DOGE Spreading Like Wildfire as States Create Replicas Aimed at Rooting Out Government Waste

Following in the footsteps of President Trump and Elon Musk, states across the nation are moving to create their own Departments of Government Efficiency offices to find — and kill — programs deemed to be wasting taxpayer money.The state-level campaigns have coined witty names, like Wisconsin’s GOAT committee, Florida’s FLOGE, and the BullDOGEr in North Carolina. Other states are also jumping on board the DOGE train, including Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, New Jersey, and Iowa, among others.“In the last few weeks, we’ve jokingly started calling ourselves MOGE, the Mississippi Office of Government Efficiency, like Elon Musk’s DOGE,” state auditor Shad White told Fox News. “We approach our work with the same attention to every penny as DOGE, and I’m happy to be Mississippi’s Musk.”Mr. White’s office can’t actually kill wasteful spending, but it alerts lawmakers to what it finds. So far, he says the auditor’s office and his team have discovered about $400 million worth of waste.“We’ve been working on this project really for the last couple of years. And what’s encouraging right now is that President Trump and Elon Musk are doing DOGE, which has raised public awareness about the amount of fraud, waste and abuse in government,” Mr. White said.While some states are just now contemplating the concept, Texas is moving ahead quickly, with state lawmakers already set to pass a bill to create a DOGE-like efficiency office within the governor’s office. An advisory panel within the office would seek ways to cut red tape, eliminate unnecessary rules, and make regulations more cost-effective.The Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, said he has prioritized the bill “because President Trump’s creation of the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ inspired me to find ways Texas can save taxpayers and businesses money by cutting burdensome regulations,” Mr. Patrick told Fox 26.Meanwhile, Florida is busy with its own version, dubbed FLOGE by the local press. “Florida has set the standard for fiscally conservative governance, and our new Florida DOGE task force will do even more to serve the people of Florida,” Governor DeSantis said last month. “It will eliminate redundant boards and commissions, review state university and college operations and spending, utilize artificial intelligence to further examine state agencies to uncover hidden waste, and even audit the spending habits of local entities to shine the light on waste and bloat,” the governor said, who boasted that “we were DOGE before DOGE was cool.”In New Jersey, a Republican assemblyman, Alex Sauickie, has sponsored a DOGE bill. “We’re going to have to make those decisions and say, ‘Hey, we can’t be funding minor league ballparks or tennis courts or dominoes clubs with taxpayer money,'” he said. The same thing is happening in Oklahoma, where the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, announced the launch of DOGE-OK. “Once there was this national push for DOGE, the governor wanted to make sure that we’ve turned over all the rocks that need to be turned over in our state government,” Mr. Stitt’s communications director, Abegail Cave, told Business Insider.Over in North Carolina, Keith Kidwell, a Republican in the state’s House of Representatives, proposed the creation of a DOGE-like entity — which he has dubbed BullDOGEr — that will work to restructure red-tape agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles. “I’m not trying to go on a witch hunt,” he said. “I’m going on a tax hunt.”In Wisconsin, a Republican lawmaker, Amanda Nedweski, serves as chairman of a DOGE-inspired initiative called the Assembly Committee on Government Operations, Accountability, and Transparency — or GOAT — and she hopes it will expand to all government spending. “Now even at the school district level, there’s a public demand for: ‘We need a school district DOGE,'” she told Business Insider.Georgia, too, has a variation on the theme, dubbed the Red Tape Rollback Act of 2025, which was sponsored by every Republican state senator. The act requires all state agencies to conduct a top-to-bottom review of all rules and regulations every four years and examine the real cost of all proposed rules.The effort has even found its way to small municipalities. The mayor of Keenesburg, Aron Lam, a small Colorado town, has created a DOGE-like entity, made up of just three people. He told Business Insider that in the last few weeks alone, some 60 officials from towns across the nation have contacted him for information about starting their own mini-DOGEs.“The efforts that Elon Musk started, and that President Trump really supported and started to implement that at the federal level,” Mr. Lam said, were “certainly inspirational.”

DOGE Spreading Like Wildfire as States Create Replicas Aimed at Rooting Out Government Waste

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