The DOGE Committee Has Become the Modern-Era HUAC

The DOGE Committee was chartered to fight fiscal “waste” at the federal level. Its foray into USA Fencing—which receives no federal dollars—foreshadows a much darker future.

The circus came to Washington last week. Or as New Mexico’s Democratic Representative Melanie Stansbury called it, “the USA Fencing Subcommittee” of the DOGE Subcommittee of the Oversight Committee of Congress.

The three-and-a-half-hour-long show was led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who perhaps fashioned herself the ringleader or the lion tamer. In actuality, as per usual, she was the clown.

The DOGE Committee was supposedly chartered to fight fiscal “waste” at the federal level. It has investigated topics like defunding PBS and government-owned properties, but its foray into a privately-run fencing organization—which receives no federal dollars—foreshadows a much darker future. Under the DOGE Committee, anything and everything could be related to “government efficiency,” thrusting any perceived enemy of the far-right state into the spotlight for harassment and ridicule. When pressed by Democratic colleagues about how and why USA Fencing even fell under DOGE’s jurisdiction, MTG’s answer was more or less “because I said so.”

The DOGE Committee is well on its way to becoming our generation’s HUAC—the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was a Red Scare-era Congressional formation dedicated to rooting out the “communists,” as well as the gays, the gender deviants, the satanists, the Soviets, or anybody else they decided they didn’t like. At its core, last week’s DOGE hearing was not about women’s sports. It was a manufactured spectacle; a content farm; an all-American propaganda factory.

The hearing centered around Stephanie Turner, a 31-year-old who was awarded $5,000 by an anti-trans extremist group after staging a premeditated protest against a trans fencer, who is twelve years her junior.

Watching it left viewers with more questions than answers—literally. The GOP did not allow key witnesses like USA Fencing's board chairman Damien Lehfeldt nor the National Women's Law Center President Fatima Graves to answer almost any question they were asked. Instead, they were immediately interrupted by Republicans spewing disinformation and hate speech about the “groomers”—a slur levied by extremists to suggest all trans people are pedophiles.

If one could speculate what goes on in the head of such a strange and terrifying creature as MTG, it could be argued that Lehfeldt was targeted (as opposed to the USA Fencing CEO, who would be more capable of answering questions, Lehfeldt said) because he presented an easy target for Fox News-ready soundbites. He has been a vocal proponent of trans rights. The congressional subpoena issued to him, forcing him to testify, states that he allegedly self-identified as the owner of a Reddit account that posted, “Spread love. I know it sounds cheesy to say that, but our LGBTQIA+ family is in a lot of pain right now. Remind them they’re seen and remind them they matter. And if you’re in DC, come to the hearing.”

The two “expert” witnesses for the GOP were gender radicals like Turner and Payton McNabb, a former collegiate athlete who sustained a TBI during a volleyball match, propelling her into a lucrative career of anti-trans activism.

Turner, meanwhile, has said she spent years investigating every opponent ahead of her matches to try to clock if they were trans women, because she avoided tournaments with so-called “male” fencers. The heinous bigotry and unscientific implications of that comment aside, it’s not even true. Just seven days before the now-infamous competition that launched her own career in anti-trans activism, she willingly entered a mixed-gender event, earning eighth place out of 32 fencers, beating many presumably-cis men. So she does fence males. The only person she refused to fence was a trans woman. (A side note: Presumed-cis women have beaten transgender women in 55% of the bouts for which USA Fencing has data.)

Meanwhile, McNabb talked about the impacts of her TBI. Concussions in women's sports are real and dire, but there is no evidence that trans inclusion is caused by or is correlated with higher rates of injury in sports. And McNabb’s story is by no means rare. Studies show that millions of concussions occur in sports every year, especially in women’s volleyball. There are countless Payton McNabbs in this country, every single day, whose injuries have nothing to do with trans athletes.

Nonetheless, anti-trans extremists have campaigned on ejecting trans women, or women even accused of being trans, from competitions like darts, billiards, poker and hot-dog eating.

However, under the rainbow wigs and behind the shiny red noses, people like MTG are still human beings—people with names and addresses, people who can be called out, voted out, protested, resisted. And outside of—or in some cases because of—the GOP’s violently anti-trans rhetoric, there are real issues facing young athletes, regardless of gender: sexual abuse, poor safety precautions, or a lack of resources depending on one’s gender, race or socio-economic status. There are trans and cis athletes alike facing gender-based harassment so dire that they’ve had to seek out armed guards.

But discussions about the real issues facing women and girls in sports were silenced. For example, the sole expert witness that the Democrats could bring in, Graves, tried to address concussion inequities in women’s sports; the kind of inequities that may have impacted McNabb. Healthcare providers are less likely to be present at the time of girls' sports-related concussions than boys, and there are fewer research studies focusing on sports-related concussions among girls compared to boys.

“I think the lesson learned around this situation,” Graves begins to say, “is around concussion program—”

Rep. Eric Burlison, a Missouri Republican, cuts her off to rail against “making” athletes take “a spiked ball to the forehead if that's what it takes for a trans person to play.”

“This was terrible,” Graves says of McNabb’s injury. “I have solutions—”

But Burlison cuts her off again, yielding his time. She never got to finish the sentence.