Budget constraints forcing states to ‘double down’ on efficiency, modernization, Pew report claims
A new report published Friday by Pew Charitable Trusts claims that most states, facing challenging budget constraints, are “doubling down” by turning their efforts to modernizing their processes and increasing efficiency.
The report says that most states — which have faced tighter finances and rising public expectations over the last few years, especially following the election of President Donald Trump and his administration’s waning support for state activities — are allowing fiscal pressure to accelerate government innovation.
The report says that while each state is tackling budgeting issues uniquely, since they each have their own unique budgeting challenges, there are common threads among them, including that many states are finding new uses of data and technology, and redesigning their processes to retool government work.
“These efforts are accelerating as tightening budgets collide with rapid advances in technology, including generative artificial intelligence, that make efficiency goals that once were out of reach now seem attainable,” the report reads.
Some advances, such as digitization and automation, are helping states to deliver on their obligations and services with fewer resources. States including Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Texas are reducing costs and waste by establishing government groups modeled after the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s temporary division that was tasked with rooting out fraud, waste and abuse in the federal government.
The report claims that others states, including California, Colorado, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington, are instead focused on bolstering digital services and improving how residents access state services. Last week, Pennsylvania’s Office of Administration announced that it had saved the state $37 million under the administration of Gov. Josh Shapiro by modernizing legacy technologies and applying smart financial management.
Despite the variance in approach between states, the report claims, the “common thread is a deliberate push to retool key systems and processes, improving service delivery while trimming costs.”
“When city and state officials fulfill people’s expectations, they create small increments of trust which aggregate to more total trust in the way government operates,” Stephen Goldsmith, professor of urban policy at Harvard’s Bloomberg Center for Cities, is quoted as saying in the report. “Government needs to prove that it can do its basic and core work better, faster, and more responsively.”
