President-elect Donald Trump’s new DOGE commission is inspiring copycats at the state level.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, announced this week in her Condition of the State address the formation of a state Department of Government Efficiency Commission.
Ms. Reynolds said the effort will build on her administration’s success in eliminating hundreds of millions of dollars in wasteful spending and help lay the groundwork for “meaningful property tax reform.”
“I like to say that we were doing DOGE before DOGE was a thing,” Ms. Reynolds said. “And to build on our success, I’m launching our own State DOGE, to find even greater savings and efficiencies in both state and local government.”
Ms. Reynolds said she has asked Emily Schmitt, general counsel of Sukup Manufacturing, the country’s largest family-owned, full-line grain drying and storage equipment manufacturer, to lead the Iowa effort.
President-elect Donald Trump, days after winning the White House, announced the formation of a federal DOGE commission. Led by tech billionaire Elon Musk and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Mr. Trump has tasked them with identifying ways “to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”
Mr. Musk declared the group “will send shock waves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people!”
The commission has generated a lot of buzz in the halls of Congress, where fiscal hawks have fought for years against the big spending consensus in Washington and yearn for a more serious debate about the nation’s annual deficits and soaring debt that now tops $36 trillion.
Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy signaled early on that they intended to identify upward of $2 trillion in wasteful federal spending.
Mr. Musk sought to tamp down expectations this week, saying that there was a “good shot” of cutting half that amount of federal spending, describing the $2 trillion figure as the “best-case outcome.”
Meanwhile, liberal Democrats are sounding the alarm, warning that the committee will cut Social Security and Medicare and gut federal programs that help lift working families and poor communities.
Mr. Ramaswamy has said the commission is expecting to recommend shuttering some federal agencies, slicing the number of federal employees, and targeting fraud in entitlement programs.
Haywood Talcove, CEO of government at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, told The Washington Times this week that his calculations show that the government spends $800 billion annually on fraudulent benefit payments, including on Medicaid and food stamps.
Another Iowa Republican, Sen. Joni Ernst, is chairing a Senate DOGE caucus and has already started highlighting some of the federal government’s questionable spending practices.
Ms. Ernst, shortly after the election, provided Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy with a list of upward of $1 trillion in possible federal spending cuts.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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