“It really is just to try and exchange ideas, get people talking and figure out ways we can best move our shared policy goals forward as well as keeping an eye on making sure that what our state government is spending money on are those critical services,” Fischer told this news outlet.
“We’re not an executive agency of course, we’re not emailing people asking them to give us a list of five things they did last week. We figured DOGE was a great marketing tool, gets people talking.”
President Donald Trump created DOGE to keep his campaign promise to cut government waste and gave Musk nearly unfettered power to execute change. Some of Trump’s cabinet members and members of Congress are starting to push back a bit.
State Rep. Levi Dean, R-Xenia, said their DOGE operation is comprised of elected lawmakers, “it’s not just one person calling the shots.”
“I hope we’ll be able to take a holistic look at the budget and comb through, the legislators, who should be the people controlling the purse strings because you know they were elected by the people,” Dean said. “Take a look at the budget, see if there’s things that government shouldn’t be doing and cut back on those things so we can properly fund things government should be doing.”
DOGE on property tax
The group of 30 and counting — a third are new in the House this year — just started meeting and solidifying their agenda. But property tax reform is on the table.
Rep. David Thomas, the former Ashtabula County auditor who is spearheading property tax reform legislation for House leadership, is a caucus member. Property taxes don’t immediately leap to mind when talking about government efficiency — especially since the state doesn’t receive that particular revenue source — but Thomas said the issue fits the profile of the committee.
“Phase one of our property tax look is actual tax policy, how things operate, what things look like from the tax rate and value side,” Thomas said. “Then phase two would be, a big piece of the issue is just the cost of local government and our local government system and reforming how that system is in operation.”
Most property owners statewide have now been hit with historic tax increases in the aftermath of the pandemic and historic property value spikes. The legislature convened a special Joint Committee on Property Tax Review and Reform to vet ideas last year.
As for the DOGE group, “I think part of the buy-in we want from members of this caucus is for them to introduce legislation that makes government smarter, more efficient and better to understand,” Fischer said.
Finding efficiency
In Washington D.C. Musk and his team are cutting contracts and personnel, and thousands of government workers have been cut or are on the way out. Local DOGE Caucus member Rep. Thomas Hall from Butler County said he is already teeing up bills for consideration.
His first offering targets technology, not heads.
“My first one is called the IT Efficiency and Transparency Act, we’re getting it drafted right now,” he said. “It deals with our state IT systems, right now we don’t have a mechanism to understand the magnitude of our IT systems and we don’t have a network to where they can talk to each other and work with each other. By looking at this we can make government more efficient and hopefully save taxpayer money on the back end of things.”
He said Ohioans need not worry, they don’t intend to bring radical, life-altering change, “all we will be tasked with I believe is making sure that we are spending taxpayer money wisely and making sure we are looking at all the options when it comes to saving money.”
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