lanka to avoid “binary-gendered language” will be in the bracket under Sen. John Kennedy’s, R-La., name.

Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., picked a $45 million Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) scholarship program for Burmese people to be featured at the event.

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Ernst, meanwhile, will be represented by the $4 million that the Departments of Agriculture and Interior spent on setting up a farming infrastructure for insect-based food consumption for humans.

Some of the other DOGE Madness bracket “teams” include billions in costs associated with the ATF illegally miscategorizing bureau employees as “law enforcement” (Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa), $690,000 to study cannabis use among “sexual-minority gender-diverse individuals” (Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo.), $12 million for a Las Vegas pickleball facility (Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont.) and $1.75 million for MoMA – a New York City museum with already $5 billion in assets (Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah).

Additionally, Sen. James Lankford’s, R-Okla., waste bracket includes $2 billion sent to the Taliban since the Biden administration’s 2021 withdrawal.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., is represented by a six-figure line item for vegetable gardens in El Salvador, and Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., has a $1.3 million subsidy for equity and advocacy for Long Island transgender “youth of color.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson’s, R-Wis., bracket position is dubbed the “liberal four corners.”

Johnson is represented by a $100,000 EPA grant to a major city’s teachers’ union foundation to hold a 14-day Environmental Justice Freedom School that the DOGE caucus said touches on the quartet of climate change, teachers’ unions, indoctrinating children and paid activism.

Elsewhere in the Sweet 16 bracket, Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s, R-Tenn., position is represented by a $22 billion allocation from the Department of Health and Human Services to provide free housing and vehicles for illegal immigrants – and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., sought to highlight millions in wasteful spending on gender transition procedures for U.S. service members.

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The final spot in the bracket is for $1.45 billion in FEMA funds for luxury hotels for illegals, an item called out by Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho.

Risch notably introduced legislation to end the practice, called the End FEMA Benefits for Illegal Immigrants Act.

Amid the tournament’s division of varying types of government waste, the Senate DOGE caucus will also announce Friday that it is divvying up “priority areas” for groups of senators to focus on.

Acquisition reform, digitizing antiquated government systems, transparency efforts, restoring “‘service’ to the civil service,” fraud, non-strategic foreign aid, and cost-efficiency are all areas of study being assigned across the DOGE caucus as the legislative year heats up, Fox News Digital has learned.