While the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may be a recent development from the federal government, the idea of trimming excess spending from the government to benefit the lives of Americans has been the focus of our 50-state Network for decades.
While DOGE efforts are headed by Elon Musk at the federal level, it should come as no surprise that the momentum surrounding DOGE has given our partners the opportunity to build out state-level DOGE efforts of their own. The Pelican Institute for Public Policy, located in Louisiana, is one example of an organization working to streamline spending in their state.
Their DOGE efforts began last fall during a special legislative session to tackle a fundamental reform of Louisiana’s tax code. The Pelican Institute worked tirelessly to push for a streamlined tax code, and their hard work paid off when the governor and legislature embraced two sustainable solutions—a government growth limit that puts guardrails on recurring government spending, and the governor’s announcement of the fiscal responsibility program chaired by a local business leader to look for areas to trim excess government spending.
While this was already a noteworthy victory, the Pelican Institute didn’t rest on their laurels. They implemented a two-prong effort to ensure that this doesn’t turn into a passing fad, but rather, is part of ongoing and long-term reform to the state government.
The first prong is to provide whatever support they can to the legislature and governor as they pursue areas to trim spending. This includes timely updates, like an upcoming report with specific recommendations, but also praising lawmakers when they make sound decisions.
“We have to make sure these ideas are politically preferable, because the moment lawmakers talk about spending cuts, they’re going to get an earful from a lot of people, and that can be hard,” said Pelican CEO Daniel Erspamer. “A really important part of this effort is having the right solutions and then praising and helping the folks who lead the way on them.”
The second prong is an awareness campaign to ensure that state-level DOGE is more than just a passing fad. At their Annual Solutions Summit, DOGE had top billing with prominent speakers like former Mississippi Speaker of the House Philip Gunn and Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist attesting to the importance of trimming excess spending. The Pelican Institute also sent out a call to their supporters to look at the state’s spending transparency portal and look for any spending that seemed unnecessary or out of place. They’ve received a handful of submissions already and plan to investigate each one to offer up as a recommendation to the legislature.
It’s important to note, however, that while Pelican is building out their efforts related to DOGE, this is by no means their first dip in the pool of government accountability. For the last several years, Pelican has been championing the “One Door” policy—a consolidated workforce and safety net model that has been successfully implemented in Utah—as a pathway to move people from dependency to self-sufficiency.
While on the surface this may seem like an unrelated venture, the One Door model is, in its most basic form, the elimination of government redundancy and streamlining it into one sustainable system.
“A lot of waste and duplication has happened because of the complexity of the structure of government,” notes Daniel. “One of the most challenging logistical parts of implementing the idea of One Door is consolidating all the different data systems. I think we’ve counted twenty different data and eligibility systems—none of which talk to one another. There are two in the Department of Health and Medicaid alone that are essentially the same system with one or two minor tweaks, but it’s sold to our state government for $25 million a year each.”
Consolidating these systems would save Louisianan taxpayers millions in the long term, but it would have a large up-front cost—something that has proven to be a major hurdle for most legislators who tend to think in a one-year budget cycle.
But the workforce is only one area of the Louisianian government that is being held back by its redundancy. The Louisiana Treasury sends out grants to non-government organizations (NGOs) annually—the first portion is sent to the organization that spends the money, writes a report on how it was used, and then the second portion is sent. The catch? Most of these organizations have no idea the money from the government is coming or the requirements to receive the second half of the payment.
“There’s a sizeable amount of money sitting in the state treasury that has been appropriated to NGOs that has never been paid out because the organization took the first chunk of money and never reported back,” explains Daniel. “The way the system is currently set up there’s no way to know how much fraud is or is not occurring with that pot of money. I’d love to see some guardrails put in place to prevent organizations who haven’t reported from continuing to receive government assistance.”
This is only the beginning of Pelican’s DOGE program, which hopes to continue to grow in the next several years. Daniel and his team have begun the search for talent who could take DOGE on full-time. Within a year, Pelican hopes to see demonstrable reforms toward government efficiency between the government growth limit, the governor’s fiscal responsibility program, and Pelican’s own recommendations. This could come in the form of cutting wasteful spending, or reforms that consolidate government agencies to cut down on costs.
In the next five years, Daniel is dreaming big. He hopes that Pelican can lead the way to a restructured state government focused on sustainable spending. This would include a significant overhaul of the state’s technology to cut down on the rampant redundancies that are currently present—something they believe will be necessary in the coming years.
“If current efforts are successful at the federal level in making changes to education and Medicaid, among other things, the states are about to get a lot more responsibility,” says Daniel. “Right now, the state of Louisiana takes an absurd amount of federal taxpayer dollars, but if that changes, are we ready? Right now, the answer to that is “no,” but efforts like this can ensure we’re more prepared.”
