Republicans and Democrats will face off in a small subcommittee hearing this week to battle over Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, even as the billionaire and his small cadre of young staffers rifle through the executive branch largely unimpeded. For the panel, both sides of the aisle have chosen some of their most prolific political brawlers to fight it out. 

Mr. Musk started his campaign against certain federal agencies just days after President Trump was sworn in three weeks ago, and he has already successfully shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, gained limited access to the Treasury Department’s payments database, and played a role in ceasing the day-to-day operations of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

As Mr. Musk does so, GOP lawmakers are hoping to offer strident defenses of the world’s richest man, his team, and his legislative goals, even though Democrats see it as a prime opportunity to go after their new foil. 

“We are here! We are also going to make sure that they uphold the law. We are not going to sit around while you go ahead and desecrate our Constitution, or you look at the laws that have been passed into law and say, ‘nevermind, we’ll just ignore that.’ Instead, we are going to be in your face . . . and we are going to make sure you understand what democracy looks like!” a Democratic member of the new subcommittee, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, said at a protest outside the Treasury Department last week. 

Republicans have tapped a number of members of the House Freedom Caucus, the small band of pugilistic hard-right lawmakers who are known to never compromise. The chairwoman of the DOGE subcommittee will be Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, despite being censured and stripped of her committee assignments just four years ago, has now seen her stock rise with Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. 

Ms. Greene said Monday that her goal is to codify Mr. Musk’s proposed spending cuts, acting as a kind of conduit between the small DOGE team and those lawmakers in the House who control government spending bills. 

“So we have to put into place the, basically, the recommendations and the changes that Elon Musk and his very smart team of young men on DOGE are actually suggesting,” Ms. Greene said in an interview with Real America’s Voice. “We can do that through the DOGE committee. That’s what my committee is going to do. We’re also going to be using this very important, powerful subcommittee to highlight intensely, with full transparency for the American people, exactly what Elon Musk and DOGE [are] finding.

“We’re going to be bringing forward the legislative changes, bills that need to be passed, and suggestions that need to be made through appropriations and our Budget Committee,” she said. 

The House Republican leadership has chosen three other right-wing lawmakers to serve alongside Ms. Greene, including other members of the Freedom Caucus — Congressman Brandon Gill, Congressman Michael Cloud, and Congressman Eric Burlison. In total, there will be just 14 members of the subcommittee, six Democrats and eight Republicans. 

On the Democratic side, the rank-and-file members who have joined the panel include Ms. Crockett, who has become a social media star thanks to her frequent boisterous battles with Ms. Greene in the Oversight Committee. Congressman Robert Garcia and Congressman Greg Casar — the latter being the chairman of the Progressive Caucus — will also sit on the panel. A longtime member of the Oversight Committee, Congressman Stephen Lynch, a former Boston labor union leader, has a seat as well. The most senior Democrat will be Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who is a non-voting House member from the District of Columbia. 

Mr. Musk has become the Democrats’ new boogeyman, and the public campaign appears to be working. As the president’s approval rating remains relatively high, voters have a mixed view of Mr. Musk, with one CBS News poll showing that just 51 percent of Americans want him to have “a lot” or some influence in the government, while 49 percent say he should have a small role or none at all. On Monday, Democrats protesting at Baltimore unveiled their new moniker for Mr. Musk and his team: “The Department of Government Evil.”

Mr. Trump has declined to say so far if anything is off-limits to Mr. Musk and his DOGE team. 

During his pre-Super Bowl interview on Sunday, the president said that he would soon send the group into the Department of Education and the Pentagon to conduct its audits. Mr. Trump had promised to shut down the Education Department and return those federal dollars to states so they can handle their own school systems, though he still wants a full accounting of the department’s money before he tries to do so. The Pentagon, on the other hand, is a wholly different beast, having never passed its own audits by the inspector general there.