Arizona’s governor unveils (a more careful) efficiency plan: ‘We will not slash and burn’
Proving that not all strains of government efficiency are aptly symbolized by a billionaire waving a chainsaw, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs this week unveiled a lean but measured plan that she said will save her state as much as $100 million over the next three years.
The plan, called the Arizona Capacity and Efficiency initiative, follows through on a promise the governor made during her State of the State address last January, “to streamline, consolidate and cut costs to make government work for our people.” Like federal DOGE efforts led last year by Elon Musk, the plan nods at a shaky economic outlook and includes the use of technology, though they’re almost certain to be used with greater care. “We will not slash and burn with stunts that do more harm than good,” Hobbs said in her January address. “We will not decimate important services that families and businesses rely on.”
Arizona’s ACE plan will, press materials explain, “consolidate state purchasing power to secure bulk-discounts and reduce waste,” standardize administrative services and technologies to reduce redundancies and employ artificial intelligence “to optimize services and boost workforce productivity.” The state will lead an Arizona Efficiency Challenge, in which state employees are invited to share cost-saving ideas, and expand the remit of the Arizona Innovation Hub, a state-run accelerator for schools and educational services.
Pushes for greater government efficiency are as old as government itself, but Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency last year inspired new initiatives in numerous conservative states, including Iowa, where Gov. Kim Reynolds signed an executive order creating a DOGE task force, just days after bragging before Congress that her state “was doing DOGE before DOGE was a thing.” Reynolds had eliminated 21 state agencies, 600 open positions and 1,200 regulations, and identified 4,700 acres of farmland the state could sell, following an efficiency push in 2022. Her office claimed those efforts saved taxpayers $217 million over 18 months.
Iowa’s efficiency work predated Musk’s, but it was not unusual work for a state. State government executives continually renew such initiatives in various forms, forever mindful of the public’s expectation that they responsibly administer the taxpayer’s purse. Justin Marlowe, a research professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, said that amid the diversity of approaches to improving efficiency found in states, some “have been more productive than others,” but that “Arizona’s approach could be among the most productive.”
ACE will be led by Amy Edwards Holmes, a former executive director of the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence, at Johns Hopkins University. She also spent seven-and-a-half years at the Treasury Department, from 2015 to 2022, a period spanning three very different presidents. The governor’s office noted that Holmes’ work included overseeing federal financial operations, as a deputy assistant secretary, and leading implementation of the DATA Act, the nation’s first open data law.
Marlowe described in an email how “efficiency” is sometimes used as a political pretext to curb spending “in areas that key decision makers oppose, often without much evidence or any real understanding of how those cuts affect real people. That’s clearly not the case here.”
Texas was among the states last year to launched an agency modeled after the federal DOGE unit, called the Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office. During its formation, the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, and state lawmakers proudly drafted behind Musk’s destructive wake in Washington. (An analysis published last year in The Lancet analyzing just one of DOGE’s initiatives, cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, concluded that his rapid removal of humanitarian efforts could lead to an additional 14 million additional deaths worldwide.) But the Texas version of DOGE has proven as benign as any state efficiency effort, of any era. Musk’s online and on-stage antics notwithstanding, states have continually validated a core contention of Marlowe’s: “Efficiency is boring.”
“It’s difficult to get taxpayers excited about procurement reform, streamlining operations, thoughtfully adopting AI, and so forth,” he said. “But when thoughtfully done, reforms focused on efficiency can produce a big return on investment for taxpayers. Arizona seems to have put in place the right people with the right mandate to deliver those results.”
