Establishing a Missouri Office of Government Efficiency (MOGE)

The size of Missouri’s government has nearly doubled over the past five years, and given the recent commitment from President-elect Donald Trump to establish a Department of Government Efficiency at the federal level, the time is right for Missouri to establish its own Missouri Office of Government Efficiency (MOGE) to rein in excess spending and unneeded regulations.

If Missouri’s elected officials are serious about addressing our state government’s unsustainable growth, they should look at past efforts undertaken across the country to see what might work. Perhaps the most successful state-based cost-cutting initiative in history was then–California Governor Ronald Reagan’s 1967 executive order creating the “Governor’s Survey on Efficiency and Cost Control”. (The text of that order is available here.)

Reagan’s blueprint outlined some some key principles that any Missouri initiative should consider:

Governor Created

• The Governor is the elected official best situated to coordinate an effort that examines all parts of Missouri government and to start implementing solutions. He can ensure that all executive branch officials cooperate in providing information and executing reforms.

Goal-Oriented

• To help ensure success, the initiative needs to start with a clear mission, a top-level objective, stretch goals, and a commitment from everyone involved (inside and outside government) to reach those goals.
• Much of the data needed to inform decisions will not be immediately available. Rooting out inefficiency will require targeted requests or establishing new metrics to get the information necessary to achieve the initiative’s goals.

Led by Non-Government Experts

• Reagan understood that getting a handle on government growth required innovation, creativity, and outside-the-box thinking that could only come from those outside of government. A Missouri initiative should seek insights from business executives, nonprofit experts, former government officials, and financial consultants with prior public-sector knowledge or experience successfully turning around companies.

Privately Funded

• Efforts to find cost savings in government shouldn’t be dependent on government funding for functioning. Reagan’s efficiency initiatives at both the state and federal level were entirely funded by private sources.

Pre-Specified Timelines

• Time is of the essence for Missouri when it comes to cutting costs. Ensuring the work is completed in a thorough and expedient fashion will require deadlines, perhaps with the option to extend them based upon meeting preapproved metrics.

Commitment to Implementing Solutions

• One of the biggest hindrances to Reagan’s cost-cutting efforts was a lack of legislative commitment to implementing the survey’s recommendations. In fact, only about one third of the recommended cost savings could be realized without any legislation being passed. Going into the efficiency exercise with a commitment from legislative leaders will be key for the initiative’s lasting success.

All told, Reagan’s citizen-led commission of more than 200 private-sector leaders was able to recommend, in short order, more than 2,000 reforms to improve California’s government operations and significantly cut costs. These recommendations included long-term savings estimates for California taxpayers of more than $500 million, which if adjusted for inflation would amount to about $4.2 billion today.

A similar result for Missouri today would be a much needed step in the right direction. It’s long past time for a serious effort in Jefferson City to rein in the state government’s excess, and taking a page out of Reagan’s book by turning to the private sector for meaningful solutions might be the most promising path forward for achieving long-term success.

Following the Reagan and DOGE frameworks, here are some specific examples of what a Missouri initiative could look like:

Creation

• Establish by executive order a Missouri Office of Government Efficiency (MOGE)

Objective

• Mission: The Missouri Office of Government Efficiency (MOGE) would conduct a comprehensive review of Missouri’s government. This review would include all services, programs, spending, regulations, and administrative practices. The goal would be to determine how Missouri’s government can be improved, as Governor Reagan specified in his original executive order, to be “the most efficient, expeditious, and economical” in the country.
• Pre-Specified Timelines: This review, along with actionable recommendations, should be completed by no later than December 31, 2025.
• Insights from Business (performance metrics): Given that Missouri’s budget is approximately twice its pre-COVID size, federal COVID relief for states is ending, and state tax revenues are down, a reasonable goal would be to return Missouri to its fiscal year 2019 cost trajectory unless a cost–benefit analysis by MOGE clearly justifies an alternative savings target. In dollar terms, this would amount to an approximate inflation-adjusted reduction of $2 billion in general funds.

Organizational Structure

• Led by Nongovernment Experts: The governor could appoint two highly respected leaders from outside of government who have a proven track record of delivering transformational change to large organizations to lead MOGE. In addition, to help ensure the initiative’s success, MOGE leadership should be allowed to select any additional staff or members they deem necessary to conduct the review.
• Privately Funded: The Governor or his allies could fundraise, as Reagan did, to fund MOGE. Ensuring that all funds used to conduct the work of MOGE come from private rather than public sources removes any undue leverage that government could have over MOGE and its policy recommendations.

Commitment to Implementation

• Agency Cooperation: The Governor could order all government agencies to give full and timely cooperation to any MOGE requests for access to data or other information that MOGE deems necessary to conduct its work, except for any instances expressly prohibited by law.
• Citizen Participation: MOGE leadership should commit to publishing intermediate findings and recommendations, formally submitting progress reports to Missouri’s General Assembly, and creating a website or holding public hearings to solicit input from members of the public who in many cases have pertinent first-hand knowledge of government inefficiencies and needed services that MOGE’s internal audit of agencies may not fully uncover.
• Legislation: Fostering input and cooperation from Missouri’s General Assembly will be essential to achieving MOGE’s specified goals. To that end, the Governor should seek a commitment from legislative leaders both to cooperate with the MOGE efforts and to advance the legislative initiatives recommended to reduce the cost and increase the productivity of state government.
• Transparency: MOGE leadership should make all final recommendations public with supporting analysis and make its leadership available for public hearings and information sessions to explain its findings and methodology.
• Accountability: After MOGE issues its recommendations, the executive branch should be required to respond to every agency recommendation by either implementing it in full or detailing why it is not doing so.