Most national media outlets have been busy trying to keep up with the actions of the new Trump administration, particularly the work of Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk touts that DOGE has already identified billions in spending reductions. Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, have been cheering on lawsuits aiming to thwart DOGE.
The Trump administration created DOGE with a January 20 executive order renaming and repurposing the United States Digital Service, an existing entity created by President Barack Obama. The Obama administration launched the Digital Service in 2014 to fix the glitch-ridden rollout of HealthCare.gov. President Trump’s executive order extends DOGE’s remit across the entire federal government and tasks it with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
The attention that DOGE and its work are receiving has even prompted some state lawmakers to call for their own version of DOGE, proposing state-level equivalents tasked with paring back bloated state agencies and reviewing state contracts. In South Carolina, for example, state legislators recently proposed a joint resolution to create a DOGE-like body in the Palmetto State tasked with rooting out wasteful and unnecessary spending by state government.
“I think the beauty of a ‘DOGE’ is that you’re bringing people from outside government and having them to take a look at what’s going on in agencies, whether there are efficiencies to be had and whether there are savings to be had,” South Carolina House Speaker Murrell Smith (R) told statehouse reporters. “That is what you need. You need an outsider approach because that’s a different analysis than an insider approach from legislators.”
“We don’t have an Elon Musk in South Carolina,” House Majority Leader David Hiott (R) told the state press corps. “But it’ll be similar to what’s going on in Washington.” South Carolina might not have an Elon Musk, but if lawmakers in Columbia pass pending legislation to permit direct sales of Teslas and all other electric vehicles, that might make Musk more inclined to send some of his DOGE engineers down south after they’ve finished mapping and sorting out federal payment systems.
“South Carolina has undertaken numerous government efficiency studies in the past, while the most recent effort — dubbed the House Government Efficiency and Legislative Oversight Committee — is still actively collecting public feedback to identify potential efficiencies in agencies like the Department of Insurance, the State Law Enforcement Division and the Department of Education,” the Charleston Post & Courier reported on February 7. “Those reviews only occur every seven years and cover a handful of agencies. Smith told reporters the state equivalent of DOGE would be much more comprehensive, taking a look at everything.”
Speaker Smith, Leader Hiott, and their colleagues in the South Carolina Legislature are demonstrating discipline in not letting a near $2 billion budget surplus, nearly $600 million of which is recurring, dampen their interest in identifying unnecessary spending. Aside from putting the state budget’s rate of growth on a more sustainable trajectory, the more spending cuts that lawmakers identify, the greater the capacity for further income tax rate reduction, which is a high priority for Speaker Smith, Governor Henry McMaster (R), and members of the South Carolina Senate.
South Carolina lawmakers’ interest in reducing state spending and its rate of growth is well founded. That’s because in South Carolina, as in most other states, state government spending over the past decade has grown more rapidly than the rate of population growth plus inflation.
In launching a state-level DOGE, South Carolina has company. Proposals to create state-level DOGEs have also been introduced in Texas, New Hampshire, Idaho, Montana, Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas.
While South Carolina lawmakers look to set up their own DOGE, their neighbors to the north beat them to it. “Last month, North Carolina House Speaker Destin Hall tapped Rep. John Torbett (R-Gaston) and Rep. Keith Kidwell (R-Beaufort) to lead a new select committee on government efficiency,” wrote John Hood — board member of the John Locke Foundation, a Raleigh-based think tank — in a February 15 op-ed.
“As the new Trump administration rightfully takes aim at Washington D.C.’s wasteful spending and inefficient bureaucracy, it is time for us in Raleigh to do the same,” Representative Kidwell said. Speaker Hall added that “unnecessary government bloat and waste hurt North Carolina taxpayers’ wallets and divert funds that could be used for core functions such as public safety and education.”
“One issue deserving reexamination is the distribution of jobs across state government,” writes Hood. “North Carolina has more public employees per capita than the national median. While this is partly attributable to the fact that we have more government-owned hospitals than most states, lawmakers ought to compare staffing levels in our departments to comparable agencies in peer states.”
Hood also urged North Carolina lawmakers to consider state agency consolidations. What’s more, he explained that by eliminating some state licensing and certification boards, state legislators “would not only cut administrative costs but also expand economic freedom for North Carolinians who may want to change careers or go into business for themselves.”
DOGE and similar state-level ventures are not without precedent. “DOGE has existed twice before,” noted Chamath Palihapitiya — venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and co-host of the All-In podcast — in a February 6 post on X. “Most recently was under President Clinton’s ‘National Partnership for Reinventing Government’ and most famously in 1941 under Then-Senator Truman’s ‘Truman Committee’.”
“Also important to know that with very little money, specifically less than $7M over seven years, the Truman Committee saved the USA $10-15B,” Palihapitiya added. “These are 1941 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, the Truman Committee saved USA almost $250B of today’s dollars.”
Others point to the savings achieved in the 1940s as a model to replicate today. “To help reduce federal spending so the nation could focus on winning World War II, then-Virginia Sen. Harry F. Byrd demanded the creation of the ‘Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures,’” wrote Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, about the the “anti-appropriations committee” that Senator Byrd chaired. Norquist noted the success this bipartisan committee had in reducing federal spending:
“The committee had 14 members: three from each of the House and Senate Appropriations committees, three from the House Ways and Means Committee, and three from the Senate Finance Committee. There were eight Democrats and four Republicans, as the Democrats held the majority in Congress. The Treasury secretary and the director of the bureau of the budget also served on it. The committee could recommend budget cuts and the Congress would vote on them.
The Work Projects Administration (WPA), the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps were downsized and then abolished. If these programs had not ended in the 1940s they would today be multi-billion dollar, immortal and unchallengeable ‘entitlements.’
From 1941-1945, the committee made recommendations that resulted in real savings of $2.5 billion or almost $31 billion in today’s dollars. (The committee’s work cost only $45 million. Nice ratio.)”
Judge Glock, director of research and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, notes that one can go farther back in time to find other examples of committees that have successfully reduced federal spending. Glock points to the “retrenchment” committees of the nineteenth century and how “they were an important part of cutting costs” in the 1840s and 1870s.
The lack of spending restraint in Washington is well-documented, but the numbers show greater government efficiency is also needed at the state level. A review of aggregate state spending nationwide from 2014 to 2023, excluding federal transfer funds, shows that the 50 state governments grew their budgets by 61.1% over that decade. If all state spending had grown in line with the rate inflation and population growth over that period, state governments would’ve spent $454 billion less in 2023 than they actually did. That’s nearly half of a trillion dollars in a single year that taxpayers could’ve held onto had state lawmakers, not slashed spending, but ensured that it grew more modestly.
Musk and his team at DOGE have much work left to do in Washington, but they have already inspired legislators in a number of states to take action to address the rapid growth of government spending where they live. While budgets at all levels of government have grown at an unsustainable pace for years, lawmakers in many state capitals now believe, with the help of state-level DOGEs, that they can begin taking steps to ensure that, moving forward, the size and cost of state government grows at a slower and more affordable pace.
