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G.O.P. governors and legislators are parroting the federal Department of Government Efficiency by creating panels at the state level. But the similarities only go so far.
March 9, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
Clamoring to capitalize on the MAGA base’s excitement over Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Republican officials in more than a dozen states have moved to start their own versions.
But they want everyone to know they’ve already spent years cutting costs.
“We were DOGE before DOGE was cool,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said recently. Or as Gov. Kevin Stitt put it in a social media post: “We’ve been DOGE’ing in Oklahoma before it was cool.” Then there was Gov. Brad Little, who in his Jan. 6 State of the State address boasted that “Idaho was DOGE before DOGE was cool.”
The flurry of state efforts to replicate the Trump administration’s work in Washington comes as state budgets across the country are under strain, with tax revenue falling and federal spending drying up.
In Oklahoma, Governor Stitt said he hoped to cut more than a thousand jobs over the next year from the state’s current work force of 31,600, though he and his staff emphasized retirements and attrition, and said layoffs were not “Plan A.” Governor DeSantis has said he plans to cut 740 jobs, announced as part of his budget.
But the state initiatives so far do not reflect what is taking place in Washington. Nobody appears to be unleashing software engineers to rewrite government code and delve into confidential databases. Threats of job cuts have been relatively few so far, which is not to say there won’t be some measure of bona fide budgetary relief that emerges.
Many of these efforts to leverage the DOGE brand — such as the panels recently created in Texas, North Carolina and Kansas — have been started by state lawmakers and resemble cost-cutting committees that frequently crop up in legislatures. In some cases, lawmakers are setting up websites and soliciting citizen advice. (“Your submissions will be reviewed and incorporated into our ongoing efforts to make government processes more efficient,” a Missouri Senate panel says on its new cost-cutting portal.)
